In talking to corporate recruitment leaders across the country, we’re consistently hearing two key elements of Brexit that will have the greatest impact on the recruitment community. The good news is, both are elements that you can make contingency plans to address should they be needed. So what are these two key elements – and how can you prepare best to deal with any eventuality?

The two key factors to look at are i) Brexit’s impact on growth and ii) Brexit’s impact on talent shortages. The first of these acknowledges that Brexit has the potential to materially impact overall economic growth – and therefore the demand for employees; in addition, it will undoubtedly impact different sectors to varying degrees – meaning changes in demand for employees will not be uniform across the economy. Likely to be just as important for Corporate Recruiters is the potential deterioration in talent availability, with any change in freedom of movement harming a business’s ability to find and attract the necessary talent for the business.

Brexit’s impact on growth

There is a growing unease that Brexit will produce – indeed is already producing – a worsening economic outlook. We’re already seeing declining real wages, with the fall in the £ raising the cost of imports and therefore pushing up inflation. Economists fear that consumer demand could stall if the population feels financially squeezed by the combination of rising prices and anaemic wage growth. So it’s especially important that Recruitment teams maintain close communication with hiring managers in order to be alerted to any impending change in hiring demand that was unforeseen.

Things aren’t nearly as clear-cut as this though. The balance of the economy is changing. On one side we have jobs apparently deserting the UK as a result of Brexit – most notably in the banking sector. But there are also sectors benefiting enormously from Brexit, most notably those that are significant exporters and whose goods and services are now far cheaper in overseas markets as a result of the declining value of the pound. As a consequence, there has arguably never been a time when Corporate Recruitment Leaders had more to gain from being party to all economic forecasting being undertaken within the business – and tuning in to what specialist industry economists are predicting too.

Brexit’s impact on talent shortages

Since one of the main reasons for the Brexit vote was a desire to squeeze immigration volumes, we can take it as a given that freedom of movement is going to be at least compromised going forwards. In fact, talent shortages have already become more acute even before this has happened. NHS figures show there’s been a collapse in overseas nurses coming to Britain since the vote. A tour of Business schools reveals that MBAs are now ruling out the UK as a career destination, deeming it too hostile to overseas staff.

As recruiters, we’re already starting to see Brexit’s impact on the availability of talent. Right now that’s a function of people believing the UK is no longer the welcoming home for foreign workers that it once was. But add into the mix the possibility that Europeans will need visas to work here – or be time-limited in the duration of their stay – and it’s not hard to picture an economy in which talent shortages are the single biggest hurdle to achieving growth and greater prosperity.

The good news is that there’s a great deal here that recruitment leaders can do to prepare for this eventuality. In particular, talent shortages are a problem at the economy-wide level. The country will face talent shortages – but there will be clear winners and losers when it comes to individual companies. To be one of the winners, it’s essential that recruitment leaders bolster their team’s ability to source candidates – and to convert those candidates more successfully into hires.

In terms of candidate sourcing, there are two angles of attack to pursue in parallel. Firstly, recruitment teams should receive the training and be granted access to the tools that will allow them to become world-class sourcing teams. When talent shortages bite, it’s those who can uncover candidates that others cannot who will emerge least scathed. But secondly, recruitment teams should also identify partners who can bring in additional recruiting resource at short notice to bolster their teams or who can support the business by undertaking candidate sourcing assignments on an as-needed basis. When talent shortages do strike, you’ll need to be in a position to respond – fast.

Finding candidates alone isn’t enough though. Your business has to become best in class at end-to-end recruitment. The duration of your interviewing process needs to be whittled down to be amongst the shortest in your industry. Your candidate engagement efforts need to be improved, so that the odds of strong candidates being interested in your role – and ultimately accepting an offer – are ratcheted up. Your onboarding and mentoring programs need to be enhanced, so that the average tenure in positions is increased and the pressure on your recruitment team to hire replacements is eased. All this is within your control, but it necessitates acting now rather than waiting until the Brexit deal is all but done. So the key question for you to answer now is: what actions are we going to take today to make our recruitment function truly world class and able to overcome whatever challenges Brexit may throw at us?

We hope this article has proved thought-provoked and helped you determine some action steps you can take to be better prepared for Brexit. Should you wish to discuss any aspect of your strategy with one of our team, feel free to call on +44 20 7748 4393

Think about it for just a minute. Whatever the outcome, there is certain to be a change in the entitlement of different nationalities to work in the UK market. That means your ability to source candidates and engage with candidates is going to need to adapt. Already numerous countries discussing potential trade deals with the UK are stressing that an easing of the criteria to secure the right to work in the UK will be fundamental to the signing of any trade deal.

