There's no doubt today that many of the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are permanent. Over the past few years, the talent market experienced some of the most drastic changes ever across the globe, and it's still continuing to change today. Both employees' and employers' needs and priorities have been shifting to keep up with the new work environment that the pandemic has created. As a result, organizations need to adapt their talent acquisition and retention strategies to meet these needs.
Employers have fallen out of sync with their workforces, and they need to get back on track. To overcome the current talent deficit, company leaders must re-evaluate their current processes and procedures to ensure they are in line with any new needs of their organization and their employees' new mindsets. It's time to implement a new approach to talent acquisition and hiring to bridge the talent gap and avoid turnover.
Identifying Hiring Process Gaps
The first step in improving any process is to identify all challenges that must be overcome. As companies strive to get their workforces to the optimized state they were in pre-pandemic, there are certain components of the hiring process that should be analyzed for improvement opportunities.
These are the harmful situations that companies should be on the lookout for to improve upon:
- An inconsistent or inefficient hiring process
- Stale outreach efforts
- One-sided job descriptions
- A lackluster referral process and unclear communication
- Missed opportunities with far-too-narrow skill and/or experience requirements
If your company's talent acquisition process has any of these inefficient procedures in place, fixing them should be your number one priority.
Building an Optimized Process
After evaluating your talent acquisition process for the inefficiencies mentioned above, you should move onto identifying the new needs of your organization and creating a process to meet them. To determine what's working and what needs to be revamped, you should focus on the following actions:
- Draft a workforce skills analysis
- Set your skill and talent priorities
- Determine which skills you will obtain and which you'll train
- Identify (and enhance) current hiring efforts
- Build a hiring plan with a partner
After completing these steps, your organization will be on the right path to overcoming the talent deficit and improving hiring and retention rates. For more information on how to overcome the talent deficit in this new era of work, download our whitepaper here.
