Recruitment is changing, and at Spaycial we've taken that on board. Our recruitment philosophy has undergone a lot of reflection, questioning and research to find the right approach to attracting the best candidates or 'talents'. Arnaud Gien-Pawlicki, our Head of Talent, looks at our approach to talent acquisition, which is becoming a mix between sales and marketing. We explain.
Modern recruitment, a new paradigm
For more than 5 years now, new job titles have been emerging on the HR market: expressions such as Talent Acquisition Specialist, Talent Acquisition Manager, Head of Talent, are gradually replacing the traditional Recruitment Officer or Human Resources Manager... A meaningless Anglicisation or a sign of real change?
Arnaud Gien-Pawlicki reminds us that:
"The 'Talent Acquisition' movement comes from the United States, and more particularly from the tech world. It consists of considering a candidate as both a potential client and a personality to be won over by trying to understand their expectations. Talent recruitment practices have integrated a marketing approach applied to the employment relationship by developing differentiating and consistent employer brands to win the war for talent and retain it. Tech is an industry with a strong structural shortage of candidates, which makes them over-solicited people who need to be convinced, without bullshit, at the risk of seeing their e-reputation damaged."
From now on, whatever the job (data scientist, developer, content manager, customer success manager, and so on), the asymmetrical balance of power between the "all-powerful employer" and the "candidate who wants to be recruited at any price" is disappearing.
The recruitment function for HR managers implies having to seduce the candidate (assimilated here to the "prospect"), who has specific expectations and behaviour. On the other hand, employers in fast-growing sectors are living in a time warp, pulled up by the acquisition of talent with digital skills, and are obliged to question themselves, before being questioned by the talent market itself. Among the subjects at the heart of the employer value proposition, re-interrogated by the expectations of candidates in their relationship to work, is the search for personal balance in the face of the performance needs of the hyper-growth company.
Attracting a candidate: the marketing approach
Finding the right person is part of a global strategy that takes on a marketing aspect that reinterprets both the candidate experience and the employee experience.
At Spaycial, this consists of creating the onboarding and the conditions to enable each person to perform as quickly as possible, by measuring performance. Talent has hard skills and soft skills, and the conditions in which it is put allow the talent to develop these characteristics. A first aspect to consider is the sourcing of the candidate to determine the skills that fit the position and the company culture.
Another criterion to consider is the reputation issue that companies are increasingly facing. Employees and candidates are giving feedback on recruitment processes and their experience. New jobs are appearing regularly in the digital industry: the population is younger, and many candidates live in immediacy, communicating online or on social networks.
This means that there are constant questions about employer brand and attractiveness: the quality of the candidate experience, the employer's e-reputation and the type of online content associated with the brand to remain attractive: in short, a 360-degree change to what recruitment used to be.
Executing the recruitment process: the 'sales' approach
In a context of rapid growth, we talk about executing the recruitment process in a sales-like manner, i.e. continuously (a position may open up very quickly), which implies being in constant contact with its market of potential candidates.
The tools
The tools used by Talent Acquisition professionals contribute to this paradigm shift. The software traditionally used for recruitment, the ATS (Applicant Tracking System), is becoming a recruitment CRM thanks to SaaS, in order to meet the need to know the candidates in the pool and to manage and nurture their talent, beyond the simple execution of a recruitment process linked to the processing of an application. The market of penurious talents has allowed ATS editors to catch up with commercial tools in general such as Salesforce, HubSpot, etc.
Personalization and segmentation
For a very long time, recruitment was seen as an entry-level function in human resources. This is no longer the case, particularly in digital, where junior and senior recruitment professionals are choosing this role out of expertise. The SaaS and CRM shift in Talent Acquisition Suites has begun, with no turning back.
"For example, the tools we were using on the market 10 years ago were not able to do any personalisation (negative responses in "monobloc" sent to candidates for example), and the HRIS tools remained very basic, sometimes outsourced to the IT departments. In 2021, it is no longer conceivable for a Talent Acquisition team not to have a hand in the choice of its CRM, just as it would be counterproductive not to choose a SaaS specific to recruitment, independent of the HRIS if we want to provide maximum performance on this lever for the company and meet the experiential requirements of our candidates," says Arnaud Gien-Pawlicki.
The relationship can be maintained, and to keep track of candidates, particularly those in high demand, the hyper-personalisation of the relationship (as in shopping!) allows for a close link to be forged with a pool of targeted talent. A fluid and seamless relationship that is still difficult to scale up to a large volume of candidates in the pool. The new nurturing tools based on Artificial Intelligence, such as Hollo, should make it possible to overcome this pitfall.
Secondly, knowing how to segment, i.e. adapting the candidate's approach to the customer journey of a web developer, which is itself very different from those of a salesperson or a data scientist. Candidate generation techniques are also segmented by hunting territory (country) or specific skills by borrowing from copywriting and paid search marketing (online content, keyword purchasing, sponsored campaigns, programmatic marketing with Golden Bees, for example)
Capturing attention, directing it to the right opportunities, engaging and converting a person into a candidate, maintaining and developing the relationship from start to finish until the first step in the company, are all steps to follow in order to build your strategy. The other challenge is to find the right tools to deploy the talent acquisition process, to adopt the right rhythm and to know how to question oneself thanks to the data, while remaining very humble. In particular, following the confinements, we decided to go remote first to meet the expectations of our candidates.
"What drives Talent Acquisition is to have an authentic relationship with a panel of candidates, to agree to go a long way together, while remaining honest with each other," concludes Arnaud Gien-Palicki.