Agility in Talent Acquisition

Picture the scene, a scene that as a Talent Acquisition leader we’ve all seen before.

Your business has decided to close their London office and relocate 400 roles to their Manchester office. The London office will be closing in 6 months, which means all 400 roles need to be filled in that time in Manchester otherwise the business is going to be serious trouble.

You have a TA team of five, they’re all brilliant and usually they have to fill 250 roles per year as part of BAU. And as usual, TA were one of the last to know about the planned office closure and relocation of jobs.

So what do you do?

How are your team of five going to fill those 400 roles in 6 months, whilst at the same time maintaining their BAU activity? It’s a bit of a pickle isn’t it?

You’ve got a few choices:

The first option is you go and hire more TA folk to join your team, either day rate contractors or a few fixed term contract folk. After you’ve jumped through the hoops of managing to secure extra headcount for your team, you can get hiring your new team members.

Who do you hire?

Looking at the role types in that 400, the first 200 that need to be filled are tech roles, do you need people for the whole 6 months to fill the tech roles, or will it be 4 months? How many do you need?

The next batch of roles are GTM roles, how many recruiters will you need, how long will you need them for? Do you need them now or two months into the project?

You might know how many recruiters you need by specialism and even decide to hire them all straight away even if they’re not going to be immediately busy, but that’s wasted resource.

By the time you’ve gone out and sourced, attracted, interviewed, offered and these new folk have worked their notice period you’re already 6 weeks into your 6 month deadline and your current TA team are drowning and your inbox is full of complaints from hiring managers that their roles aren’t getting enough attention.

You’ve also been distracted for those 6 weeks, not giving your full attention to the relocation project or your team. Your new team members are probably not going to all be joining on the same day, which means staggered onboarding, training and ramp up in delivery.

Towards the end of that 6 month window, your new team members are worrying about their next job, they’re only on a 6 month contract after all. They start taking time out for securing their next role, going to interviews and some might even leave early, leaving those who are left behind to pick up the slack.

It’s not really a great result for you, your team, your new starters or the business is it?

So what’s the next option? Well you could outsource a good chunk of those 400 new vacancies to recruitment agencies, that should give some more bandwidth to your TA team shouldn’t it?

Probably not, your team are still going to be managing the agencies, managing their own vacancies whilst guiding both candidates and hiring managers through the process.

Taking away the sourcing and offer part of the process isn’t really freeing them up as much as they need, and the spend on those agency fees aren’t really worth the little extra bandwidth the team might get.

Not really worth the hassle or spend is it?

A better option? Bring in an Embedded TA provider or RPO.

You need 5 tech recruiters to start on Monday who know the Manchester Tech scene. You need 3 GTM recruiters to start in 2 months time and you can add more to team when you need them and roll them off when demand decreases.

You don’t need to find or interview these recruiters, you don’t need to convince the powers that be to give you extra headcount, you CAPEX the lot.

They slot straight into your existing team and begin making an impact pretty much straight away.

It’s a bit of a no brainer isn’t it?

That’s agility, that’s futureproofing your TA Operating model to cope with changes in demand.

And let’s face it, if the last three years have taught us anything, demand can and will change very very quickly. And drastically.

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