Revisiting Talent Acquisition: What has Changed?

Every day, workforce decision-makers face disruptive forces influencing the world of business and talent acquisition (TA). In an increasingly fragmented labor market, engaging the right talent for the right position at the right cost has become more complicated and highly competitive.

In addition, a lingering talent shortage has shifted the balance of in-demand skills with the number of candidates that possess those skills. With that said, more businesses are moving to a skills-based hiring model when recruiting talent, to open access to new avenues of talent.

Further, rising unemployment hasn’t translated into easily available talent in high-demand skills. In some fields, such as IT and healthcare, the costs for workers have remained steady or gone up. And when it’s time to hire workers, business leaders have found themselves with limited resources to execute their recruitment strategies.

While most organizations have adjusted to the immediate impact of economic disruption, it’s now time to look ahead. Work needs to get done. Value must be created. Innovation remains a priority, and companies need talent to make it all happen.

Now is the right time to take a renewed look at your TA function. Should you consider more flexible approaches to processes, technologies and partners? Should you rethink your digital strategy? Or should you reinvent the entire function from the ground up?

You, like so many other business leaders, may be struggling with these questions; however, an effective talent strategy is within reach. The path to that strategy begins by revisiting your goals, technology and opportunities for improvement. In many ways, the rules in talent acquisition have changed. And adapting to the differences will be critical to an effective talent strategy. The questions that follow can help guide your planning as you develop your strategic approach to a future-ready workforce.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Are You Getting Talent Acquisition Results That Matter?
  • Cost and Speed
  • Skills-Based Hiring   
  • Quality of Results 
  • Workforce Readiness
• Are Digital Gaps Holding You Back?
  • AI Tools for Advancing Talent Acquisition
  • Identifying and Targeting Talent
  • Communication and Candidate Care
• Where Are the Opportunities for Talent Acquisition Transformation?
  
  • Screening and Selection
  • Onboarding
  • Expanding RPO Offerings
• Thinking Ahead: Don't Wait to Take Action

Are You Getting Talent Acquisition Results That Matter?

An informed recruitment strategy does not focus on a single measure of success, one approach to filling roles or addressing only current challenges. Rather, it encompasses multiple complementary goals, varying hiring techniques and scalable, flexible solutions to deliver meaningful and lasting results. Consider the following areas of improvement and their potential for workforce transformation.

Cost and Speed

The Story: Speed and Cost Metrics Can Track Performance, But May Not Solve Problems

A company can become more efficient at filling roles quickly and cheaply while suffering from high turnover or poor performance. Nevertheless, time-to-fill and cost-of-hire remain relevant as measures of performance. Today, smart companies struggle to put those measures in context and interpret their meaning to gain significant improvement.

What’s Different: Companies Can Look into More Detailed Metrics to Drive Improvements

When roles remain unfilled or quality of talent falls short, replace the finger-pointing of the past with detailed data and clear answers for improvement. By accurately executing and tracking all aspects of the process in a digital environment, organizations can see exactly where they are succeeding and where they are falling short. For example, is fulfillment consistently late because the quality of candidates is low, or does the job description fail to align with the real supply of available talent? Are hiring managers taking a long time to make decisions? Knowing the answers can make changing course manageable for everyone involved.

Takeaway: Don’t Rely on Hunches and Opinions to Fix Gaps

If you rely on opinions and hunches to pinpoint the gaps that are slowing down results and driving up costs, take a second look at your technology. Are your systems capturing the timing and source of candidates at the outset? Can you track the milestones and stakeholders in the process, from responding to the initial application, to scheduling the interview through making the hiring decision? By capturing reliable data, you eliminate the guesswork and can engage in a useful problem-solving discussion to improve performance.

Skills-Based Hiring

The Story: It’s Not as Simple as a List of Skills, You Need Skills Architecture

As skills-based hiring practices become more commonplace, the need has arisen for skills architecture. Experienced recruitment specialists will not just review the skills needed to get work done, but will create a dynamic, interconnected system that illustrates how certain skills and roles are related to each other and how each skill influences business objectives. A strategically developed skills architecture provides actionable information that can inform hiring, support workforce development and give a 360-degree view for planning.

What’s Different: Talent Acquisition with Expertise in Skills Orchestration

Once you develop a workforce plan, with comprehensive skills architecture, the next step is to coordinate, manage and categorize the multitude of skills and tasks needed to execute end-to-end workflows. Orchestrating how to best distribute, utilize and nurture the skills in the most advantageous way for the worker and the business, is key to long-term results and meeting goals.

Takeaway: Measuring Success and Opportunities for Growth Through Skills Tracking

It is tempting to think that once you’ve fulfilled your hiring goals, the job is done. However, in a rapidly shifting market it is essential to systematically and thoroughly measure your processes so you can continue to optimize. Programs with a healthy skills tracking program of monitoring, recording and measuring abilities, skills and competencies have the data to maintain the paths that work and as well as the knowledge of when to reroute when challenges arise.

