Global{M} Talent Partner, Cynthia Benitez is sharing her tips on ‘How to build a Talent Acquisition Strategy’ and explains how to apply Armin Trost’s framework to your recruitment process.

Building your talent acquisition strategy

Let’s start by defining Talent Acquisition: the process of identifying, assessing and attracting skilled talent to meet organizational needs in the long term. That’s why it is so important to have a strategy in place that will help you drive your business goals.

When building the TA strategy, I like to consider the Armin Trost framework.

This framework consists of defining different scenarios based on two main factors: talent availability and strategic relevance to the business. It is important to also work on the sourcing, employer branding strategy, referrals and working with a specific agency.

It goes like this:

First, you put your talent needs into this matrix, based on the talent availability and strategic relevance for your business. Identify the demand for those profiles (if it’s just one profile, then it’s small demand).

Secondly, you define the scenarios: 

Taking into consideration the scenarios, you define where you will put your effort:

But, before that, you need to keep in mind the following topics: 

1. Identify your company’s values, mission and vision

Your values will be the key factors in your hiring process. You will need to have clear and easy-to-describe values to attract candidates identifying with them. 

You also must take care of explaining your company’s vision and what you do to ensure that candidates understand your “why” and “how”.  

2. Work on your Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Build your Employer Branding Strategy. 

Once you have your values, mission and vision defined, you need to work on what makes your company different from others, why are your employees choosing you every day, and what are you offering to candidates and employees in return for their skills, capabilities and experience they bring to your company. This is something you build in collaboration with everybody in your organization and with candidate feedback. 

The EVP is part of your Employer Branding strategy. You need to think about your EVP message and choose the channels that will help you reach the right people you need for your long-term goals.

3. Work on the basic processes you need to have in place in order to keep the candidate/employee engaged. 

Ask yourself all these questions, to make sure you have the right processes defined in order to attract the people you need for your long-term success.

• Hiring process: How is your hiring process? Are you measuring its success? Do you review your metrics on a regular basis? Are your interviewers trained to give the best experience to the candidates? What are the candidates saying about your process? What are your new employees telling you about their experience?  

• Onboarding process: How is your onboarding process? Are you considering all the information the new employee needs in order to have the best start? Does the person have clear expectations and goals from the beginning?

• Development: Do you have a career path framework in place? How are you recognizing good performance? Do you have a performance management process implemented? Have you shared a compensation framework with your employees? How often do you review your benefits? 

4. Define the skills you currently have in your company and the gaps you will need to fill. 

You can work on a skills or capabilities matrix, which helps you identify the skills that a team has or needs in order to do their job effectively. By creating a skills matrix, your company can easily identify where employees are succeeding and where they need to improve. This will help you define the training and development plan for your current employees and also the needed skills you need in your future employees. 

5. Work on the future organization you need to achieve your business goals. 

After implementing the skills matrix, you will have one of the strategic workforce planning steps achieved. Strategic workforce planning is a proactive approach to anticipate staffing needs and align HR processes to business long-term goals. Criteria to consider when working on this planning include: 

• Employee numbers: identify the right size, in order not to be overstaffed or understaffed. 
• Skillset: Define the skills you currently have in your company and the gaps you will need to fill. 
• Budget: related to the compensation framework. 
• Flexibility: it is important to develop your teams for them to be ready to adapt quickly to market changes. 

With all the above topics in mind, you can start working on the strategy defined at the beginning of this article.