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This is not to recommend that you create a new resourcing model or revisit your organizational design principles, but to highlight why HR leaders and recruitment professionals should develop a deeper understanding of best-in-class marketing & sales models that exist. If you are missing out on the strategic rigor, market planning and the efforts it takes to build an eco-system to onboard customers, you are likely to be running sub-optimal talent acquisition machinery.

There are frequent parallels drawn between the recruitment and sales functions. However, that’s been limited to the need to ‘sell’ a job or the organization just like you sell a product or service to a consumer. The similarities run deeper than that.

Both the markets, consumer and talent, are driven by market forces and thus in both cases the basic principles of marketing apply. Customers and human resources are both leveraged by an organization to generate economic value and thus have both revenue and cost sides.

What follows are 8 fundamental go-to-market principles that will help you run a more robust talent acquisition function.

 

1. Make great products

The design process can be quite frustrating as getting the product that you will take to the talent market, is difficult to get right. Getting the “combo-pack” of a challenging role, an attractive rewards proposition, future career options and a work culture that appeals to your target segments could be one hell of a job. It’s an inexact science.

Your Employer Value Proposition (EVP) is your product for the talent market. It carries the perceived attributes of the firm and the role, perceived benefits and the brand image.

Just like new products, most employers’ value propositions fail, even if they are built on a great idea, because they miss to segment the market. Deep consumer insights to understand needs of different generations of professionals, in different phases of their career will make your proposition both robust & innovative.

Know precisely who your customer is and aim all your marketing efforts on them. Have your ‘micro-segmented’ your talent market?

2. Build a compelling Brand & Segment your market

Though it helps to leverage a strong consumer brand, the best of employer brands are likely to have a strong brand identity while aligned to the corporate or consumer brand. Strengthen the explicit links between your employer brand and the broader strategic goals of the organization.

In a ‘micro-segmented’ market, it’s imperative that brand extensions are designed for different target segments, with customized product features. Your brand can’t make the same proposition as it does to a prospective board member as to a Generation Y talent fresh out of a university (‘generational segmentation’) or to an experienced frontline salesman (‘hierarchical segmentation’).

As yes, your Brand should build on your true strengths – because you don’t want post purchase dissonance!

3. Ensure a high quality distribution

What gets seen; gets sold! How close is your product to the source of demand? What’s the ease of access to information on your product?

Teach your senior leaders, your search partners, the media and the market, how to talk about your product. Make your line managers and trade partners an extension of yourself.

As you spread the word about our company and the careers it offers, remember that distribution is not so much about quantity but about quality. You would be present where your talent catchment areas are and say the right things at the right place.

‘Market coverage’ can be quantitatively characterized as the number of hiring channels carrying your product as a percentage of total channels (sometimes called distribution coverage or simply “distribution”) or the percentage of hiring channels carrying a product weighted by each channel’s sales.

Of course, the “quantity” of channels carrying a product is not directly proportional to distribution “quality”, so metrics should be carefully tailored to reflect presence in strategically appropriate hiring channels.  In many instances, being in the wrong places may more harmful than being in too few places.

Quantitative measures of product support include the percentage of mandates or jobs, share of ads or promotions, the number of displays/pitch to candidates, placements, and candidate satisfaction indices.

Channel partner (i.e. search partner) engagement and communication including incentivization, both monetary and non-monetary, if done rightly, will positively impact reach & availability of your product.

4. Focus on quality of acquisition

Your acquisition team should know what are the capability and skills required for the future success of the organization, and what the core values are. Equally well, they must research were to find the right talent.

The quality of talent you acquire is a factor of the catchment area, the “sales pitch”, the background check of the candidate and the robustness of your selection process.

Sufficient & updated information about the history, size, scale, management team, culture and way of life in your organization, along with the quality of job briefing to the candidate will ensure that your sales pitch does not go wrong. Which of your channels is carrying this information today and is the talent market aware of the channels?

A combination of candidate briefing & a relevant Job Description, CV screening, reference checks, behavioral assessments, competence-based interviews flowed by requisite background verification of the candidate will increase the predictability of making a good acquisition.

5. Invest in Candidate Lifecycle Management

Your candidate goes through very similar cycles of ‘buying process’ as does your consumer.

