1. Managing Talent: The strategic approach to your success
A practical guide to finding the best people for your business

3. Introduction 4
Your brand: would you work for your organisation? 5
Mobile technology: it’s where it’s at! 6
Data mining: how to unearth the gold 7
Be social and play games to find talent - case studies 8
Sourcing talent: if you use social media, you must mean business 9
The future role of recruiters 10
The interview process: Have you reviewed yours lately? 11
Future trends: where is it all going? 12
Conclusion 13
Contents
This article has been authored by Peter Cosgrove, Director at Cpl plc and current
President of the National Recruitment Federation. Peter has 20 years business
experience. He is regularly called up on by the media to comment on a number of topics,
namely recruitment talent and careers.
Email: peter.cosgrove@cpl.ie | Twitter@petercosgrove | Phone: +353 (0) 87 620 0836
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4. Introduction
According to McKinsey’s War for Talent survey, It has never
been more challenging to identify the best talent. There’s
an ever increasing need for technical skills, a move to non–
permanent jobs and a desire among employees to work
from home. So with all these changes, how are CEOs and
recruiters managing future talent? Where do they find the
best people, and how do they do it?
This paper will help you understand what finding the best
people is only going to get more difficult, how the jobs will
eventually find the talent and not the other way. There are
eight topics in all with three bullet points at the end of each
topic for those who want to read an executive version of the
article.
What has been the most under-managed corporate asset of
the past two decades?
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5. Even with the dawn of the Internet, there was a time when your
website was your shop window; you could highlight positive
messages such as “we’re socially responsible, carbon-neutral,
great employers etc.” Those days are over.
Many employers still don’t get this. In simple terms, you don’t want
to be the guy who walks into a bar telling everyone you’re cool. You
want to be the guy who walks into a bar having everyone saying that
you’re cool.Your real employment brand is walking out your door
every day and interacting with their friends more than ever before,
posting messages on Facebook, tweeting and possibly using newer
sites like glassdoor.com to complain about you.The difference now
is that the conversation is happening whether you engage or not, so
you need to know what is being said about you.
All the challenges in finding and recruiting the best people are
massively wrapped up in how people see you. It’s not much use if
you can identify the top 100 best people for your company if 99 of
them don’t want to join you.
So what do potential recruits think of your brand? It’s often not what
you think. Do you ask new employees why they joined? Do you
carry out regular pulse surveys? Do you know how many referrals
your employees are giving you?
If employees like your brand, they will tell others.
Referred candidates have one of the highest retention rates in
organisations. That said; referral schemes tend not to work in most
companies because they’re restricted to a period of time. Also,
people may not want to have a friend working in their company,
they may not know exactly what their friends do or if they’re any
good at their job.
One of the leaders in referrals is Arie Ball from Sodexho who has
presented globally on this topic. She poses the following question:
“Ask yourself why your people are not finding the best talent for
you?” If you can answer that, you’re halfway there.
How do you become a great company to work for?
The answer is simple but not simplistic; be a great company.
That means living and breathing the brand values and constantly
monitoring and investing in your brand image. It starts with the
CEO; if he or she does not impress on everyone the importance of
the people they have and the type of talent they wish to hire, the rest
of the organisation won’t either.
›› Start with knowledge. Do you know what your brand says to potential recruits?
›› What proportion of your employees would be happy to walk around with the company logo on their belongings?
›› Remember that younger generations will be your future leaders.What are they saying and sharing about your
brand?
Top tips/things to consider
Your brand: Would you work
for your organisation?
McDonald’s bites off more than it can chew
The new online channels make it easy for people to comment publically on
your brand, whether you like it or not. Some companies have tried to take the
social initiative, with unhappy results. McDonald’s wanted people to tweet their
favourite experiences about McDonald’s, using #McDStories, but the dear
customers quickly hijacked the great marketing campaign with comments such
as ‘Every time I enter a McDonald’s a little piece of me dies’. Ironically, there
was so much commentary about this campaign (dubbed #McFail) that many say
it actually succeeded, given that most people know what they’re getting when
they go to McDonald’s.
20 years ago or so, it was relatively easy to manage a company’s
brand. It was simply a case of what you told the marketplace.