It may well come to pass that the countries you’ve historically been reticent about hiring from become the ones where you’re now more readily able to attract talent and secure for them the necessary work entitlements. Whereas the simplicity we’ve taken for granted of hiring EU nationals may become a degree harder – with such workers also less inclined to move to the UK following Brexit. That’s a game-changer for anyone involved in Recruitment.

The unemployment rate has fallen

 Of course there are other ways Brexit will impact us all in Recruitment, not least of which is its impact on the state of the economy. In the weeks leading up to Brexit, we witnessed the Bank of England, the IMF and the OECD all voice the concern that a UK vote to leave the EU would take its toll on employers and push up unemployment. However, unemployment actually dropped to its lowest level in 11 years towards the end of the year – on the back of the surge in export sales that the lower £ has stimulated.

Releasing the results of their 20th annual Global CEO Survey, PwC have just revealed that UK bosses are unquestionably in hiring mode. 63% expect to grow their workforce over the coming 12 months, compared to 52% of their global counterparts. Similarly, only 10% expect headcount to decrease, down from 20% in 2016. But access to key skills is considered to be the single biggest business threat facing their organisations. 83% of UK bosses are concerned about how to get hold of key skills, up sharply from 71% last year. Any change in eligibility to work in the UK will only make those shortages more acute in the short term – and create a bigger competitive advantage for those companies who adapt most successfully.

The intriguing thing here is that the UK economy may not only grow at a faster pace than was anticipated, but also the pattern of growth and therefore employment demand may have significantly shifted. Certain industries are booming as a direct consequence of these economic shifts, whilst others are struggling. If those patterns continue then the hiring hotspots and the talent shortages are going to look markedly different than they were just a couple of years ago. Recruiters will need to adapt to thrive.

 What will happen to employment laws & EU regulations?

That’s before we talk about regulatory changes. Changes in employment law will undoubtedly have an impact on UK employers. At this stage it’s difficult to know what laws will be carried over and what will be shelved. What we do know is that in a written statement, David Jones, minister of state at the Department for Exiting the European Union said: “The government will bring forward legislation in the next session that, when enacted, will repeal the European Communities Act 1972 and ensure a functioning statute book on the day we leave the EU. This great repeal bill will end the authority of EU law and return power to the UK. The bill will convert existing EU law into domestic law, wherever practical.” On the one hand this could mean business as usual for laws and regulations. However, there is also the possibility that the great repeal bill may include a ‘sunset clause’, which would mean EU laws expiring unless they have been explicitly backed by the government. Were that to happen, it could affect workers’ rights through laws such as the Acquired Rights Directive, the Collective Redundancies Directive, and the Working Time Directive. All would have knock-on effects on recruitment teams.

Uncertainty over trade deals and corporate tax regime

It now looks increasingly likely that reductions in freedom of movement will be pushed through – and that Britain will lose its unfettered access to the single market. But new trade deals with other countries may serve to offset this – and there’s even the possibility of the UK bringing in more attractive corporation tax rates to maintain competitiveness.

Last year, Japanese ambassador Koji Tsuruoka stressed that “if the way Brexit ends up does not provide companies with a prospect of making sufficient profits to continue operating in the UK, of course there’s no option they cannot choose – all options are open.” We’re already starting to see the flow of Banking jobs to other European capitals that were predicted by some at the time of the vote. So a changed labour market seems inevitable, regardless of the ultimate deal that’s done.

However, with change comes opportunity. There may indeed be positives for some employers. Those sectors that remain strong may have the opportunity to poach talent from other industries or attract new overseas investment. The ease with which different sectors can attract and hire staff we can expect to fundamentally change.

Against this backdrop, we’re seeing many employers carrying on with significant recruitment whilst some others are taking a more cautious line. For help sourcing top talent to join your company, please get in touch with one our team and we can give you the flexibility in your sourcing capabilities that the current market climate demands.

Working on a succession planning project can be one of the most rewarding candidate sourcing assignments you’ll ever undertake. Think of it as candidate sourcing on steroids. Which is why it’s all the more surprising that more organisations don’t view candidate sourcing as an integral part of their succession planning strategy. Allow me to expand a little.

