The shift in India's recruitment strategy

The demand for talent is abundant. The supply of diverse talent is available. However, strategy for assessing and selecting right person for the right job to optimize results is undergoing a massive transformation in recent times.

India's talent pool has evolved substantially in recent times. But that has not necessarily translated into employable talent. Industry has reached a stage where it has become essential to shift from traditional hiring strategies to more innovative methods backed by fresh measures to track the effectiveness of hiring. The aim, of course, is to leverage prospective talent emerging from diverse backgrounds.

With a positive political outlook bringing stability to the economy, industry in India indicates a 70% increase hiring volume this year. This reveals the potential for new jobs and requirements of diversified skillsets. Employing efficient methods to acquire such talent is one of the top five challenges of most organizations today.

Adapting to change, business leaders are increasingly engaging with recruitment teams for sourcing, selection, employer branding, onboarding, compensation package design, and positioning. Synergy of critical skills and talent supply are key areas where recruitment leaders are helping fuel businesses. These leaders collaborate with business units to structure hiring teams to identify skill requirement, improve hiring effectiveness, and provide robust talent supply. While some large organizations are indulging in specialized teams for campus recruitments, smaller niche is spending on adopting hybrid team structures such as Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) methods specifically in the IT industry.

On the employee side, with a social media outbreak, companies are deploying more resources towards employer branding to attract and engage active and passive talent.

Employers are scaling up budgets to stand out as employers of choice. Their top priorities for the coming year have been chalked out in four major areas:

Social media engagement
Online assessments
Building the employer brand
Technology

More than 60% of organizations plan to increase their budget allocation for employer branding to gain a competitive advantage in the crucial "War for Talent." To track their return on investment and measure the success of these branding strategies, organizations are relying on outcomes such as "Candidates Applied" and "Candidates Hired."

A leader in the pharmaceutical industry has been leveraging the brand pull of the organization to drive hiring, maintaining talent supply, and increasing direct applications. The company has expanded its branding at a junior level through Campus Connect Programs and uses social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter for engaging with active and passive talent pool. On the other hand, a leading FMCG giant believes in leveraging social professional networks and direct mailers to increase outreach and visibility in the talent pool. The company showcases female leaders in the organization via employee testimonials and social ads that helped attract women talent.

On the employer side, organizations are reconsidering the use of simplistic screening methods. Hiring teams feel the need to deploy multiple assessments at each level including a mix of aptitude and competency tools to assess candidates on role fitment as well as culture fitment in the organization.

At present, functional interviews and background checks are most prevalent across levels, whereas more than 50% of organizations use aptitude and skill-based assessments for entry-level hiring. More than 55% organizations assess for competency and culture fitment for mid and senior level hiring. Further, more than 60% of organizations rely on perception-based measures (manager feedback, 180 day performance) to track effectiveness of the selection process. Organizations increasingly feel the need to buffer aptitude tests with competency and culture fitment assessments to select suitable candidates who are a good fit for the role at hand.

One of the leading firms in the technology industry believe in deploying multiple selection rounds that assess candidates on key functional skills and leadership behaviors. The organization also suggests that technical assessments are needed at junior levels and psychometric assessments at senior levels. These identify the competence of candidates and predict their value-add to the organization's culture. To improve this process, competency-based interviews conducted by trained hiring managers can be added to the mix.

There is a visible gap in the availability of support for talent development, however, that is a next step for the industry. Overall, employer attitudes and employment tactics are shifting form as skill and knowledge of potential employees finds further definition. As the war for talent continues to heat up, 2015 promises to bring transformations in the way India Inc. stabilizes the attraction and selection of key talent and how businesses partner with talent acquisition leaders to attract key talent.

Vikas Verma
Director, Selection and Assessment, Aon Hewitt (India)

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What Best-in-Class Organizations Do Differently:

Sourcing Across Business Verticals | Cognizant
"We have formed a sourcing team, which helps us hire across horizontals (product lines) and verticals (industry services/domains). It helps to address different levels of hiring needs and manage scalability issues. We also have teams hiring for niche skills, leadership hiring and hiring for critical talent separately."

Strategic Branding to Attract Diverse Talent Pool | HUL
"We released a direct mailer campaign aimed at targeted audience to get interested and relevant candidates to apply. Best practice in showcasing culture and brand by highlighting the female leaders through employee testimonials and social ads. Leverage social professional networks to build on leadership brands of female leaders in the organization to attract women talent."