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6. Top tips/things to consider
Sometime in 2014, mobile Internet traffic will overtake desktop Internet traffic. Quite simply, mobile is where it’s at. Of course, it’s important to
understand what we mean by mobile. Some people still picture a guy sitting on a train with his mobile phone; this is only a part of it. Mobile also
means people surfing the web at home on a tablet device. You need to bear this in mind when thinking about how people will search for jobs.
The figures above speak for themselves, but businesses are still
very slow to adapt to mobile. Why do so many companies not yet
have a mobile website? If 50% of job viewing is carried out on a
mobile device, you need to ensure that people can see what they
need to see, without having to use their thumb and finger to enlarge
the screen.
If you want to hire the best people, you must make it easy for
them to apply.
Recruiters need to work closely with companies to ensure that the
brand experience on mobile does not turn people off. They need to
understand the analytics behind recruitment. Amazon.com is able
to attribute drops in revenue to their website opening milliseconds
slower, so expect the audience to leave your website if it doesn’t
load quickly enough or isn’t user-friendly.
There is also a wow effect with mobile and the apps that come
with it.
For example, Layar is an augmented reality app. As you walk down
a street, it identifies which companies have jobs along the way.
Also, the likes of a QR (Quick Reader) code can help bring your
marketing collateral to life. When someone reads your brochure,
they can scan a QR code which brings them to a webpage about
job opportunities, among other things.
There are many other tools out there. For instance, there’s one
that can project 3D images of you by taking your photo and that
of a particular product, and putting them together. Think about the
cool things you could do with potential candidates. Once again, this
requires recruiting and marketing working together.
The data on mobile usage is staggering:
• 70% of Facebook updates
• 80% of twitter updates
• 30% of Google searches
• 75% of emails opened are on mobiles
• Over 40% of people use their mobile
phone on the toilet
• More people in the world have a mobile
phone than a toothbrush
If you take nothing else from this article, find out if your company has a mobile strategy, what it involves, and how it can benefit your
recruitment brand.
›› What is your mobile strategy and has it been considered from the perspective of attracting talent?
›› How easy is it for people to apply for your jobs on a mobile device? Is your website optimised for mobile users?
›› What is your target audience browsing and watching on mobile and at what time?
Mobile technology: It’s where it’s at!
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7. Top tips/things to consider
Predictive analysis
As Danish physicist Niels Bohr noted, “Prediction is very difficult,
especially about the future”. Using predictive analytics however, we
can monitor the behaviour of candidates and tell in advance when
a candidate is ready to change job. There are many analytics tools
that can now predict, with about 80% accuracy, when a candidate is
ready to move, which can be very useful to know.
Social footprint
On top of this, there is now what is called ‘people aggregators’
who can gather together your entire online social footprint so as
to get a more accurate view of you. They link your profiles on sites
like LinkedIn, twitter and Facebook with your company bio, press
releases, articles you may have written etc. to produce a ‘social CV’
of you as a candidate. Three of the main players to look out for are
DICE, Talentbin and 3sourcing.
Companies are investing heavily in the processing of such data,
not only to source good talent, but to find out which candidate is the
best fit. Also, as face recognition and profiling software improves,
it will eventually be possible to know all you need to know about a
candidate without ever speaking to them. Taking it one step further,
in the future, technology will be able to match candidates with your
company before you even know you need them.
So lots of data, yes, but we must be careful
how we use it.
That said, whatever data is produced will end up being processed
by humans and humans are not very reliable. For instance,
behavioural studies link the chance of a convict getting parole to
the length of time since the judge has eaten. We are also 20% more
likely to react positively to someone if we’re holding something
warm like a cup of tea.
No matter how advanced technology becomes, we need to use
it intelligently and not rush to conclusions. A good online profile
does not necessarily equate to a good offline employee. Some of
the most highly sought after people in Silicon Valley at present are
behavioural scientists, hired to interpret data.
Data mining: How to unearth the gold
›› Predictive analytics tools will be able to help identify future candidates for your organisation as well as identify
employees in your own organisation who may be looking to move elsewhere.
›› Candidate data is everywhere. It needs however to be combined with humans at some stage. You will never hire
someone you don’t like regardless of the data.
›› Understand the power of data algorithms to help you source candidates and identify star candidates.