In so many ways, succession planning projects make it possible to multiply the results you might reasonably expect to generate from a candidate sourcing assignment. Most notably in the areas of i) candidate receptiveness, ii) candidate interest and iii) market feedback. These upsides all essentially stem from the nature of the assignment. Unlike most candidate sourcing work, there’s no immediate position to be filled. The conversation is hypothetical – and that puts candidates at ease and facilitates the task of getting results. Let’s look at each of the three elements in turn and you’ll see why candidate sourcing effectiveness is heightened to such an extent.

1) Increased candidate receptiveness

Whenever a candidate list has been drawn up through candidate sourcing, there’s always the issue hanging over you – how many of the candidates we approach will actually be open to a discussion? Talking openly about the possibility of an imminent career move has certain ramifications – and that can deter people from being receptive to your approach.

The beauty of succession planning discussions is that they are hypothetical and imply no disloyalty to one’s current employer or dissatisfaction with one’s current role. This is a liberating feeling, knowing that more of the candidates you approach are likely to be receptive to a conversation – but what’s more, this also means the effectiveness of candidate sourcing is ramped up noticeably.

2) Greater candidate interest

Candidates being more willing to talk when approached is obviously a great starting point. But there’s also the added bonus that candidates are more likely to be genuinely interested in being considered for the opportunity too. One of the problems of regular candidate sourcing campaigns is that they typically need to uncover candidates who are willing to move right now. For a variety of reasons including family circumstances, ongoing projects in current role and financial incentives, moving right now simply isn’t going to be a plausible option for a portion of the candidates you approach.

This of course ratchets up the number of suitable candidates that need to be found in order to produce a successful outcome from a typical candidate sourcing campaign. Except that where succession planning is concerned, time isn’t a pressure and so far more candidates are able to countenance the proposed move. Everything from changing location to cashing out on existing remuneration schemes becomes more manageable when the timescales aren’t so pressing. Hence the likelihood of your work producing a hire is increased.

3) Valuable market feedback

Last but not least, the longer term nature of a succession planning project means that greater market feedback can be collected relating to the appeal of the employer and how the organisation is perceived in the market. Ultimately making a successful succession hire will likely involve you maintaining contact with potential candidates for some period of time. From point of first contact through until when a hire eventually needs to be made, you’ll need to be maintaining some degree of contact with your preferred candidates to keep them warm and interested in the potential opening.

This presents you with the ongoing opportunity of hearing first hand about the evolving perception executives have about your business. Rather than the snapshot you might collect in a regular candidate sourcing assignment, the insights gained here are more revealing – and can inform broader recruiting and retention decisions that need to be taken with the organisation.

Join me for more insights

So I hope the above has whetted your appetite for the role that candidate sourcing can play in succession planning. If you’re eager to learn more on this topic, it’s one I explore as part of our series of webinars for in-house corporate recruiters. I hope you can tune in for a future call and look forward to fielding your questions.

Successfully planning a candidate sourcing project

Successfully planning a candidate sourcing project often comes down to having realistic expectations about both the time and resource needed to fulfil the assignment. No two assignments are the same and there are major differences in the difficulty of completing candidate sourcing projects on time and to budget. Correctly quantifying these parameters from the outset ensures that you leave yourself with the time window and the resources needed to deliver results. Unfortunately, it is all too often the case that internal recruiters feel pressured to get more and more done in less time. This leaves them feeling pushed into devoting less time to the task than is realistically needed to produce a successful outcome. In my experience, this is one of the major causes of candidate sourcing shortfalls.

So start by realistically assessing your project. Some projects are targeting the types of candidates that can be reached in significant numbers via InMails and emails alone. For these types of assignments, a shorter time window – and a reliance on online approaches – will often produce the desired results. However, many other projects involve searching for candidates who have a rare skillset. This means that we will have to search harder to find enough of them – and will also have to go the extra mile when trying to woo them. Putting in calls to initiate a conversation increases results. Being persistent increases results. Both take additional time – but these are the types of things you have to do to maximise your shortlist of candidates, which becomes increasingly important the harder the candidate brief is to fill.

Using the right search criteria

The challenges don’t stop there though. Recruiters frequently ask me for input on the criteria they should use when actually undertaking their searches. This obviously involves understanding both the platform on which you’re searching and the limitations of searching on that particular site. In terms of the big picture, though, the single biggest mistake I see recruiters making is narrowing down their search too much. We must recognise that many of our target hires have not done a great job of keyword optimising their profiles – or indeed have cut down the information on their profiles to make it harder for recruiters to find them! Consequently, the more detailed the searches we undertake, the more valid shortlist candidates we exclude from our search results and therefore from consideration for the role.

