Sourcing talent in a global market

With the emergence and growth of new technologies, businesses are constantly looking for ways to incorporate new developments into their business, to stay ahead of the curve, be recognised as an attractive and innovative employer and achieve company goals. This means, more so than ever before, talented professionals with a strong background in IT, digital, online and social media are in high demand.

And while demand for IT professionals is expanding at a rapid pace, employers are struggling to source this talent with very specific skills sets, due to the competitive nature and growing needs of employers in this specialist field.

If you are actively jobseeking or passively waiting for a new role to fall in your lap, this is good news and potentially puts you in the driver’s seat. However, for employers, the task of finding talent is only going to get harder, and with fewer people potentially looking for roles in IT, how can you find the people you need?

In the old days things were far simpler - we put a job ad in the paper or, in more recent times, on an online job board and candidates applied. These days we are turning to social and professional networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to seek out passive jobseekers in our networks. However, we need to look beyond our social networks and connections and take a deep dive into big data if we are to stay ahead in the talent race in the future.

Big data creates incredible opportunities for you to locate talent you would have never found in the past, from anywhere in the world - talent that may not know about you or your vacancy.

Think of big data like an iceberg. There are over 500 million Facebook profiles, 175 million LinkedIn profiles, 500 million Twitter profiles, 250 million Google+ profiles and 1 billion tweets every three days. This is potential talent for your business but, like an iceberg, you can only really see around 20% of the mass. This is the area reached via the tools used by most business such as Google searches, LinkedIn searches, job board database searches or more traditional methods such as referral and alumni programs, or the creation of your own talent databases. Everyone is predominantly searching within that 20% and finding the same people, so it seems like a very shallow talent pool.

But how do you reach the other 80% you and your competitors cannot see, and who cannot see you? The answer is through data mining - something that, until recently, was used solely by IT and talent sourcing experts.

Knowing how to efficiently and effectively use data to help a business meet its financial, company and people goals will increasingly become important, and IT professionals will benefit from this growing trend.

Similarly, IT professionals need to understand the importance of having the right ‘personal data’ that accurately and successfully reflects you, your knowledge, skills and experience. So it’s time to invest in using the right language in your CV and online profiles so that you are easily discovered when employers are searching for talent like you.

This leads me to my next point: it’s not just about how companies find talent that will be important and how people position themselves online; it’s also about the positioning of your employer brand and your employee value proposition, which will make you more visible in the market.

An ‘employer brand’ is based on various intangible factors, including perception, image and identity, and the ability to differentiate between them. In a nutshell, an employer brand represents the image your business projects as a potential employer. If you have a strong employer brand and unique value proposition, then your company is considered a distinctive place to work, with attractive brand values and career prospects. It helps you recruit highly skilled and promising new employees and enhances their loyalty by increasing their identification with your company. It also raises your organisation’s visibility in the job market and makes you stand out from the competition.

In today’s highly competitive job market, employer branding is a crucial tool for attracting and retaining the right kind of talent to make your business successful.

Remember that in the current market, the talent you are looking for has choices, and they have more information available to them about your business than ever before. So the questions you need to ask are: What are the real strengths of your business? What is it that jobseekers within different demographics value about your business? How do you connect with these diverse groups to sell this value? It’s important to be certain of one thing - one size does not fit all for the jobseeker of the future and you will need to tailor your messages individually if you want to make sure you’re building a skilled and diverse community of talent in your business.

Honing all of these skills will be the secret to success to source the best IT talent and can be achieved either through the development of in-house expertise or working with skilled recruitment consultants.

*With over 25 years of experience, Steve Shepherd is one of the leading employment market analysts in Australia and is the group director of recruitment & HR specialists Randstad.