Actual purchasing (joining an organization in this case) is only one stage of the process. Not all decision processes lead to a ‘purchase’. All decisions do not always include all stages of a cycle, but are determined by the degree of complexity of the decision or ‘purchase’.

As a candidate goes through Recognition (awareness of need for a job change) i.e. difference between the desired state and the actual condition, the situation can be stimulated by the marketer through product information on the desired state. This takes the candidate to an information search, ranging from websites to social media to search firms and even to friends and relatives (word of mouth). Some amount of comparison shopping is bound to happen.

A successful information search leaves a buyer with possible alternatives, the evoked set. Evaluation of alternatives happen i.e. need to establish criteria for evaluation, features the candidate wants or does not want.

How your talented candidate has been impacted by your company information to employer branding to the job description to the interview experience to your rewards offer is critical as s/he reaches the Purchase Decision stage, i.e. choosing/buying alternatives.

The most critical phase for your is the post job offer acceptance stage or what marketers call the Post-Purchase evaluation. Cognitive Dissonance (have I made the right decision?) can be reduced by warranties, after sales communication, etc. For your hiring manager and the talent acquisition team, it’s critical that you be engaged with the candidates. Call him/her to your office and give a facilities tour or email reading material that engages him/her with the business and culture of your company. Have someone from the leadership team give a call or send the family a welcome kit.

Ensure that there are no last minute surprises for your candidates, no consumer likes them. Attractiveness needs to be backed by accuracy, i.e. fulfillment of promises.

Making the candidate feel that he is already part of the organization and a warm community of professionals is fundamental.  Keep them posted on changes or new related to the organization, let it not flow to him/her through a newspaper or an internet site.

6. Invest in capability building of your workforce & channel partners

All of the above would have made your feel the need to go back and train your recruiters – internal & external. There’s nothing more important than that.

Your external talent market gets to experience the brand and culture of your organization through your recruiters and search partners. An aligned & motivated team can make your employer brand come alive and can ensure that the quality of acquisition is what you always wanted.

While these are inputs, it is equally important to institute incentives or penalty, in the form of special recognition or dis-empanelment, to drive the right behaviors and outcome.

7. Ensure you have a governance mechanism

There’s a cost side to acquisition and can make or break your resourcing “bottom-line”.

Most acquisition teams are busy with time and quantity measures, and miss out on parameters that measure consistency, effectiveness and commercials of making an acquisition.

Having the right channel mix ensures that you are exploring & reaching out to a range and variety of talent markets or catchment areas. Doing a regression analysis on your employee attrition and performance data will help you see clear correlation between our talent sources (universities, organizations, search partners, sourcing channels) and success or failure of your new hires.

Sourcing involves purchasing decisions, and it’s extremely important that on both the buy-side (channel partner) and the sell-side (candidate) the purchasing is ethical. Doing the right thing is the base for doing the best.

8. Keep revisiting and renewing your go-to-market strategy

Keep talking to your customers and be keen to hear them during interviews, at events, at university campuses… and even more importantly on social media. From Glassdoor & LinkedIn to Facebook, be alert to the chatter and the tweets – not only they are a great source of feedback and can highlight gaps in your executive of the EVP and the Brand in the market place.

Unique employer brand are few and far between. So, if you are building one, keep the foundation strong and keep refreshing it in tune with the changing aspirations of your consumers.

I have always wondered why there are always 3, 5, 7 or 10 things to do or not to do; here are my 8. What are your thoughts and would you like to add on?

 

These are my thoughts, written in my personal capacity and are neither related nor attributable, in whole or in parts, to my past or current employers.

These are my thoughts, written in my personal capacity and are neither related nor attributable, in whole or in parts, to my past or current employers.

Flash back to Year 3010 B.C. As twilight sets in, Eve (for lack of a better name) is at her cave, waiting for Adam (again for lack of a better name) to return from his hunting for food.

At the cave, while water boils in a pot at the corner of the cave, Eve’s young kids are at play at the far inside end. Eve is all ears for any noise that signals an unknown animal – a snake or a predator, and for the water else it boils over. She also keeps watch on her kids at the far end, and at entrance of the cave, as she cuts some plucked vegetable to boil.

Year 2011 A.D. and you replace the cave with a cubicle at the office. Eve is at work – going through her e-mails, instructing her team member on something urgent and the same time keeping a tab on her 2.5 year old daughter’s well-being at home via the cellphone. While at all this, she is also ears for conversations happening around. When back at home she manages to cook food, look after her kids and catch up with TV as well.