Indeed there are two key reasons to avoid being too laser-targeted when conducting your searches. Firstly, if all recruiters target their searches in a very narrow manner, everyone ends up fighting over the exact same small pool of candidates. That’s not good news for maximising the likelihood of candidates being receptive to your advances, or indeed to you ultimately hiring them. But also for the purposes of generating the strongest possible shortlist, we need to be looking at a broader set of candidates and then using our own judgement and further research to determine whether those candidates are right for the role or not. Try using broader search criteria on your next candidate sourcing engagement and you will undoubtedly find you increase the time needed to deliver your ultimate shortlist, but you will also produce a shortlist that is far more comprehensive and therefore likely to produce a successful outcome.

Uncovering the best candidate sourcing tools

Last but not least, there is the small matter of the latest tools and techniques for undertaking candidate sourcing projects. This is a fast-moving area, with new tools – and new functionality for existing sites – being introduced all the time. Some services unfortunately close down too, which means it’s always important to have a variety of tools at your disposal. Essentially, no-one wants to be trying to deliver on assignments with technology that is inferior to their peers.

We are often asked for recommendations of tools to use – and insights into the latest things recruiters should be trying out – when we run our Q&A sessions. There are so many tools out there, many of which are sector specific, so it’s not a topic we can do justice to here. However, two key tools in your arsenal must be a tool for identifying candidates’ email addresses and a tool for pulling together information about them from multiple sources.

Once you’ve identified a candidate on LinkedIn or elsewhere, don’t leave yourself dependent on InMails being read. Instead, try uncovering what that candidate’s email is with a tool like ContactOut. These browser extensions have come on a long way in the last years. ContactOut claims to have more than 600 million emails in their database, with each being triple verified and the service having an accuracy rate of 97%. Given we all know that emails are more likely to be read than InMails – and likely to be responded to much faster – this is a surefire way of increasing your candidate sourcing results.

Alongside an email research tool, you also want one or more extensions to help you to quickly learn more about a candidate you’ve found. Often, you’ll only get a complete picture of a candidate when you combine information from several different profiles. For this, try a tool like Riffle. Find any candidate you’re interested in on Twitter – and up will pop information such as their LinkedIn profile page, Facebook page, Klout score and most popular topics. This is helpful both in streamlining the time you need to research candidates and in increasing the richness of information on which you base your shortlisting decisions.

In my experience, though, it is usually the first two topics we have covered in this blog that produce the most significant improvements in candidate sourcing results. Knowing about the latest tools and extensions only gives you a short-term advantage over others in the market, whereas knowing how to effectively plan and execute a candidate search is an advantage that you will have for life. My recommendation is therefore always to focus on getting these other elements right, rather than fixating on whether you know about the very latest tools out there. Hope this helps – and look forward to fielding your questions if you’re able to attend a Q&A session in the coming weeks.

Firstly, there’s the issue of assessing the role that’s being worked on – and correctly determining the resourcing that’ll be needed to realistically deliver on that assignment. This might involve what we’ve termed a “light touch” approach, or a “deep dive” approach – depending on the anticipated difficulty of sourcing suitable candidates for the role. The time investment needed for each differs considerably, so making the right call is key. But sometimes the more time-intensive route is needed – and internal recruitment teams need to be able to fight for adequate resource when that’s the case.

Then secondly there’s the issue of optimising your approaches to sourcing. Having decided whether to go “Deep Dive” or “Light Touch”, are you researching and contacting candidates in the ways – and with the frequency – needed to maximise success? Working at scale on such engagements, we’re obviously in a position to shed light on the activity levels and approaches that are most likely to generate results. So hopefully we can help you to ramp up results with your limited resources.

Let’s look at each of these two points in turn.

Candidate Sourcing Success Requires Adequate Resourcing

In this blog I’m sharing typical resourcing levels and results for these two types of candidate sourcing campaigns. At one end of the spectrum we have the “light touch” approach, which is likely to require 5 full days of work spread over a 2-3 week period.

At the other end of the spectrum, the “deep dive” approach will require 10-14 full days of work spread over a 4-5 week period. The differences here are absolutely critical. A good portion of all the roles you’ll work on can be successfully filled with a light touch approach.

This involves a less rigorous approach to candidate research – with candidate approaches made via LinkedIn InMails or other online messaging. If you determine that this approach is sufficient, then it’s realistic for you to promise the business a 2-3 week turnaround time to produce your shortlist.

This approach works for that portion of your roles where the profile of candidate being sought is easier to deliver on. That’s to say there are more of the desired type of candidates out there, they are more likely to have complete profiles on sites such as LinkedIn and they are more likely to be receptive to online approaches.