Sorry, chaps, there’s no news today
A British journalist tells of how, when he joined the BBC in 1930, there was
no regular news bulletin. In his first week, he arrived at the studio to watch a
scheduled bulletin being broadcast. The presenter sat at the microphone and,
when the time signal had finished, announced with great solemnity:
Information overload
It’s a long time since the BBC had ‘no news’ to share with us. Nowadays, we are overloaded with information. With over 250 million
profiles on LinkedIn alone, we probably have too much data, so the question becomes: how do we use it? All types of businesses are
now using new sources of information to help make better decisions. Recruitment is no different. A word of caution though, computer
analysis is subject to ‘GIGO’ (garbage in, garbage out), so you need to be careful where you source the data and how you process it.
“ This is the
BBC Home Service
from London.
It is one o’clock.
There is no news.
”
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8. Be social and play games to find talent
Hard Rock Café Firenze fills all positions
using Facebook alone
The Hard Rock Café in Florence needed to hire 120 staff for its new store
opening. They recognised that their consumers and candidates were often the
same person, so they launched a Facebook campaign that allowed candidates
to submit applications via Facebook.
They also ran Facebook ads targeting people around Florence who showed
an interest (liked) rock and roll bands. The page grew to over 6,000 in 4 days
(bearing in mind that some companies take years to reach 5,000). The Hard
Rock team also responded to applicant questions within Facebook. The
campaign led to 4,000 applicants and all 120 were hired through the app. It
was not just incredibly quick, it was very cost effective. Also, because they
targeted candidates who were passionate about the Hard Rock brand, they
had a 95% offer success rate.
Find talent in the book section!
One recruiter who was hunting for actuaries was finding it very difficult to
source any available candidates so he thought about where an actuary might
be found. He logged onto amazon.com to find the most popular book on
actuarial matters. He then targeted those people who had rated or commented
on the book in the comments section below – clearly they were all going to be
actuaries – certainly a left field approach.
RMS engages in smart thinking
RMS, an insurance company, bought into a game called The Plague (a game
about infecting the world) as it recognised that many of the decisions that had
to be made in this game were similar to calculations a risk analyst might make.
So, rather than go to a university campus with a corporate stand, they set up
the game and a leader board, and checked which graduates scored highest.
It proved a highly engaging way of identifying suitable candidates.
UPS did the same with a road-trip challenge
They set up a community where people could win $2,000 in a game; then, when
it came to their busy recruitment season, they posted job messages to this
community and filled 900 jobs through this method alone. The total advertising
spend was only $2,000.
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9. Many argue that sourcing talent will never be easy again. Birth
rates in the developed world are falling, candidate mobility is rising,
technology is evolving at a rapid rate and fewer jobseekers see
themselves in a career for life. So how have the traditional channels
responded and what new ones are emerging?
Job boards - useful, but not when you’re looking for
scarce talent
The biggest challenge with job boards or your own career site is
that you’re confined to applicants who are actively looking. Also,
your job has to stand out among thousands of others. Most line
managers when asked to review their own jobs online are horrified
with the content and would not apply themselves!
As companies are swamped with more data than ever, responding
to every applicant can be very time consuming and many don’t see
how not responding to applications can impact negatively on their
brand. Job boards can be useful when the skillset is plentiful but not
when you’re looking for scarce talent.
LinkedIn - transforming the way candidates are found
All the talk now is about social media and a sourcing strategy
that targets the best talent. The basic premise is that only 20%
of talented people are actively looking at any time. That said, the
other 80%, although passive, will engage with an opportunity if it is
presented and packaged in the right way.
There are now over 250 million profiles on LinkedIn and
that number keeps growing
The basic premise is that everyone is a candidate; it just depends
on the opportunity. It enables recruiters to search for hard-to-find
skillsets and target potential recruits in specific companies more
easily than before.
Jobseekers are spending more time adorning their profiles,
adding recommendations and linking to their blog or any recent
presentations they may have given. Of course, you need to be
careful; many candidates are passive for a reason; they are
not looking for a job so you could spend a lot of time talking to
candidates who are not interested.
Facebook - if the candidates you want are on it, then
that’s where you need to be
Every company is trying to get followers on Facebook, but many still
do not understand how to make the most of them. Maersk, an oil
company that specialises in drilling, has one of the best Facebook
pages with over 30,000 ‘likes’ which proves you don’t need to be
a ‘cool’ brand; you just need to know how to engage with your
audience.
