Adding value to in-house talent acquisition teams

During the last decade, many corporates have invested significant sums in building out their in-house talent acquisition teams.

The result has been that they are more demanding in what they require from their external providers.

For a company like Armstrong Craven, it has presented some exciting opportunities and was one of the key reasons why we opened our latest global hub in New York.

There is now a greater acceptance that there are alternative approaches to the traditional executive search model.

Approaches that dig deeper, find better talent, give greater control and ownership to companies and deliver a superior return on investment while, significantly, reducing cost and time to hire.

Armstrong Craven does not replace in-house TA, rather we partner with you to enhance recruitment methodology and give it the greatest possible chance of attracting the very best talent to your organization.

We talk a lot in client meetings about the 3Cs – capacity, capability and confidentiality.

Capacity to deliver all your talent acquisition requirements, particularly when there are spikes in demand; capability in terms of the experience and knowledge of your in-house team, perhaps in a new region or for roles which are more complex, niche or unusual; and confidentiality when the client wants to maintain distance between itself and the candidates it is engaging with.

Many of the conversations I am currently having with clients are focused on our ability to pipeline senior and in-demand talent.

They like the fact that we can provide them with a population of proactively generated, screened, assessed and engaged individuals – developed candidates who are totally aligned with the requirements of the organization’s business strategy.

They also like the fact that they own the data we produce, whether they are using it to make an immediate hire or for future hiring requirements. It reduces cost and the need to use executive search because they can reach out to candidates themselves.

Clients like the partnership approach whereby the skills and services we provide complement their own in-house capability.

We are challenging the conventional transactional recruitment model, many aspects of which we believe are not achieving the talent acquisition goals.

The projects we are delivering for clients in the US and globally demonstrate that there is a more dynamic, flexible and effective approach.

Pipelining can help an organization today and tomorrow in so many ways.

It can assist with succession planning to ensure that you have the right individuals ready to step up when the need arises. It helps a business to improve its diversity and it also helps to reduce risk within an organization by ensuring you have the right people in the right roles.

For growth businesses, pipelining should be an essential. By engaging with a pool of external talent in advance, growth can be managed and talent integrated as the strategy and performance dictates.

Talent pipelining can be a hugely powerful and effective weapon for any organization wanting to ensure the best candidates are attracted to their business and not lost to a competitor.

• To find out more about Armstrong Craven pipelining or any of our other services, please contact info@armstrongcraven.com