One of the biggest difficulties I see amongst in-house recruiting teams is that they find themselves pushed into working this “light touch” approach, on roles that clearly demand a much more rigorous plan of attack.

Where your target hire is a more difficult candidate to find and win over, you must leave no stone unturned. Your research methodology needs to be more comprehensive. When reaching out, you need to do so by phone, InMail and email. All of this takes additional time.

So one of the biggest wins recruiters can come away with is a greater understanding of the resources they need to have at their disposal – and the means to fight for those resources. 5 days of resource for a regular role and 10-14 days for a tougher assignment. If you don’t have that resource available in the business, that’s when you can turn to a business like mine to do this work for you.

Candidate Sourcing Success Comes From Knowing Your Numbers

Of course one way you can help alleviate the pressure on your team is to maximise everyone’s effectiveness when they’re working on an assignment. For example, sending one well-crafted InMail to your target candidates is likely to yield only a 15-20% response rate. You could lift that to a 40-60% response rate if you just followed up with a strong second and third InMail message.

Two things stand out here. Firstly, you need to have tested your InMails to know which ones are proving to be the most effective at soliciting a response. Having done that, you need to also know that sending the second and third InMails will produce those additional gains – and thus leverage all the work you put into finding the target candidates in the first place.

Similarly, if you’re going down the more intensive “deep dive” route, it’s critical to know the order and timescales in which you should be calling candidates, leaving voicemails, sending InMails and contacting them by email. It’s not enough to work hard on an assignment, you need a template of what the perfectly delivered assignment looks like – which you then work to on each and every role you’re given. This not only maximises the chances of a successful hire being made, but it also gives you something that documents to your budget holders the ramifications there will be if you don’t get the resources you need.

These are some of the key topics we talk through in my Candidate Sourcing webinar. You’re very welcome to tune in for one of the next sessions – and to follow that up by sending through any questions you may have.

Social media has changed the branding game and the distance between employers, employees and prospective candidates has shortened. Consequently, it can be hard to tell where the employer brand ends and talent brand begins.

However, there is a clear difference between the two concepts and in order for a business to source the talent it needs, it is important to bring the blurred lines of branding back into focus.

Employer or talent?

Employer and talent brands may well be both sides of the same coin, but they differ in several ways.

Mark Bevans, founder of branding agency ‘Welove9am’, perhaps explains it best: Employer brand says “come work for us” and talent brand says “this is what it’s like working for us”.

Employer brand is defined by Workopolis as “an organisation’s positioning as an employer compared to its competitors”.  This is the messaging sent out from the heads of a business on what it will ideally be like to work at a place.

To do this effectively, you need to have a good idea what your business is about, what it wants to achieve and how staff fit into this grand plan.

It’s about creating a great business reputation,too. This can be seen in the case of Apple. Employer Brand Insights explained that Steve Jobs himself played a crucial role in the employer brand and talent management, bringing together all the key elements of the company.

This included having helped invent some of the best devices of the age, being the visionary behind one of the strongest consumer brands and being involved in every small part of his business. This passion and innovation attracted the talent the company needed to grow and pushed forward the Apple brand among potential candidates.

Talent branding works slightly differently and is shaped by employers and employees alike. A talent brand is about how everyone involved in an organisation – past, present and future – feels about a company and defines the workplace culture. This has become more important as social media has risen to prominence, providing a forum in which people can actually discuss their experiences. However, it has always existed and historically talent branding has been created through word of mouth.

Social media – muddying the water

Social media has caused the lines between employer and talent branding to weaken in two key ways. Firstly, where once an employer brand was something decided in boardrooms, pitched ahead of delivery, it is now shaped by opinions on social media and disseminated on channels like Facebook at Twitter, with changes capable of being implemented relatively swiftly.

Secondly, it’s now easier for employers to get engaged in talent branding and introduce employer branding into dialogues. For example, businesses can shape their talent brand by engaging in social discussion, publicising good work through video or giving people insights into a ‘day in the life’ of an employee through blogs, tweets and instagram.

Thirdly, the effects of having a poor talent brand are now far greater for a business, as information can be shared quickly and there is much more data available in the public domain outside of the control of an organisation.

The importance of working together

“Employer and talent branding can work in perfect harmony together,” Mr Bevan declared. “As with all successful strategies, it’s a case of researching, planning, timing and consistency.”

There is certainly a consensus that employer and talent branding must work together to be successful.

After all, a talent brand is shaped by how much a company lives up to its employer brand and this relationship has been thrown into even clearer focus with the rise of social media.