Quality of Results

The Story: Measures of Talent Acquisition Quality Are Vital

Candidate fit and quality-of-hire are important indicators of TA performance, but measuring these indicators require consistent and reliable data as well as a methodology for determining success. There are certain indicators that have proven trustworthy markers of recruitment effectiveness: employee performance comparable to goals, interview-to-hire ratios, rapid time-to-productivity and hiring manager satisfaction scores. It is also recommended to monitor 90- and 180-day retention rates as well as the impact of team member productivity on the business.

What’s Different: Data to Track Quality Is More Available Than Ever

Today, every part of the recruitment process represents a potential connection to high-quality candidates and hires. Solid recruiting efforts identify and target workers with the right skills and knowledge to get the job done, along with the aptitude to learn and adjust to new demands as they arise. New tools and technologies, such as AI, make the ability to capture and organize all data to measure talent quality highly accessible.

Takeaway: People and Technology Are Essential to Drive and Measure Results

It is possible to bridge the silos that once separated data sources and gain a picture of how the talent you hire succeeds on the job. But data from disparate systems won’t come together on their own. Informed guidance, both from internal sources and external subject matter experts, is needed to determine how the organization will gain a snapshot of talent quality. The main challenge for employers will be to ensure that all stakeholders – from talent partners to HR to hiring managers and leadership – commit to measuring quality of talent as a central part of the recruiting strategy.

Workforce Readiness

The Story: Companies Struggle to Adapt and Scale Talent Acquisition to Fit Their Needs

Speed and cost matter, but long-term adaptability is equally important. Is your recruitment strategy positioned to tackle hiring across multiple roles and skill sets? How quickly can your recruiting organization scale up to meet new demand? How well can it evolve to compete for talent using new technologies, remote engagement models and smarter, data-driven strategies? The readiness of the TA function to meet these demands is a major driver of success in an unpredictable business environment.

What’s Different: Rapid Change Is Now a Constant

Adaptability is always top of mind for forward-thinking companies as they develop their recruitment strategies. In today’s recruiting landscape, the ability to navigate change is not necessarily a competitive advantage; instead, it is a basic requirement for the post-pandemic business environment. Long-term goals still drive success, but achieving those goals may require rapid shifts in the work needed to move forward, or adjustments to who does the work and how the work gets done. TA teams require access to candidates, quickly and effectively, when and where the need arises, so a strategy that is nimble is the bare minimum.

Takeaway: Make Flexibility a Priority in Your Talent Strategy

The workforce landscape in recent years has revealed how quickly conditions can change — not over a year-to-year time frame, but monthly, and even from one week to the next. Access to a broad array of talent and flexible talent acquisition capabilities are now essential. If you are not yet thinking about flexibility and scalability in your recruitment strategy, now is the time to start.

Are Digital Gaps Holding You Back?

Technology provides more than convenience for recruiters and candidates. It can be the difference between a recruiting program’s success and failure. Without the right technology, organizations struggle to keep up with information overload and stand out in a noisy digital environment. This has become even more evident in the increasing access to AI, generative AI and agentic AI tools developed for the workforce industry.

With a sound digital ecosystem to support them, companies can make smarter decisions and deliver a better candidate experience. Through improved insight into talent supply, widening access to talent pools and virtual agents that free recruiters from the burden of sifting resumes, technology can help organizations meet several long-standing talent acquisition challenges.

AI Tools for Advancing Talent Acquisition

The Story: Companies Often Use Outdated Tech Rather Than the Latest Tools to Drive Results

Organizations grow accustomed to the tools they have used year after year, despite the availability of better technologies that could increase efficiency, improve productivity and yield more reliable data. Working from outdated tech can hinder your ability to make crucial, data-driven decisions. You could lose your competitive edge, reduce access to talent and slow down the process from reviewing resumes to hiring. Investing in tech that improves your business or working with a partner who can provide the up-to-date data you need are critical in today’s ever-shifting workforce landscape.

What’s Different: Data and Analytics Tools Intelligently Draw from All Sources of Talent

In our current business environment, the recruiting strategy that worked six months ago may be completely ineffective today. Without an updated view of where talent may be found, an organization may target the wrong places, offer the wrong pay, use the wrong message or simply recruit for the wrong skills.

The good news is that AI tools can give employers the intelligence to make more informed decisions. In addition, agentic tools can speed up the sourcing, screening and hiring process for the skills your organization needs. Examples of ways AI and workforce tech can enhance processes include skills and candidate matching to specific jobs, market analytics that leverage the latest workforce data and personalizing communication based on candidate history and preferences. In addition, these tools can often work in conjunction with your applicant tracking systems, candidate relationship management (CRM) platforms, and employee-facing sources like internal human resource information systems (HRIS).

