Are your talent acquisition strategies future-proof?
In this month’s Highered Insights, we look into a timely topic of talent intelligence. Dr. Amber Wigmore Alvarez shares her observations and suggests a continuous, strategic dialogue between all stakeholders – recruiters, talent, and academic institutions.
Recruiter Perspective
Achieving the balance between “talent potential” and “competition ratio” is still a struggle for companies’ HR departments. Using traditional HR methods, companies find themselves lacking the resources to target every school on their radar. Careful profile positioning is required considering the key terms recruiters across all industries and cultures have incorporated into their hiring objectives (STEM, talent and diversity, and inclusion), and the stringent work authorization requirements (the US and UK being the most relevant at this time). Leveraging HR tech, which is increasingly relevant, talent sourcing and recruiting could be the easiest to demonstrate value creation (cost/time/quality of hire).
Talent Perspective
Candidates’ job searching behavior and preference influence talent recruitment strategies. Summarizing data generated from nearly 100,000 active users from 387 business schools in 98 countries using Highered, we find that students are most actively searching for internships/part-time opportunities in Q1 (January – March), and full-time positions in March, May, and October. Students show strong interest in Finance and Accounting, Marketing and Sales positions. IT roles also gained popularity.
Academic Perspective
The design of academic institutions’ Career Services has to be revised and the concept of “placement” has to be rethought through a complete grasp of organizations’ hiring needs and profiles with the multitude of intricacies. Career Services are also expected to develop a more in-depth understanding of data-driven selection processes and the candidate experience, especially the established providers in the assessments arena (Cut-e, Arctic Shores and Pymetrics to name a few), in order to best prepare their talent.