” If you start professing to be the best company to work for, flexible in working attitudes, social media-friendly and don’t deliver, then not only will you lose employees but you will gain a hard to shake negative reputation. Getting candidates through the door is one thing, keeping them is another,” Mr Bevan explained.

The two certainly complement each other, but it’s important to remember that they are unique entities that have their own roles to play.

While employer brand is about acquisition, talent brand is about retention too. It’s important that the latter is built around policies that encourage people to be around for the long haul, rather than flashy statements and strategies that are perfect to get people through the door but aren’t sustainable over the long-term.

Indeed, a business is arguably only as good as the person (or persons) that sits at its head. Becoming a strong leader isn’t an overnight process either and people take years cultivating the attributes they need to be at the top table.

But what happens when it’s time for leaders to leave? After all, it’s not as simple as replacing old for new, like a cog in a machine.

To ensure continued success, businesses need to plan who will take over when the ‘old guard’ steps down.

Succession planning is integral to any organisation, enabling a company to identify suitable talent – either internally or externally – to replace key staff and ensure a business runs smoothly.

To create such a plan successfully, it is important to determine the qualities needed in a leader.

While the specifics of this vary between industry, there are a series of broad qualities that are traditionally identified as been essential in those at the top.

The theory of leadership

What makes a leader is a contentious issue that affects everything from politics and business to entertainment and sport.

There are many schools of thought on leadership, but the most dominant is often the militaristic approach. Writing in HR Bullets, Joseph S Nye, eminent American political scientist and University Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard, explained that the role of heroic leadership in war has come to characterise many views on the matter. In the past the male warrior leader was essential for tribes to survive and the depiction has continued in modern times, causing people to over emphasise command, control and hard power, Nye believes.

However, there are other ways to lead and achieve desired outcomes. These include the softer powers of attraction and persuasion, and hard payment.

There has also been speculation that a leadership gene exists or socio-biology plays a role, but there has thus far been no scientific proof of this.

One thing is for certain according to Nye – context plays an important role. He explained in the news portal blog that some situations call for autocratic decisions and some need the opposite. Consequently, it important for leaders to be able to transfer their skills across all contexts. This has been seen in figures like Dwight Eisenhower, who was a successful military leader and president.

Broadly, there are some characteristics businesses can safely prioritise when creating their leadership pipeline.

Sunitha Narayanan, certified career and co-active coach at Promark Company, explained in the Undercover Recruiter that the abilities to think critically, find and mentor the right talent, embrace change and build relationships should be prized.

Innovation, confidence and the ability to listen must also play a part to ensure a leader can drive forward a business.

Management Vs leadership

Perhaps an easier way to define leadership is to compare it against management and note the differences.

A piece in the Undercover Recruiter explained that a leader develops and builds, while a manager maintains. A leader also invests in people, while a manager invests in systems and processes.

Leaders inspire, innovate and challenge the status quo, while a manager imitates and operates within existing structures.

Looking forward with leadership

While a clear-cut definition of a leader would certainly help during succession planning, unfortunately things aren’t that simple.

However, with clear trends emerging in the business environment, companies that want to move forward will need to hire those capable of managing them.

Continued economic and business uncertainty means that leaders will need to innovate and be able to make hard decisions.

Those with a commitment to developing others will also be integral as the skills shortage rumbles on.

Of course, any hire must share the core views and beliefs of an organisation, so be sure future leaders are passionate about the business. This will guarantee they will go one step further when necessary.

It’s a fact that a lot of the hiring process now takes place out in the social stratosphere, whether that’s search, making contact, vetting or keeping track of prospective candidates.

So consuming is this trend, that I’m sure I’m not the only person who struggles to remember the days before Linkedin!

But – now this might be controversial – are we losing something by relying on social media and Linkedin in particular?

Let’s take a closer look.

The dominance of Linkedin

Jobvite claim 96 per cent of businesses use LinkedIn for search, 94 per cent use it to make contact and 92 per cent turn to LinkedIn for vetting in the US.

Of those surveyed, 93 per cent also use Linkedin for monitoring candidates.

The situation isn’t much different in the UK, with 62 per cent using the the social site, according to Jobs.ac.uk.

LinkedIn is certainly dominating all stages of the funnel, far outstripping its next biggest competitor: Facebook.

So why do recruiters love it so much? Is it just a symptom of a wider trend? After all, 78 per cent of US recruiters now claim they have hired through a social network. Or is it something more specific about LinkedIn?