Most men would consider women as over-sensitive to color, tone & manner, as being un-able to focus – “can’t finish one thing at a time” and indecisive.

 

We always knew we were different!

Men	Women
Play team sports	Play relationships
Are Ok with conflict	Avoid conflict
Compete	Be nice, get along
Focus on goal line/win	Negotiate for win/win
Avoid asking questions	Ask questions
Are linear focused	Multi-task – do things simultaneously
‘Kill’ the problem	Talk over and discuss it
Table 1. Men & Women: Differences

Evolution, genetics, physiology, up bringing – all contribute to making men and women different. These differences have huge implications for the way we hire talent, what we do to retain them, the way we plan careers and how we deal with men and women talent in our organizations.

Research has proven that some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to the way they are genetically made up. They are also able to distinguish various frequency levels of sound than men can’t.

Men and women also bring to work a lot of diversity in the way in which they approach their work and relationships (refer Table#1).

Women employees tend to ask more questions- helping the organization review & correct aspects of a course of action that men may have completely missed out. They are more prone to discussing out problems and resolving them in a win-win manner, than simply ‘hunting down’ the problem and ‘killing’ it. The process of achieving the result is as important to them as the result itself.

Women at work bring this diversity of inputs and methods of processing on the table for your organization, thus yielding diverse and different levels of output.

Because it makes business sense

Research says that 80% of consumer purchasing decisions are made by women, covering everything from cars and computers to IT and insurance (North America & Europe, OECD 2007). After a good/bad experience, women will tell 7 times more people about it than will men. Hence, it makes immense business sense to have women on board to understand product features that women consumers like and to appreciate their purchasing preferences.

Gender Diversity is a sound business practice with independent studies clearly pointing out to the direct correlation between diversity and the profitability of companies globally. Here are some of them:

• US Companies with highest representation of women on top management teams delivered 35.1% higher ROE and 34% higher total return to shareholders than those with lowest representation. (Catalyst USA 2004)
• Performance was even greater where there was a “critical mass” – companies with three or four female directors had 83% greater return on equity, on average, 73% better return on sales and 112% higher return on invested capital. (Catalyst 2007)
• In a 2007 study of companies across Europe, Asia and America by McKinsey & Co. those with 30% or more women in their senior management team achieved higher average scores for “organizational excellence” than those with no women. Operational excellence tended to correlate with better operating margins and market cap. (Women Matter 2007)
• A further McKinsey study of organizations in Europe showed that companies with the highest levels of gender diversity in top management enjoyed substantially better financial performance (including EBIT and Stock Price Growth) than the average for their sector. (Women Matter 2007)

Gender is a business issue, not a ‘women’s issue’. The under-use of women’s talent has an impact on the bottom line. Taking action to address this will require sustained courage and conviction from all of us.

Addressing 500 of the world’s most powerful women at a self-styled ‘Davos for women’ conference in Deauville, France (Women’s Forum, 2006), Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan said that women directly make or influence two-thirds of car purchases in Japan. Nissan conducted surveys which revealed that 80% of women buyers would prefer to have women salespeople in the showrooms – so would 50% of men.

More and more organizations are learning to leverage diversity of talent for competitive advantage.

Question the number of resumes of women that your talent resourcing team presents, the number of women candidates that you meet to hire for a position. Have you looked at women employee’s career-paths differently? Are they supported with a flexible work-time policy post maternity? What mentoring & development support systems do you have?

And helps build more productive & innovative teams

The more the diversity in your teams, you will have that much more innovative ideas and creative outputs through different opinion and discussion points. The more the variety of approaches, the more chances of coming out with differentiated products and services, process improvement opportunities, and better focus on new & diverse customer segments.

Cross-functional teams, office meetings and official social gatherings can become breeding grounds of exclusion of certain members. These members are likely to be one who may not be fluent communicators in English or one who do not come from affluent family backgrounds. Can be the introverts or can be the women. Or the one who have just joined your organization or the usual “not like us” – a homosexual or a disabled individual.

What we miss out is that our customer base has these same people – women, homosexuals, disabled or old people, those from rural and poor backgrounds or minority communities. Who in your organization is listening to them and is able appreciate their unique needs? Which of your employees are reaching out and interacting with them? Who in our teams are probably more equipped to think of products and services for them?