Takeaway: Transformative Decisions Come from Reliable Data

Talent technologies such as the Acumen® Intelligent Workforce Platform can help locate and draw from talent pools across disparate systems, while AI tools can collect and organize data to help HR leaders determine the right offer to attract people with the skills to fit the need. More advanced technologies also enable organizations to analyze the data to assess candidate capabilities and predict their performance. Today’s technologies give organizations the power to use data-driven intelligence and remain competitive.

Identifying and Targeting Talent

The Story: Companies Struggle if They Wait for Talent to Come to Them

Finding and matching the right talent to fit the requirements of a role is a primary focus of traditional recruiting. The old post-and-pray model of sending an ad to a job board and hoping for a response will no longer sustain a lasting talent strategy, yet companies continue to rely on that approach to fill roles with mixed results.

What’s Different: AI-Enabled Sourcing Paves a Skills-Based Path to the Right Talent

Today, much of the TA process takes place in a digital environment, and companies cannot assume job seekers with in-demand skills will come to them. Instead, they have to find and connect to people through large volumes of data and various engagement channels. Social media, internal systems and external data pools all represent potential talent sources. More organizations are deploying a skills-based method for matching the right person to the required work. AI tools make sorting skills and highlighting talent that can get the work done a more efficient and accurate process to uncover potential candidates. Technological advances can keep hiring companies ahead of their competitors through trustworthy data and automated resources spanning all facets of recruitment for any given role.

Takeaway: Data and Analytics Tools Underpin a Must-Have Sourcing Capability

Thanks to machine learning and other AI-driven innovations, talent acquisition technologies can cover the vast sea of data across internal systems and social media sources to reveal potential candidates. Treat such capabilities as must-have tools that give humans the power to identify and focus on meaningful talent choices, rather than as convenient replacements for human expertise in sourcing.

Communication and Candidate Care

The Story: Past Methods for Candidate Communication No Longer Effective

Historically, the job seeker experience was characterized by a relationship in which the employer had the upper hand. With more candidates than jobs available, companies could tolerate a less personalized approach to applicants, confident that they could secure needed talent. Candidates often had to navigate a cumbersome application process with little way of knowing their status. There was very little transparency into the process, communication of expected timelines or shared insight of the company culture to determine fit. A more modern approach takes into account the importance of a positive candidate experience.

What’s Different: Candidate Experience and Employer Branding Take Precedent

Job seekers with in-demand skills can consider opportunities from multiple employers or explore other options such as freelance or contractor work. The competition for highly skilled workers is increasing, inspiring businesses to deploy TA technologies that can find, attract and nurture applicants. Using AI, tools such as chat bots can increase access to information, talent marketing strategies can target the best candidates, and resume readers and online schedulers increase efficiency to make sure the process moves at the rapid pace. In addition, company branding assets, such as employee experience videos, encourage candidates to learn more about the company culture and gain insights that could enrich their desire to work with your business.

Takeaway: Trust and Transparency Can Lead to A Successful Candidate Journey to Address Gaps

Today’s candidate is not just looking for work; they are looking for a company they can trust and a workplace where they can thrive. This is why greater transparency into the business; the hiring process and the skills needed for success in each role is critical. By putting the candidate experience at the forefront of recruiting processes, technology can help position the business as more desirable than competitors and provide the company with a solid list of candidates. Ultimately, the quality of the employer-applicant relationship forged by a positive experience can be the difference between a lost candidate and a great employee.

Where Are the Opportunities for Talent Acquisition Transformation?

Determining a long-term recruiting strategy is complex. It involves many different options related to technology, processes and internal and external resources. So, while it is easy to get lost in complexity, through in-depth analysis your recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) partner can help determine which option works for your business goals and when you need to shift to another process.

Don’t focus entirely on one single component as the make-or-break ingredient to success. After all, behind the complexity is a basic process and experience for every stakeholder. An effective recruitment strategy is built on fundamental steps in the journey to a great hire: attract and find the right people, make the right hiring decisions and set new hires up for success with an effective onboarding process.

Screening and Selection

The Story: Ineffective Screening and Interviewing Create Costly Hiring Risks

The cost of a bad hire is estimated at approximately 30% of the employee’s salary or more. Screening, interviewing and selection are important to recruitment performance and have a lasting impact on the business. Unfortunately, companies struggle to develop strategies for identifying the best-fit candidate in an unbiased, consistent and measurable way.

What’s Different: Companies Are Improving Objectivity to Reduce Bad Hires

Advances in technology enable a selection process that is more flexible, unbiased and transparent than ever. AI tools can provide objective evaluations through video media. Bias-free applications can remove identifying indicators from applications to help prevent tainted decisions. Platforms for testing skills and competing in code-camp style events can reveal real-world capabilities for many technical skills.