Many people see Facebook as a fun site and not about jobs and
careers. It’s only a matter of time however before it becomes a key
way of finding people, simply because there are so many people on
it. The reality is, if the candidates you want are on Facebook, then
that’s where you need to be.
Precise targeting – how to find that needle in the
haystack
The changes in how we target candidates have led to a more
scientific approach to sourcing. Because people have a growing
digital footprint, it’s getting easier to learn more about them.
Complicated search strings (called ‘Boolean’) can be used in
Google to unearth candidates. Companies such as Social Talent
and trainers like Craig Fisher and Stacy Zapar share their tips online
for free to help find that needle in the haystack; recruiters are part
recruiter, part data scientist.
In the case of hard-to-fill vacancies, it’s usually because the required
skillset is in high demand. In many cases, suitable candidates do
not need to visit job boards; they get approached (headhunted)
instead. As a recruiter therefore, you need to be fishing where the
candidates are swimming.
Talent communities – how to convert followers into
employees
While it’s great to generate followers and advocates online, the
challenge is how to take this audience offline and engage with them
one to one. Companies are investing heavily in twitter followers and
Facebook likes, but the reality is you need to translate this online
community into offline employees and/or customers.
Clear objectives – measure what you manage
Social media is just another channel for communication, albeit a
very useful one. You need a clear goal however; there are millions
of inactive pages and blogs that sit like abandoned ships in the
middle of the ocean. Those who set them up did not really know
why they were doing it.
As with anything in your business, you need to measure what you
manage; social media and social sourcing are no different. Are your
recruiters finding and hiring more candidates using social tools?
Is it a good use of their time? If you can answer these questions,
then you are doing better than most companies. If you need more
support on this, Bill Boorman and Andy Headworth are both experts
in the area.
Sourcing talent: If you use social
media, you must mean business
Top tips/things to consider
›› Ensure the ownership of the job specification lies ultimately with the line manager, not HR, as they are closest to it.
›› Don’t delay in establishing a social media recruitment strategy. Don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it.
Do it because it’s where so many people can be found and you need to communicate with them.
›› What games could you create that would engage and build a community to help you recruit in the future?
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10. Top tips/things to consider
Companies need their recruiters to be salespeople as the war
for talent increases. They also need to ensure that recruiters
understand the business so they will be more passionate about the
company.
Key things that a corporate recruiter
needs to consider:
• Sell the opportunity: How exciting are the jobs you advertise? Do
you highlight the fact that new jobs have arisen due to growth? Do
you use more than just a job specification? Do you commission
a short film or corporate video? Do you track which jobs on your
careers webpage get the most hits?
• Measure the right thing: What is your most important metric? If it’s
time to hire, consider why. If you want to target people for hiring
quickly, you may be promoting the wrong behaviour.
• Stay in touch with former staff: Do you track star candidates who
have left? Many great employees return to a company when
they find that the grass is not greener elsewhere. It is up to you
however to stay in touch and make this happen.
• Track the data: Do you keep track of the information on your career
site (what’s popular, what’s not) and then adapt it accordingly? Are
your recruiters savvy enough about Google Analytics and page
rankings?
• Facilitate internal mobility: How often have you seen an employee
shine when they switch roles? It’s considered a hot potato in many
organisations because no manager wants to lose his best people,
but it may be the right thing for the company overall.
• Tap into talent communities: Are you identifying future hires and
building talent pipelines and skill networks?
Recruitment Agencies
Job boards, LinkedIn and corporate recruiters have all been
highlighted as reasons for the death of the recruitment agent. But,
to adapt Mark Twain’s remark, rumours of the recruitment agency’s
death have been greatly exaggerated. The industry is alive and
well, thriving in fact and there are very good reasons for this:
• Talent is not a commodity: Unlike other things you can procure,
talent has a voice and an influence and it is complex, like any
human individual. The services of recruitment agencies involve
much more than providing CVs. If that’s all an agency does, it will
struggle to survive.
• Social media is not a replacement: Tools such as LinkedIn and
job boards, while very useful, will never completely replace
recruitment agencies; they only give you a list of candidates; you
cannot identify the right candidate by this means alone.
