Recruiting the Class of 2011

Andrew Gadomski, Chief Advisor and Founder, Aspen Advisors

Believe it or not, another school year is upon us. It seems that just yesterday caps and gowns were walked down the aisle, and the graduating seniors entered the working week, the military, or are now in the college ranks. They have about four to seven years until they are likely talking to corporate recruiter for a position.

So what will corporate recruiting look like for that Class of 2011? It will look different than the Class of 2001, 10 years earlier, considering no senior had cell phones, or Facebook, a tweet was something a bird says, the economy was awesome, and people were fighting over stock options at Internet companies.

My prediction is that technology, global growth, and mobility will change the employment outlook, but especially how we engage the Class of 2011. The role of the “recruiter” has already gone through great change, but much of that was prompted by HR’s need to become more specialized in areas like labor, compensation, engagement, organizational development and others. Talent organizations will continue to develop beyond their HR counterparts into even more sophisticated functions. It doesn’t take a labor study to show that more manufacturing jobs are now concentrated in certain regions of the world, while others are in decline. That will result in a strong push by business leaders to recruit different talent per geography. But that does not mean recruiters will simply do the work they do now, and have different regional focus.

The job of the recruiter has already changed because of how HR has separated from recruiting/talent. HR tends to focus on engagement and management of group of employees, while talent/recruiting is usually more focused on individuals who are typically non-employees. Both have complexity and sophistication, but statistically, more variables can occur with the engagement talent/recruiting does – the population is simply bigger. As such, I predict that the world of talent will become even more complex, and will go through another round of changes in order to address these variables.

The Class of 2011 will likely be engaging companies with talent organizations with the following attributes. At the end of each hypothesis is a preparation exercise for your organization.

Hypothesis #1 – Talent will not equal Employees

We are on a push already of outsourcing and using third parties for technology, human capital and intellectual property. As consumers, we have accepted that excellence can now be determined by engaging users of the product (American Idol, reality TV, social media recommendations) rather than listening to just experts. We have created an environment where open source works (Linux, mobile app development). We share information driven by volunteers (Wikipedia, blogs, etc). We also live in a time where a person’s brand or body of work can significantly change the brand or product they work for (engineers, brand marketing experts, technology gurus).

Talent will grow beyond employees to include employee alumni, retirees, volunteers, consortiums, global work groups, intellectual property sharing, and so much more. The concept of “recruiting” will turn into “resourcing” as our businesses will need resources to get the results desired (employees or no), and as access to non-employee resources increases, there is room for the recruiter’s role to go WAY beyond gathering just new employees.

Test It – List all the resources your business leaders use now to get work done – employees and non-employees, using the list above. Now list how much control does recruiting have on those resources – full control, some control, influence, no influence. Now measure control and influence for the same listed resources several years ago. Are you trending to add more resources and sources of talent? Are you controlling contractors and contingent labor? Outsourced partners? Are you building sharepoints, communities, and workgroups that are readily accessible? I bet you are, and your recruiting team has more influence now than 10 years ago. Imagine what they will have influence over in 10 years.

Hypothesis #2 – The separation of talent acquisition activities will be fully realized.

You will see a much clearer separation and complexity of 4 major elements of talent acquisition (listed below). You are already seeing it, and it is likely to advance.

Staffing, the act of transferring an applicant to a hire, will remain, but likely will be managed more by the hiring manager.

Recruiting, turning a prospect into an applicant, will diversify. Recruiters are engaging internal employees on positions, and obviously people from outside the organization who want a new job, but they will start to engage more with some of the other resources discussed in Hypothesis 1. In other words, prospect -> applicant, will turn into prospective resource -> possible solution.

Sourcing, vetting non-prospect into prospect will remain and will be critical as a reaction to business need. It will have to be smarter and will likely have a larger breadth and complexity as information becomes so available.

But from Sourcing, we will see the rise of Scouting, the constant measuring of viable resources. This scouting is being done in smaller circles now, but it’s critical to linking talent to workforce planning. Knowing what type of resources are available and viable is absolutely essential to workforce planning, and the talent organization will be an excellent position to constantly discover, measure, and present solutions for the workforce through scouting. Some people call this pipelining, but that is specific to just employees – this will move quickly into scouting resources, not just employees.

Test It – Did you separate into sourcing and recruiting? Do you outsource research, executive search, or use RPO for certain roles? Are you talent pipelining? How much have those functions / options advanced for you in the past few years?

Hypothesis #3 – The Return of the General Manager

It took us over 20 years, but we did a great job of separating all the work into many functions and silos. Of course, people can communicate much easier with each other now, and we have been using each other’s best practices so well that innovation from a function comes very slowly. As such, leaders have emerged to leverage all functions, technologies, and the mixed teams to get results. We may not call these leaders General Managers, because we call them Team Leaders, VPs of “Initiative”, or Director of “Program” – but they manage and influence dozens of stakeholders and likely manage a budget that cuts across all types of businesses and functions. So they are a “GM”. As the GM runs an entire team, project, product line, brand, or initiative, he/she is going to want to influence, if not own, the recruiting and retention of the resources for those teams. I don’t think that directly equates into a massive push towards manager self service, as that depends on an organization’s service philosophy (do we do for you, or do you do yourself).

But have no doubt…the hiring manager will soon be joined by a “general manager” as a major influencer to the recruiting of employees/resources, and engagement of that GM will be required by talent. Executive presence and presentation will increase as a needed competence for talent/recruiting personnel, as the interface with GMs increase, especially since GMs likely have a higher pay grade than many hiring managers.

Test It – Take a look at your hiring manager pool, and also the people that interview final candidates. How many general managers, heads of projects, team leaders or initiative designers are now involved in the interview process? How many of them are actually “General Managers”? Has that changed in the past few years or quarters? Look at the hierarchy – are you seeing more of these management personnel appear?

Stay tuned for Part Two – where we explore the future of employment branding and how productivity, assessment, performance and recruiting start to merge.

Andrew Gadomski is the Chief Advisor and Founder of Aspen Advisors. A truly unique efficiency consultancy firm, Aspen is the first organization to focus purely on talent strategy and productivity, enabling clients and partners to focus on execution and management.

Posted by Andrew Gadomski on September 14, 2011. Filed under Recruiting, Thought Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry