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HR Leader hosted “Attracting and retaining talent in 2023” on 13 December in partnership with Enboarder and Lotus People. The webinar delivered professional insights into how to navigate the talent market.
Andrea Kirby, director at Talent Table; Iona Colville, divisional manager of HR and talent for Lotus People; and Adam Faludi, head of customer success Asia-Pacific at Enboarder spoke at the event.
One of the topics discussed was the best way to approach talent attraction in 2023. Ms Colville noted that the pandemic has shifted the norms of hiring, and employers should “definitely be looking at skillset as opposed to work history”.
“Since COVID-19, organisations are starting to base their approach to hiring and development on skill levels as opposed to exact work experience,” said Ms Colville.
Ms Colville commented that promoting from within is not only a better way to utilise the talent you already have but can prove to be more productive long term.
“In a short time period, you probably will have to put in a little bit more effort into your training and development, but long term that person’s more likely to stay with you because you’ve trained them, you’re bringing them up through the business – there’s so much value that you’ve added to their career,” explained Ms Colville.
“[Experienced hires are] not really the candidate you want to be going for because within a year, possibly, they’re going to get offered something else that’s going to challenge them more and they’re going to go for that.”
Ms Kirby also discussed the benefit of promoting from within: “At one of our recent events, the hashtag #internalfirst was trending. Assessing people on skills definitely allows you to then start to look at your internal workforce differently.
“There’s some great tech that actually helps you pull together everything that’s out in the market on a person in terms of skills and courses that they’ve done. Creating a marketplace of your internal talent means that when opportunities are coming up, rather than looking externally first, you’re actually looking at who you can develop in your organisation.”
Job descriptions may also be reducing your potential candidate pool. Ms Kirby said: “It’s a very limiting document and we know that hiring managers often don’t know exactly what they’re recruiting for. It’s a document that actually doesn’t give you a lot of information.
“Start to talk about what you want to see the person in the job achieving and what that job looks like going forward. Then you start to have a clearer understanding of the type of person that can fulfil that job,” said Ms Kirby.
Mr Faludi discussed the concept of a “boomerang employee”, which is when an former employee returns to an organisation. This has the benefit of not only bolstering talent pools but brings somebody back into the business who has knowledge of how it operates.
“There are a lot of these employees or past employees that have left the organisation and we are able to use that as a talent pool to engage with them to say, ‘I know you joined that company maybe three months ago. How’s it going? Has it lived up to the expectations that you wanted?’”
Mr Faludi continued: “What’s great about internal and external talent teams is they’re already trained up, they know about your organisation, they were clearly ‘bought in’ to the mission, vision and values that once were part of their everyday work – it’s a great talent pool to be able to tap into as well.”
He added: “There’s definitely a talent pool out there for employees that have unfortunately left your organisation, and being able to tap them on the shoulder to say maybe there’s a chance for them to come back.”
The transcript of this webinar, when quoted above, was slightly edited for publishing purposes. The full audio conversation and the original webinar can be found here.
Jack Campbell
Jack is the editor at HR Leader.