• Good business sense: Commercially, it will always make sense for
companies to use recruitment agencies. Their service is generally
free until you hire (no hourly charges like many professional
services). If you can find the talent quicker and better yourself,
fine, but is it really the best use of your time?
• Candidate’s perspective: From a candidate’s point of view, they
may not want to apply directly to the competition; they may prefer
a third party to contact them on your behalf.
Recruitment agencies will need to specialise to a greater degree,
if they’re to continue adding value. They will need to demonstrate
their expertise and promote themselves to clients and candidates
as the place to go. As Greg Savage, a prominent industry expert,
often says “whoever owns the talent, will own the market”.
The future role of recruiters
›› Do your recruiters understand the business and can they sell opportunities with enthusiasm and passion?
›› Build the relationship with recruitment agencies. The best companies work very effectively with them,
they partner with them.
›› How much time do you spend identifying talent internally and asking staff for ideas as opposed to looking at the
external market?
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11. Top tips/things to consider
People don’t always act as you expect them to act, so recruiting
and selecting people is never easy. The show ‘Who Wants to Be
a Millionaire’ follows the same format in Russia; you can ask the
audience if you’re stuck. But the Russian audience is more likely to
give you the wrong answer. So not only are people irrational, they
are irrational in different ways, depending on culture and a variety
of other factors.
Although we know this, we still base most of our decisions on an
interview, often by an untrained interviewer. The head of HR for
Google, Laszlo Bock, recently conceded that all their brainteaser
interview questions had been a waste of time and had not improved
their interview results one iota.
Before you try anything new, get the interview process right.
One old-school technique which has fallen away is the reference.
It’s not because companies don’t give references, they do, but
anyone doing a proper check would never rely solely on a formal
reference.
Think of how much more relevant information you could get
from a 30 minute reference than a 30 minute interview
The challenge lies in the psychology of hiring. When you’ve gone
through the entire process, the last thing you generally do is look
for a reference. If a bad reference is given at this stage, you have
to start the whole process all over again, so most references, if
average to poor, are ignored, as the pressure of making the hire
is too great.
One fact that will not change is if the hiring manager does not
like the person you put in front of them, they won’t hire them.
No one hires someone they have to work with if they don’t like them.
How many processes have gone through two or three rounds of
interviewing before the line manager even gets to see the person?
The growth in video interviewing and shorter interviews will help get
this likability factor out of the way and speed up interview rejection
and acceptance.
A lot of work has also been done into initial CV discrimination.
Bias enters at every stage of the process. Think how we are often
unimpressed with a CV, only to change our mind when we meet the
person, or vice versa! Look at how many organisations still recruit
by ensuring all hires have a college degree despite the fact that
often times senior executives in the firm do not have a degree.
Before you try anything new,
get the interview process right.
The interview process: Have you re-
viewed yours lately?
›› How many of your hires are still based purely on interview and how many people do you reject at the reference stage?
›› How much time is spent before the ultimate hiring manager gets to meet the shortlisted candidates?
›› What do you screen out at the CV stage? For example, is a college degree still critical for every role?
Seeing things in black and white
Two leading economists, Bertrand and Mullainathan, ran an
experiment with 5,000 CVs to measure racial discrimination
in the labour market, entitled ‘Are Emily and Greg more
employable than Lakisha and Jamal?’ They responded with
fictitious resumés to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago
newspapers. Each resumé was assigned either a very African-
American or very White-sounding name, but nothing else
was different. White names received 50% more callbacks for
interviews.
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12. Top tips/things to consider
We are seeing an irreversible trend
from permanent workforces to more
temporary and contracted positions.
It has been forecast that up to 40% of the global
workforce could be freelancers by 2020.
Much of the outsourcing taking place is around flexible or
contingent talent, a fact which companies will need to bear in
mind, as more of their workforce moves to non-permanent roles.
This trend could lead to the outsourcing of recruitment functions
which can help drive down recruitment costs. A word of warning
though; while it’s good to get value for money, do you really
want cost to be the most important factor in the acquisition and
negotiation of your number one asset?
Companies are hiring talent from a global network on the
understanding that they may never meet their employees
face to face.
Many of these trends are coming about because of advances in
technology. Sites such as Elance and oDesk enable freelancers
to make money from their talents, by connecting them online with
companies. In this way, technology is making it simpler to link
employers with ‘employees’. This will fundamentally shift the way
we do work.
