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In the War for Talent, the Biggest Talent Pool Wins

By Kathy Barton, June 14, 2007

Last year, in 2006, a momentous event occurred - the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup (yeah!). In addition, however, and more to the point, the demand for labor statistically exceeded the supply. The long-predicted labor shortage arrived in fact. The timing and severity of the shortage over the next 50 years is subject to debate, but its existence is not. In the two decades between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. workforce grew by 54%. From 2000 to 2020, it is predicted to grow by only 3%, due primarily to the retiring of the baby boom generation. For those of us in the recruiting and hiring field, this makes a difficult job even more difficult. Given a projected gap of 14 million skilled workers by 2020, it's only going to get harder.

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Take a look at the supply of skilled workers, and it's even more sobering. The U.S. Dept. of Education predicts that 60% of jobs in the 21^st century will require skills possessed by only 20% of the current workforce. The percentage of the U.S. workforce with college degrees rose by 43% between 1980 and 2000 - over the next 20 years it is predicted to only grow by a meager 7%. This means that in the foreseeable future, for every two experienced workers that leave the workforce, only one will enter.

Not worried yet? To quote that great philosopher, Yoda, "You will be." Those who have been working in the scientific and engineering fields (only 5% of U.S. graduates) have been feeling the pain for a while now. The pain is now spreading into healthcare, energy, and finance. Labor analysts predict that the next four years will make the late 1990s look like a walk in the park.

What's a savvy recruiting professional to do? Think of labor like any other scarce resource - the people with the best access to the supply win. It's time to start treating your organization's talent database like the corporate asset that it is. If you don't have one, it's time to create one. Any applicant tracking system will provide a database of the people who have sent you their resumes. There is great scanning technology that can take existing hardcopy resumes and get them into the database. Many of your recruiters probably keep softcopies of the resumes they've received on their hard-drive - get them into a database! Cost is no longer a valid argument - there are very powerful systems available today for a reasonable cost (my current favorite is HRSmart, www.hrsmart.com) and you can get a high end scanner for under $500.00.

If you have an existing candidate database, are you leveraging it properly? We find that an astonishing number of recruiters never even search their internal candidate database for new positions. They simply post the job and look at the new resumes that come in. No wonder candidates roll their eyes when we tell them we will keep their resume "on file" and let them know if we have an appropriate opening! Here you have a ready supply of people who have expressed interest in working for your company - some have even come through your career web site - and you aren't taking advantage of it. The database is hard to use and out of date you say? Funny, we never let the finance department get away with that - or the payroll division, for that matter. Imagine the reaction the first time the CEO misses a paycheck or doesn't get the quarterly financials. We all know the first time would be the last time. It's a question of priority.

This means raising the priority of hiring top talent to the point that standard database processes are applied to the candidate database. For a database to be valuable, it needs to be accurate, easy to use, and up to date. Work with your HR IT people or system administrator to get rid of duplicates. Send a message to everyone in the database, tell them that you have a number of positions that you are hiring for, and ask them to click on a link in the message to update their contact information and resume. Keep track of the messages that kick back as undeliverable - hire a summer intern to use tools such as ZoomInfo and LinkedIn to get a current email for those people. If you can't locate them, tag the candidate as inactive.

Make sure you have a way of identifying your top candidates. These are the people who either turned down a job offer, or who were first or second runner up for a position. These people are clearly qualified and have done well in the interview process at your company in the past. Don't lose track of them! Set a flag in the record, or create a user-defined field that will make sure these records pop up when you have a similar position. These are some of the easiest hires you will ever make.

Now that you have a good base, get creative! How can you encourage people to give you enough information to begin recruiting them? Don't get stuck in the rut that says all candidates have to register, give you 15 required fields, and cut and paste a resume. What top candidate wants to do that? Add a button to your career site that says "Just looking?" Then give them an option to give you a name and email address so that you can send them regular company information and teasers on top jobs. This is called "drip marketing" and is based on the concept of short, compelling, and meaningful communications that give top talent a sense of what it's like to work for your company.

Or, come up with creative contests like Pizza Hut's VP of Pizza campaign. To get that position for three months, the winner wrote the best paragraph on why they should be VP of Pizza. And what did Pizza Hut get? The contact information for tons of people who love their product. Guess whose talent database just got a lot bigger? What can you do to encourage people to give you their contact information, and how can you use the process itself to qualify them? If you are an IT or scientific organization, run a contest and give two free tickets to anywhere in the U.S. (perhaps even a whole vacation package) to the person who comes up with the most innovative way of solving a difficult technical problem. Then recruit everyone that had a good answer. If you are a software company and run an open message board to discuss the product, check out people with the best posts and recruit them. There are any number of ways to get basic information on good people - you just have to think outside the box.

Before the Internet, recruiters made their living off the strength of their Rolodex. In today's shrinking labor force, recruiting depends on the size, quality, and power of your talent database. Make sure that yours is one of the best.