Stripping away the obvious fact that this network is used solely professionally, when we look at the LinkedIn Recruiter tool it becomes clear why this site is pushing our buttons.

It essentially takes a lot of the time, effort and hassle out of recruitment.

In the first instance, with the most powerful search available, it is possible to expand beyond connections to the entire LinkedIn network. Users aren’t overwhelmed by information either, as the filters help identify candidates worth reviewing quickly and easily.

Recruiters can also reach out to candidates through InMail, which allows them to set templates to save time and, for their troubles, can get a much better response rate than standard email.

What’s more, LinkedIn helps manage talent pipelines, which can be a time consuming task for many recruiters. Using Recruiter, it is possible to create, track and manage talent to hire now and in the future. With access to folders, reminders, to do lists, syncing functions for projects, searches, profiles and applicant notes, pipelining becomes much more streamlined.

Is there a downside?

Of course, as with most things, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows when it comes to LinkedIn Recruiter and an over reliance on the tool could harm your hiring strategy.

Writing in Social-hire.com, Tony Restell, ex-strategy consultant and founder of Top-Consultant.com and Social-Hire.com, explained that the social site could be undone by its own success.

He claims that because so many recruiters are now using LinkedIn, candidates are facing an unwelcome deluge of inmails/emails. Consequently, recruiters are having to approach more people to generate the same results as just a small number would have allowed just 18 or 24 months ago.

What’s more, Linkedin doesn’t necessarily allow you to access the whole passive talent market. Most people with strong profiles on the site have them because they are looking for a new job and by zoning in on these alone, you may be missing out on some of the best talent.

Top candidates are also more likely to turn you down as they’ll be sick of receiving recruitment emails – if you think they’re good, chances are other people will too.

Consequently, it’s important recruiters don’t lose their ability to search the passive market away from social sites. This way, professionals can really identify people’s strengths, weaknesses, backgrounds and successes – not just what candidates want to be seen.

Should we abandon LinkedIn?

This begs the question ‘should recruiters wave goodbye to LinkedIn?’ – to that I say a resounding no.

It’s all about balance and the site certainly has its uses for hiring and talent pipelining. However, this needs to be accompanied with off-site activity, carefully researching the best talent at competitors and cultivating a pool of people that could step into the breach when called upon – assuming they want to make the switch.

We also can’t lose traditional recruitment skills of approaching candidates and working with them to determine whether the job being offered is the one for them.

Ultimately, social recruitment shouldn’t be a hiring strategy in itself but part of a vibrant, diverse approach to talent acquisition and management.

Ironically, by moving away from social media, recruiters can actually put the personal touch back into recruitment through phone conversations or face-to-face meetings. When recruiting for the most challenging roles, this is what makes the difference and overcomes the increasing ‘noise’ of inmailed job offers.

So why then are there still inadequate talent management strategies out there?

Part of the problem is confusion surrounding the difference between talent intelligence and talent data. Businesses need to know what skills they have in their organisation, where they are, what expertise employees have and which qualities staff members possess. This is talent intelligence. But the challenge lies in taking masses of facts and figures and effectively analysing them to enable the creation of an optimal talent management strategy.

While talent intelligence and data are co-dependent, they aren’t the same thing and it is the failure to convert data into meaningful intelligence that often leaves businesses unable to harness the skills they need to grow.

What is talent data?

Talent data is the raw facts and figures needed from which to build a talent management strategy. While the data can be meaningless without any analytics or understanding of what to do with it, get the wrong facts and figures and it’s hard to move forward with any programme.

Professor Shlomo Ben-Hur, director of Organisational Learning in Action at the IMD Business School, explained in HR Bullets that most data relates to workforce composition. This includes demographics and distribution. Of course, this is limited in how it can be applied. Consequently, companies need to ensure they have talent assessment data at hand, covering skills, attributes and characteristics of the workforce.

This is often collated using technology and monitoring procedures, enabling businesses to ‘mine’ information to understand what high performance is in their organisation and who is reaching this standard, Stuart Hearn, co-founder and director of HR specialists PlusHR, wrote in HR Zone.

Gathering and using this information is vital to succeed. Michael Capone, chief information officer at software company Automatic Data Processing, told Workforce: “The companies that leverage workforce analytics effectively will win the war for talent.”

Transforming data into intelligence

It’s easy to think that once you start analysing data, it transforms into intelligence. However, this isn’t the case and the process of taking facts and figures and turning them into something meaningful can be complex.

