The war for talent is not going well, with existing strategies failing the allies – clients and contractors. Fortunately, new models are evolving to help connect contractors and clients in closed environments, as Dan Collier, Managing Director of Elevate, explains in this article for ContractorCalculator.
A fifth of all vacancies for professionals and associate professionals in the UK remain persistently unfilled. This astonishing statistic was revealed in the UK Commission for Employment and Skills Survey 2011, one of the largest skills surveys in the world, alongside a wealth of compelling evidence of an increasingly hard-fought war for talent between UK organisations.
The official UK classifications of professionals and associate professionals are dominated by the core contracting disciplines: IT and telecoms professionals and technicians, engineers and engineering technicians, construction professionals, oil and gas and energy workers, financial and accountancy experts, plus marketing, media and management professionals.
Existing recruitment models fail the intense competition for talent
According to the UK Commission for Employment and Skills report, there are simply not enough workers with the right skills, qualifications and experience to fill the talent resourcing requirements of UK organisations. Too many applicants are applying for roles for which they lack the necessary skills, and clients are missing opportunities to hire contractor talent during the brief windows of their availability.
Client organisations are faced with the multiple pressure of intense competition for talent coupled with the drive to recruit quickly and efficiently. The pressure is on clients to innovate so they can hire the limited number of contractors available with the talent they require, whilst weeding out unqualified candidates quickly and efficiently.
Widely used existing models of recruitment, those that see agencies throwing many CVs at a client organisation in the hope that some stick, can no longer deliver the talent clients require. And clients increasingly lack the time and resources to devote to filtering candidates and conducting interviews with contractors who are highly skilled and experienced, but not necessarily skilled or experienced in what the client is seeking. Yet these processes persist because clients are not aware there are fresh models to adopt.
Power has shifted: contractors won’t accept poor processes
Contractors also have demands that are no longer satisfied by existing recruitment models. Those contractors who hold highly sought after skills, qualifications and experience know the balance of power has shifted in their favour. They find existing recruitment models time intensive, inefficient and generally highly unsatisfactory.
Contractors forced to adopt existing contract search models, because they believe there is no alternative, lose control of their personal data as their CVs proliferate across the internet, and are thrown at clients by recruiters. It is still not an unusual occurrence for a contractor to receive a call to interview for an assignment they were unaware they had applied for, despite the regulations in place to prevent their details being put forward.
Widely used existing models of recruitment, those that see agencies throwing many CVs at a client organisation in the hope that some stick, can no longer deliver the talent clients require
Dan Collier, Elevate
Professional networking sites were once hailed as the panacea for mapping clients’ needs onto available talent, directly linking organisational hirers with a pool of experts. But as a result of the law of unintended consequences, many networks have been hijacked to become slaves of process-driven ‘sausage factory’ volume recruitment. This results in highly specialised contractors with the right profile keywords being bombarded with unsolicited recruitment spam.
Winning strategies for the war for talent
The evidence suggests that the war for talent is not going well. Existing strategies are failing both clients and contractors; indeed, they can’t even efficiently and securely connect highly skilled contracting talent with clients with pressing needs. The impact of this market failure manifests itself in many ways, none of them positive. Contractors leave the UK contracting market, or contracting altogether. Clients postpone or even cancel projects, relocating them to labour markets which can deliver the talent they need.
New strategies are required that maximise the prospect of victory for both of the allies, clients and contractors, in this war. To deliver the benefits sought by both groups, these new strategies must deliver:
- Proactive yet non-intrusive talent brokerage: Clients only want details of available talent when they need it for a specific purpose. Contractors only require opportunities when they are seeking them, and are available
- Accurate and consistent skills profiling: Clients require transparent information about the talent they are seeking to hire. Contractors need a strong, consistent framework within which they can display their skills and capabilities
- Security and control of talent data: Clients rightly consider their talent needs as commercially confidential. Contractors want to protect the personal information that forms an intrinsic component of their contracting business profile within a closed environment
- Process and financial efficiencies: Clients must optimise their talent sourcing budgets, focusing organisational resources on putting talent to work. Contractors require less inefficiency and downtime during the recruitment process, a better hit-rate for their applications, greater service quality and an improved experience.
Talent resourcing models which do not rely on the ‘throw enough CVs and some will stick’, ‘sausage factory’ volume approaches already exist. Via models like Elevate, it is now possible to access secure talent brokerage within a closed environment that only connects contractors with accurately and consistently defined skills, qualifications and experiences who are available to clients that have clearly defined talent requirements.
Until developed economies such as the UK can refocus national skills development policies to deliver the education and training that will deliver the skilled workers organisations need, the talent war will continue. But in the interim, contractors and clients can benefit from improved models of talent sourcing. These must offer correctly resourced projects delivered on time and to budget, and which ultimately deliver victory to the contractor and client allies.