Bring the work to the worker instead of the worker to
the work.
Currently, many workers cannot enter the workforce because they
have to stay at home due to childcare commitments, a long term
disability, or because they’ve been out of work for a long time and
are perceived as unsuitable. In circumstances however where the
only requirement is the completion of a particular task within a given
timeframe, many people who are currently not working could find a
regular earnings stream. Such new ways of working will make more
talent available to companies; they just need to be open to it.
Also, for the first time, we are seeing firms ‘acqui-hiring’, i.e.
acquiring other firms for the talent. This was something companies
regularly did to buy intellectual property, contracts, etc. but now,
with the challenge of finding the best people so difficult, it has
become increasingly prevalent and will only increase in the future.
Future trends: Where is it all going?
The power of the idea has not died.
Companies like Attlassian in Australia understand the benefit of encouraging
their employees to be creative. Every quarter, they give employees the chance
to work on anything that relates to the company’s products. The likes of Google
and Facebook hold regular ‘hackathons’. But it’s not just IT firms that understand
the importance of creativity. Volkswagen in Germany sought to turn off senior
executives’ smartphones (for email) before 7am and after 7pm because they
were paid to be creative and come up with solutions but had no time or space to
think because they were constantly busy and distracted by the torrent of emails.
›› The shift to non-permanent workers is happening at a rapid pace; how are you adapting?
›› Understand that your talent no longer needs to work in an office or even be in the same country, so look at how you
can access global talent, not just local talent.
›› If people are your most important asset, expect others to know this and more aggressively target them.
12

13. 1. Understand what your brand says. There’s little point
identifying the top 100 people for your company if 99 of them
don’t want to join you. What matters is not what you say,
but what others say about you. Ask yourself if you would
be inspired to join your own company or if you would refer
others to work there.
2. Appreciate the importance of social media in attracting future
talent. Be clear on what you want to achieve and dedicate
resources to it, only then will it become more powerful.
3. Ensure your recruiters are part data scientists and part sales
people; they need to understand how to find candidates amid
the vast amount of data, but they also need to be able to sell
them the opportunity.
4. Make sure you have a mobile optimised website that makes
it easy for candidates to apply – one in two applicants will be
looking for your jobs on a mobile device within 12 months.
5. If your people are your most important asset, ask yourself
how many people are financially rewarded to manage it?
6. Partner with a recruitment agency. Many firms do not
have problems finding the best people because they have
excellent relationships with agencies who know the best
talent out there, including yours!
7. Look at changing your assessment process to rely less
on interview and take the reference check much more into
account. Also ensure that the line managers see candidates
at the start of the process, as this will save a lot of time.
8. Understand the importance of creativity and new ideas.
These will differentiate your company from the competition.
Are you clear on how you are getting the best out of your
current staff?
9. If your talent is the number one reason you will succeed,
re-think the role of procurement that says you must get the
lowest possible price from all recruitment partners. Talent is
not a commodity but there is a right price.
10. Look at the future of work; your employees are less likely to
be permanent, less likely to be in the office and even less
likely to be in the same country. Are you ready to adapt to
such changes?
Here is a summary of the top ten things you should consider if you are serious
about finding the best people:
Conclusion
The most complex thing in the universe is the human brain.
Hiring people will always be difficult, but they will ultimately make or
break your company.
The world of recruitment has changed and will continue to change.
We all need to keep pace with the latest developments, in order to recruit
the best people for the job.
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14. Cpl Resources plc. is a leading provider of recruitment,
staffing and outsourcing services. We provide these services
to local customers and multinationals through a network of
32 offices in Canada, Czech Republic, England, Hungary,
Ireland, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and Tunisia. Our business
is based on matching the capabilities of our candidates and
employees with the needs of our clients to get work done.
We achieve this by:
• Placing people in permanent jobs with our clients
• Staffing client projects with our temporary employees and
contractors
• Employing staff in our service centres to support our
international client base.
In addition to providing these services to customers in Ireland,
we serve the European needs of global corporations in
Technology, Finance Accounting, Science Engineering,
Sales Marketing, International Customer Service and
Healthcare.
Our Business
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Peter Cosgrove, Director Cpl, 01 614 6000

16. www.cpl.ie