As you know, the Talent Acquisition space has changed rapidly over the past few years. And my organization, Intel, is definitely not exempt from that!
In this post, I’ll overview some of the Recruitment Marketing inspired ways we’re transforming Talent Acquisition at Intel.
I hope that our recent deep dive and re-work of the way we approach Talent Acquisition inspires you to take a critical look at what’s working and what can be improved at your own organization!
Before I break down each of the areas we’re focused on now, however, I wanted to describe a larger paradigm shift that we’ve put into play that has driven these changes.
That paradigm shift is the movement from the recruiting funnel to the infinity loop.
What is the infinity loop?
Our infinity loop concept refers to a change in Talent Acquisition priorities. We now prioritize the candidate experience through the entire life cycle, rather than just through the hiring funnel. Here’s a visualization of what this looks like in action:
This infinity loop operating model allows us to move past simply attracting and keeping up with the volume of applicants who find their way on to our reqs every day, to focusing on the best talent, whether they are internal/external or passive/active. With this model, we can use data to ensure our pipelines are healthy and we no longer lose candidates unnecessarily.
Now that you have an idea of the revised operating model that’s driven these changes, here is an overview of the three main areas we’re focused on within this model to transform our TA function:
1) Pipelines over requisitions.
With our new model, our team is more focused on building and identifying candidates via talent pipelines, rather than through applicants to specific requisitions. Let me explain why we’ve moved in this direction:
Like many multinational companies, Intel is in a pretty awesome place from a TA standpoint: we get way more applicants than we will ever need to satisfy our hiring needs. While that might sound awesome, there is a problem with that – applicants are not always best suited for the specific opportunity they apply for.
You see, if we make hiring choices based solely on an applicant pool for a given req, we are getting the best people “on” the market, vs. the best people “in” the market, (a wonderful phrase our friends at Social Talent coined). In other words, we might be getting the best active talent, but there could be better passive talent that would be willing to move if they were contacted about the role.
To address this, we must proactively look for the best people in the whole market (active and passive) and engage them well ahead of a hiring need ever being in place. This way we can keep them engaged with our brand and ensure their readiness to consider the opportunity, ahead of the business need.
How do we do this exactly? By focusing on building pipelines for different role areas.
For every hire, there are typically a handful of great candidates who didn’t get selected: “the silver medallists”. We must keep these silver medallists engaged and proactively looking for the best next opportunities for them, vs. allowing them to go into our proverbial ATS black hole.
After all, candidates gain new experiences over time. That entry-level person who we thought was great right out of university, but didn’t hire, has gained experience that may be of interest to us five years from now, so it’s important we give them a reason to continue to pay attention to us.
2) Quality over volume.
As a team, the value we provide to the business is no longer limited to the volume of leads, prospects or applicants we bring into our Talent Network. Nor is it limited to ticking off the boxes when it comes to certain processes, like compliance tasks for job reqs in different regions.
Instead, our team is now more focused on building quality relationships with candidates and hiring managers. This is how we define success as a recruiter today in TA at Intel.
To make this new approach possible, we’ve started hiring for a new role: the Talent Coordinator. This role is focused on managing requisition hygiene and compliance regulations so that our recruiters can focus on building relationships with their pipeline.
Recruiters build these relationships by sharing meaningful insights with candidates about what it’s like to work at Intel, how to represent themselves in the interview process. Likewise, they’re focused on building equally meaningful relationships with hiring managers, where they provide consultation on each candidate that may be relevant in their consideration of that person’s fit for a role (like their background or certain market conditions, for instance).
3) Data over gut.
Evolving our focus and priorities, also means we need to evolve the way we measure our work outcomes.
As such, we no longer care about the age of a req, we care about how long the candidate has been in our pipeline and the unique needs of that candidate. For instance, are we engaging them in a way that interests them and prompts them to interact with some form of experience (content/video) that we customize for them?
We no longer care about the sheer volume of candidates, we care about the “movement” of the volume we have through our infinity loop.
Are we converting our leads to prospects, our prospects to applicants and our applicants to offers at a reasonable rate, relative to the unique candidates we engage with? Or, if not, where are they getting “stuck” in the process?
Likewise, in the past we’ve been focused on the satisfaction of the process support we provide to our hiring managers (which has been high!). But the bigger impact we now need to use to measure success is whether the manager believes we’ve provided the optimal slate of candidates to select from, within a timely manner.
Thanks for reading and I hope you’ve found our transformation journey and shifting priorities educational and inspirational!
If you want to get more details on our infinity loop operating model or our evolving Talent Acquisition function you can take a look at my colleague, Allyn Bailey’s, recent blog on LinkedIn.