Today's War for Talent is best waged with a social strategy. That's a far cry from what's implicitly accepted as the key to success in recruiting today. Conventional best practices are built on the notion that talent acquisition is really an exercise in hiring "human capital." While that term may dignify us humans as a special form of capital, however, it fails to acknowledge the one attribute that differentiates cognitive beings from cogs: we are a social species not carbon-based widgets. The best way to recruit talent for our organizations, therefore, is to acknowledge and respect that distinction.What is a social strategy in the War for Talent?
Let's begin by comparing it to a traditional human capital strategy. That approach to recruiting focuses, appropriately enough, on the skills and knowledge of alternative candidates. It is implemented by taking a page from our colleagues in logistics. Basically, we create a supply chain of human beings with the necessary expertise, and we turn that stream of human capability up or down as needed to fill our various openings. In short, a human capital strategy is all about supply-finding enough talent to meet the demand of your organization. Success is defined as putting a qualified person in the right job.
How is such a strategy typically implemented? The successful operation of a supply chain depends upon your ability to find enough human capital to meet the organization's needs. Hence, the technique of choice is passive and proactive sourcing. A human capital strategy relies on passive recruitment ads and on proactive data mining online and in resume databases; it involves (largely) passive employee referral programs and proactive searching through profiles posted on LinkedIn and other social and business networking sites. However it's accomplished, it is all about building up an inventory of talent for potential assignment to specific job openings.
A social strategy, in contrast, acknowledges the critical importance of candidates' skills and knowledge but goes beyond them. It focuses as much on their temperament, personality and personal attributes. It examines their mettle and their potential level of engagement. Why try and get your arms around stuff as squishy as that? Because as important as "hard attributes" like skills and knowledge are, it is a person's willingness and determination to apply those capabilities to the organization's mission that enables that organization to succeed.
The hard skills of candidates define human capital; their dedication and loyalty define social capital. In the relatively benign marketplace of the 20th Century, human capital was sufficient for an organization to survive and prosper. In the dangerous marketplace of the 21st Century, only social capital can ensure an organization's ability to do so.
Why is that? Because research shows that the single greatest cause for a new hire's sub-par performance or their rapid attrition is not their inability to do the job, but their inability to fit in. As human capital, they're everything an organization could want; as social capital they're worthless. And, an organization that is bankrupt in social capital will inevitably (and quickly) be bankrupt in financial capital, as well.
The Hallmarks of a Social Strategy
A social strategy is not about supply. It is all about the right supply. And a successful social strategy doesn't put a qualified person in the right job, it puts the right qualified person in the right job at the right time. You can't do that with sourcing alone. You need sourcing and recruiting, but recruiting with a very different kind of emphasis than what we've seen in the recent past.
Although not universally so, recruiting in the past five-to-eight years has largely been seen as the art of selection and persuasion. It has been understood to be the effort required:
to determine the best qualified person based on the stated requirements for a job
and
to convince that person to accept an organization's offer of employment.As complex and difficult as those two tasks may be, however, they do not provide a complete definition of recruiting. Historically, recruiting has also involved another activity, one that is now vital to victory in the War for the Best Talent. This third task is best described as getting to know candidates as people as well as the paper persona we meet on their resumes.
How is that done?
The activity is basically an exercise in socialization, but in our profession, we have traditionally called it relationship building. Its goal is to uncover those individuals with the right stuff-the subtle but powerful personal characteristics and values that draw out a person's best work on-the-job and their willingness to continue contributing that work to an organization-or what we have traditionally called peak performance and retention.
Now, as anyone who's ever been in a relationship knows, it takes time and effort to nurture the familiarity and trust that are the basis for a sound relationship. And even more challenging, many of the relationships we do nurture in recruiting will ultimately identify individuals with the wrong stuff, at least for our organizations. Nevertheless, in today's and tomorrow's demanding operational environment, any organization without a robust relationship-building or social strategy is at risk, not only in the War for Talent, but in the war for survival.
It's up to us, therefore, to move beyond the quest for human capital. In the 21st Century, the primary mission of recruiters must be to enrich our organization's stock of social capital. We must, for example, stop seeing our resume databases as static storehouses of resumes, and instead treat them as platforms for building relationships with people. We must stop using professional networking sites as virtual barrels of profiles and instead, tap their capabilities to nurture familiarity and trust with talented employment prospects. We must get beyond the simplistic view of humans as simply another form of inert capital and see them instead as complex social beings who have talent to share, but only if they feel like they're in the right place at the right time for them to do so.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
P.S. President Obama called out to our better selves and asked all of us to pitch ... so, pleased, help a friend in these hard times; tell them about WEDDLE's Newsletter.
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