Through the talent market research reports, I found many of today's corporate recruiters divide the time primarily focused on "hunting" for external talent, or managing the external hiring activities. The title itself has experienced a transformation from staffing, workforce management or talent management to solely recruitment, which may reflect the changing landscape for recruiters due to the job refinement and skill re-alignment. From the competency point of view, yeah, I agree, recruiters become more dedicated, more in-depth and more efficient in terms of service level and response time. Unfortunately, they are also becoming more niche, operational, and narrow-down to hiring scorecard for calculating numbers as well as process compliance. In business downturns, organizations oftentimes must either freeze/limit the external hiring or pay more attentions to their existing talents, which means recruiters are at stake for being potentially downsized. With the current economic situation, actually it's ideal timing to reconsider the role of ourselves and recognize the value in helping and supporting to manage the workforce.
Industry forecasts on retirements, labor shortage, quality of new hires, and lack of future leaders all highlight the need for companies to proactively address current and future talent gaps - in alignment with their short and long-term business strategies. In order to effectively manage the most important asset - talent, it's critical to reach a level of alignment and integration across all processes that forecast, supply and mobilize talent against demand. No matter what kinds of companies you are working for, the talent strategy in meeting the business objective - "having the right people in the right roles with the right information and right skills with right motivation" is always through a 3B model (Buy, Borrow and Build). Recruitment organizations traditionally have taken on limited view of talent management, focusing on "buying" external talent to fill current business needs. This is much more from a supply model to answer what we have now from the market. That's why we are working with headcount planning rather than strategic workforce planning. When other HR team discusses the agenda for "build it or mobilize it", we as recruiters are just not in the table. That's what and where we are now, should we change our view to talent management and expand and integrate our service scope to support it, your choice!
