The Mindset to Create a Scalable Talent Acquisition Program To Attract and Retain Top Talent

At SecureVision, we help our clients with their talent acquisition strategies and improve their talent acquisition functions to produce great outcomes. This blog post explores how getting serious about your talent acquisition program will help you attract and retain top talent - something that is critical to scale.

The majority of our customers, a majority of growth-stage organizations in general, are in a very reactive place when it comes to talent acquisition. We see companies invest a ton of resources into optimizing their revenue functions, product functions, engineering functions, etc, and they'll get to the point where they've reached this critical moment of scale where they need to hire dozens, if not hundreds of people. But then they realize that their talent acquisition program isn’t really built out to a system that works at scale.

What are some of the things that companies can do to create a talent acquisition and hiring function that will serve them well at scale to take advantage of the amazing growth opportunities that are currently on the market?

Talent Acquisition Philosophy

Many companies are facing the challenges of: How do we scale? How do we scale effectively? How do we scale quickly? Let’s start with the required philosophy that a company needs to implement in regards to talent acquisition and their culture overall. It might sound simple, but the philosophy is this: a commitment to talent acquisition functions.

Simply offering great salaries and being remote does not cut it. Almost every other company is now offering that; what makes you different? An organization committed to talent acquisition functions looks at it holistically. They always want to improve the talent acquisition function to make sure they’re offering a great candidate experience. So, on top of and in addition to great salaries and offering remote, they are looking at things like the employee on-boarding experience, employee experience in general, how to become and maintain a people-first culture, etc.

Understanding the Data

In order to understand the aforementioned tactics and how to optimize for them, it is all about looking at the data. Critical decision-making data must be found by looking at the market, looking at benchmarks, looking at your space, and looking at internal data, to gain an understanding of what a relevant package is in terms of both salary and culture. What are candidates targeting? What do candidates need? Building a culture that infuses your values is not easy. And again, it starts with a commitment to the talent acquisition function and a commitment to leveraging your data.

When trying to build a culture, a company, and a talent acquisition program that will help attract and retain top talent, some of the data you will need to collect and review is from: the interview process, employee surveys, simple internet searches to see salary benchmarks, historical data from your prior interview processes, data that from an applicant tracking system, and talking to influencers or specialists in your market who can guide you and share Insights from the market.

Just remember that if you do an employee survey, and ask everybody what they think, be sure to actually implement some of those changes. If you don't implement the majority of what they asked for, then everybody might throw up their hands and ask, “why are we doing this?”

Top Loss Reasons

Another critical piece of data is top loss reasons. On a per roll basis, department basis, and a company wide basis, understanding why candidates are dropping out of the process is critical. This data should inform the strategic direction of the employment package, professional development, promotion paths, etc. As long as companies are looking into top loss reasons, and taking actionable steps to eliminate the top reasons candidates are dropping out, they should ultimately end up in a decent place.

To summarize and simplify, creating a talent acquisition function that can scale: step one is to collect data and step two is to take action on it.

Companies are so focused on optimizing toward revenue, engineering, and product functions, they tend to not optimize their talent acquisition function. Ultimately this is what's required to get great outcomes from talent acquisition and have great hiring, retention, on-boarding, and experiences for people considering your team.

At SecureVision, we're really big on creating a people first culture. That's something that has proven itself to us over the past couple of years to be the optimal way to do business. It's not only aligned with our values, it's also just incredibly effective for talent acquisition and retention.

Every time a company does the right thing, they reap the benefits. They're getting great new team members and are forming these amazing teams so they can innovate and produce great outcomes for their customers.

Continuous Improvement

The most successful companies see talent acquisition as something that they need to keep improving each day, each month, and each year. They never stop, they are always looking at data, analyzing that data, and ultimately using the data to make business improvement decisions.

They have this mindset where they are always thinking about what else they can do and are always making changes and improvements on multiple fronts. The spirit of continuous improvement has been infused into their talent acquisition function. It's not just about raising salaries, maybe in a certain area, it's not just about opening it up to remote or offering the remote option, it's about having a good careers page, it's about having the data and collecting the proper data so that you can keep on improving.

A huge, dramatic change all at once isn't always the answer either. There is a lot of pressure to come up with something like that. However, it's a lot of smaller, incremental improvements and incremental changes that are being made that are leading to the most dramatic results. This is also part of having the right philosophy, an understanding that small incremental changes can lead to a massive change.

Talent Acquisition Impacts Everything

Talent acquisition impacts every function in every department. When you have a people-first culture, when you're investing in talent acquisition, good things tend to happen with your team.

The reality is that if you get talent acquisition right, you can ensure that you have the best people working every function across the board for your business, which is ultimately going to have an exponential effect on where your company ends up. We find it to be an interesting thing that a lot of very experienced, smart people miss this when they're scaling a company.

How SecureVision Can Help

If your company needs help scaling your talent acquisition function, please reach out to us for a conversation! We have worked with and helped over 140+ companies with finding and retaining the best talent and also implementing the right changes in the organization to create a talent acquisition that scales.