Complementing the technologies are practices that can make interviews and selection as objective as possible. Consider consistent question lists for all interviewers and an expanded interviewer panel to include a broad cross-section of the organization. Together, the right training and tools can help provide a more accurate predictor of a candidate’s success.

Takeaway: Improvement Depends on a Commitment of People and Technology

Look to recent advances in tactics and technology to move beyond instinct-based hiring decisions and deliver more reliable results. Consistent processes, use of advanced applications for interview scheduling, and delivery and training on interviewing best practices are integral to every TA process. Recruiting is not just hiring; it’s equipping your hiring managers with the knowledge and tools to make fully informed decisions.

Onboarding

The Story: Onboarding Is Often Treated as a Cumbersome Necessity

While much attention is given to attracting and engaging talent, onboarding is frequently overlooked. In fact, only 29% of employees say they feel prepared and supported on day one. From computer, email and phone setup, to coworker introductions, and planning and goal setting, onboarding activities can make a difference in employee success and impact on the organization.

What’s Different: The Day-One Experience Drives Engagement

Companies are getting more intentional about streamlining the onboarding process, particularly in virtual work environments. Onboarding technologies organize the new hire process through a single, automated platform. Reminders can be pushed to everyone involved, according to an established timeline. This process eliminates simple errors (e.g., the scheduling of online interactions before finalizing computer setup), and it ensures important activities are not overlooked (e.g., introductions to managers, coworkers and project team members).

Takeaway: Invest in Onboarding to Cultivate Highly Engaged Employees

Simple, easy and fast processes are expectations of the consumer experience that workers now bring to their employers. Survey data indicates that highly engaged workers are more than twice as likely to feel strongly about their positive onboarding experience than other workers. Deliver an onboarding function that brings together the resources, people and processes to help workers succeed, and the result is a more engaged and productive workforce processes to help workers succeed, and the result is a more engaged and productive workforce.

Expanding RPO Offerings

The Story: More Targeted Recruiting Is Replacing the Standard Talent Funnel

Traditionally, RPO was a one-size-fits-all model that only provided the full hiring funnel without considering varying client needs. While many clients would benefit from that end-to-end solution, some simply require more flexibility. Several RPO providers, such as Allegis Global Solutions, have expanded hiring offerings to better match the needs of the client.

What’s Different: More Tailored Services for Unique Business Hiring Goals

At Allegis Global Solutions, we’ve modernized our delivery models to offer greater flexibility in filling skills gaps required to get work done.

RPO Delivery Models Defined:

• Enterprise RPO provides the full-service, end-to-end approach to hiring that is quite commonly required.
• Select RPO is a customized and modular support to take your talent acquisition to the next level. You can select which one or more of these services your in-house team needs support from our recruitment experts – attraction, sourcing, screening, matching, coordination, marketing, advisory – to gain productivity, hire quality and/or cost savings or other advantages. 
• High Project-Based Recruitment Solutions is targeted, short-term recruitment support to help clients scale or accelerate TA for niche roles, new markets, seasonal volumes, etc.   
• Recruitment On Demand provides flexible, scalable support designed to augment your internal team with experienced TA professionals who can provide immediate access to specialized recruiting expertise for hiring spikes, new initiatives or ongoing workforce needs. 

Takeaway: RPO Providers Are Meeting Clients Where They Are

Talent needs, market demands, competition and many other factors that affect hiring are ever shifting, so it just makes sense to offer flexible, and customizable options that shift with them. Business needs change regularly, so to best help clients find the skills they need to get the results required for success.

Thinking Ahead: Don’t Wait to Take Action

Talent acquisition is a complex journey. Organizations may not have the most current tools or the means to commit to a massive investment in a new technology stack. It may not be possible to allocate funds to rehire the recruiting function that was reduced earlier in the year. These are challenges, but they are not insurmountable. In fact, they are likely to be a part of the landscape for nearly every workforce decision-maker.

Meeting these challenges requires organizations to think differently than they have in the past. Hiring a staff of in-house recruiters or buying and implementing a cutting-edge acquisition technology stack is a commitment that is relatively inflexible. Instead, consider partnerships as a more flexible approach for leveraging the technology and workforce experts to transform TA.

Partnering with a RPO solutions provider like Allegis Global Solutions is one such flexible approach. Scalable solutions offer alternatives to fixed costs, and the RPO provider has the expertise, resources and technology to tackle the most challenging demands.is one such flexible approach. Scalable solutions offer alternatives to fixed costs, and the RPO provider has the expertise, resources and technology to tackle the most challenging demands.

Whether augmenting current in-house resources, taking on the full recruitment operation or delivering on specific aspects of your talent strategy, the right partner can help you execute a practical TA strategy that will support your organization now and in the future.