You can do a quick self or organizational check:

• Are we creating ‘space’ in meetings so that everyone has the opportunity to contribute regardless of style, first language or level in the organisation?
• Do we combine different perspectives to innovate and challenge?
• Do we create an environment where all feel respected and are able to freely contribute?

 

Though it’s not about numbers

While building gender diversity in our organization is not about numbers, but as business and human resources leaders, you can track these male-female ratios in:

• Resumes received for key positions
• Candidates shortlisted for a position
• External hires
• Various work-levels, geographical regions, functions
• Location transfer requests effected
• Attrition especially early (0-12 months attrition)
• Promotions in a certain cycle/period
• Identified/assessed top talent
• Successors for senior/top management roles

These ratios will throw up areas of focus for your organization. Besides these pure metrics, you may also analyze various other organizational or people related reports. For example, you may split responses to various people pulse or health & safety surveys by gender to understand what needs your immediate attention. These ratios and reports will also help you diagnose whether

Training man-days report, working hours report, whistle-blowers reports and the minutes of your sexual harassment committee can be other resources to check your diversity & inclusivity (D&I) health.

Map & understand lifecycle of a woman’s career

It is imperative that not only business leaders and HR leaders understand a woman’s career lifecycle and the changing needs of individuals, but even first-level supervisors need to appreciate and understand how a woman professional’s career path progress and what she needs at each stage.

The graph below (refer graph #1) is illustrative and presented as a template and is not comprehensive. However, it is sure to start a thinking process to proactively manage and respond to the crests and falls. Most managers shy away from hiring or promoting women team-members purely from a perspective of avoiding the ‘falls’ that come with hiring women.

What hiring managers often forget that even male employee may go through such ‘falls” in their career lifecycle due to various other reasons like dissatisfaction with current role or supervisor,etc..

It is also important that you communicate success stories of women who have managed to have fruitful careers in your organization through these stages.

To create a support infrastructure and monitoring mechanisms, at each of these stages of ups and downs, that sustain through other organizational changes especially leadership change, will key in attracting and retaining women talent.

 

Different strokes for different folks

There are various examples across progressive organizations and across geographies, of women specific initiatives. Some examples of such actions and initiatives:

• Flexible working
• Work from home option
• Crèche facility, Concierge facilities
• Inclusive behavior and leadership training for people managers
• Enhancing employee experience pre maternity, during maternity & post maternity return to work
• Reviewing women talent pipeline & development plans
• Women’s network @ work
• Mentorship programs for women
• Buddy at work for new women employees

Well beyond the above actions and initiatives, you need to build support infrastructure and process to sustain what you may start as an intervention. The organization’s learning and development (L&D) team needs to be geared up with programs that are specifically designed to deliver on women’s career, work-life balance, health, environmental awareness, etc.

The facilities team should plan for rest rooms build especially for women employees and vehicle drops for those sitting late.

Culture should get driven by organisational norms rather than by the personality of the business leader. Communication should go out that as senior leaders promoting diversity is just as important as performance. The more transparent, fair, honest you are – the better you come across to people – you can’t be an excellent performer and un-inclusive.

However, we all know that there’s no magic wand. It takes time to change existing norms.

 

Summing it up… keep the hat on and apply the lens

Keep the “D&I hat” on and “apply the D&I lens” in your role in order to incorporate D&I in processes you are responsible for, and to raise the awareness of D&I among line managers and employees

Be courageous and make a positive intervention when you see non-inclusive behaviour in yourself and others.

Watch for the subtle messages that get out every day. Alone, they may seem petty but together they create insiders and outsiders. They undermine your efforts to build diversity in your team and create an inclusive environment.

As leaders, we set the tone & “norms”, for instance: the jokes we laugh at, how we conduct meetings and what we do when we see inappropriate behaviour.

We can make a positive intervention without coming down “heavily” on someone. We can do that by bringing issues out into the open, by re-setting the line around what is appropriate. By ensuring that there is zero tolerance of any abuse of power by someone in a leadership role.

Not to miss the positive strokes, you can think of awards to recognize those promoting diversity and an inclusive culture.

Various researches show that diversity in the workplace was the bridge between the workplace and the marketplace. If you are not trying to build and sustain diversity in your team or organization, you are missing out on significant potential of half of the human race.