The first thing to do is to know which data to include in your analysis. For this, you need to understand what you want to ultimately get out of the information. For instance, do you want to make decisions about individual people or an entire department? Are you trying to support processes such as onboarding, succession planning or training? If not, should you be?

Without knowing the destination, it’s hard to plan the journey so be clear from the outset.

Once goals are determined, it’s time to begin data analysis. Professor Ben-Hur recommends starting by identifying how connected different types of data are. He explained in HR Bullets that it is important to make links between each data set and other sorts of information.

When data has been analysed, it is time to apply the findings. This is where talent intelligence is truly created and finds its value. Professor Ben-Hur uses a real life example to illustrate how this can be done.

He explains in the news portal that when asked by a large global business to establish an assessment process, he looked at the competency ratings of new hires to understand if some where attracting stronger candidates and if qualities of hires were in line with business goals. From this, different departments were able to see where they were lacking and improve their strategies.

The average competency rating of new recruits was also compared with those of current employees. Assessment then took place to determine the qualities that distinguished people identified as high-potentials and those that got promoted. It was observed that those identified as future talent had different attributes than those actually being promoted, meaning there was a disparity between the people the firm thought it wanted and those it actually valued in reality. Consequently, new criteria for promotion were created.

These examples demonstrate how it is possible to create real business intelligence that has real impacts on talent management. With 77 per cent of global chief executive officers anticipating making changes to their talent management strategies, according to PMI, understanding the difference between data and intelligence and how to apply it will be crucial going forward.

The main reasons commonly cited for this centre on human weakness. Indeed, talent – or lack there of – presents one of the greatest barriers to M&As.

“Failure to address the people aspects of bringing two organisations together can not only limit the effectiveness of the deal and desired outcomes,but in some cases can contribute to its demise,” Towers Watson explained in its ‘Positioning for M&A Success: Putting People Into the Equation’ report.

To break with tradition, then, and ensure successful M&As, should talent acquisition form a pivotal part of any strategy?

Doomed to failure?

“The success of M&As is often damaged because a company is more than just its tangible assets,” Chris Molloy, chief executive officer at RSA Executive Research, explained in HR Bullets. “A company is its people, in ‘company’ with one another, defining a culture and a framework for doing successful things.”

This sentiment is shared by Edward A Kazamek, who realised as early as 1989 that without a focus on governance, leadership, and cultural issues, problems will occur in any M&A.

Of course the challenge is that planning for people is an intrinsically flawed concept. Certainties and facts should be the basis of any strategy, but humans are notoriously unpredictable and indefinable. Ultimately, it is hard to predict how staff will respond, therefore placing  M&As on volatile ground before they begin.

Mr Molloy claims problems usually become apparent in sales and marketing departments. Customer confusion and employee confidence levels can result in an exodus within days of any announcement if not managed properly. Research and development departments are also vulnerable. “During a merger, R&D departments are the last to combine as a company’s pipeline and patents are its most prized assets and are not revealed to competitors in case the deal falls through,” Mr Molloy explained.

With a complete departmental merger taking anything as long as nine months, with no new projects or hires coming in, staff are placed under significant stress, leading to complications.

However, these trends suggest that M&As aren’t doomed. Indeed, with clear patterns of where problems occur for executives, it is possible to target pain points and manage the ‘uncertain’ human element – at least to a point.

Solving the talent problem

Factoring in talent to any M&A can help to mitigate risk and ensure success. Through analytics it is possible to analyse how departments are going to react to change before it happens, thereby allowing processes to be put in place to limit the fallout.

Profiles International explained that before embarking on an M&A, it is important to understand the people in an organisation. This includes their strengths and weaknesses – information that should already be collected for a successful talent pipeline.

An eye should also be kept on top talent and leadership depth. “Some people will leave on their own, not wanting to go through the process and effort it takes to make the new enterprise successful,” Profiles International explained. “Many of those people might be leaders or considered to be rising stars before the deal, but who are now less sure of their position as a result.”

Consequently, plans need to be in place to help businesses fill these voids if and when they occur. A retention strategy should also be created to ensure a company has the ability to keep current employees primed to climb up the ladder.

Cross-company teams also need to be created during M&As to ensure workers from both companies integrate and work towards a common goal. It is important to pick the right people to go on these teams. These individuals will act as ambassadors throughout your M&A.

Of course, stress is one of the greatest challenges, especially when the word redundancy is floated around. “M&As cause organisational stress but this is dwarfed by the combined personal stress across employees at all levels,” Mr Molloy explained. “From the boardroom to the bench no-one is spared. It is emotional for all and therefore handling emotion is critical.”