I recently joined McLean & Company as their first Executive Counselor and I am looking forward to sharing my insight gained from my rewarding, and challenging, career as a senior HR Executive. As McLean & Company’s first Executive Counselor, I am excited about providing a customized, high touchpoint experience for senior HR leaders that have a Counselor membership.
While most of my career has been spent in the hospitality, entertainment, media, and sport industries, I have also worked in technology, retail, and manufacturing. The one constant in these different organizations and industries was that they were all extremely change oriented. The change would be created by any number of things: merger or acquisition; growth initiatives, opening a facility on a new site or in a new country; and technology. HR departments need to take the lead on change management initiatives as ultimately, they are all about the people. And to be effective HR must be both resilient and agile.
Technology changes, hands down, have had the biggest impact over the course of my career. The hours spent pouring over applications and resumes add up to years of my life I will never get back. In my earlier days, whenever I led the opening of a new facility whether it was a store, hotel, or arena – inevitably applications would get lost, applicants would be unreachable by telephone and we would give up calling them, and valuable interview time would be wasted on those with unrealistic salary expectations or availability. And then technology started to change everything.
In McLean & Company’s 2020 HR Trends Report one of the megatrends shaping HR is technology and talent acquisition (TA). Our research found that there is a strong association between those that are highly effective at talent acquisition and overall HR effectiveness and efficiency. Therefore, strengthening HR’s TA effectiveness positively impacts HR overall. TA is also the second most staffed area of HR, which reflects not just the workload, but the impact TA has on HR.
The research also found that HR’s investment in TA technology has doubled over the past year. Leveraging technology to take care of routine tasks can free up time to be spent on other more-strategic initiatives. And while many of us in HR worry that applicants will be put off by having their application communication automated, our research has found that applicants don’t care who they are communicating with as long as the communication is timely and accurate.
Embracing technology and talent acquisition is smart not just for HR but for the business overall. One of the philosophies I liked to ingrain in my HR team was that every applicant is also a potential customer. They may not end up being a successful applicant, but they may buy or recommend our product. How do you ensure a good candidate experience that reflects well on the organization? Have a strong employee value proposition (EVP). Our research shows that an established EVP supports the TA process by clearly communicating the value you are offering to both your current and future employees as well as supporting your company brand online. When HR leverages the TA technology available in-house, talent acquisition is much more effective, yet only 30% of recruiters are doing this. Teaming up with in-house resources such as IT and Marketing to assist with leveraging your in-house technology and communicating your EVP can yield positive results.
View McLean & Company’s 2020 HR Trends Report for more information and to learn about the other megatrends impacting HR.
By Mardi Walker