Your Best Bet: Improving Your Hiring and Talent Acquisition Forever

As jobs evolve to require higher-level skill sets than ever before, companies throughout the world are becoming far more aware of – and concerned by – the increasing difficulty of finding qualified workers to fill them. While the skill shortages affecting certain industries such as nursing and information technology have received broad media coverage over the last decade, far less attention has been given to the fact that companies in ALL industries are beginning to suffer growing skills gaps.

As the global economy continues to become more knowledge and service-based, companies will need more workers with the mission-critical skills that create competitive advantage and drive business growth. The pressure to bridge the ever-widening skills gap, which used to be felt solely by corporate training and development functions has now begun affecting every facet of talent management, with particularly dramatic implications for the recruitment process.

Recognizing that skills shortages will continue to deepen and the right skilling initiatives will become more common, First Advantage Talent Acquisition Solutions partners with its clients to ensure they hire candidates with the skills and abilities to meet current organizational needs and have the potential to adapt as companies change their organizational structures to stay in step with competitive market dynamics.

According to the Aberdeen Group, talent acquisition is one of the top two challenges being faced by businesses today. First Advantage has created a formula to identify, cultivate and track the right talent and ensure business success for their clients.

Identifying talent

Placing the right candidate in the right role affords not only a competitive advantage, but also enables the employee to grow with the business, increasing productivity and retention. First Advantage specializes in understanding clients’ needs to ensure talent acquisition success and fills candidate pipelines with both active and passive candidates that have the right skills at the right time.

Acquiring talent

Once you have a robust pipeline, you have to sort, manage and screen those individuals through the hiring process. Automating that process allows recruiters and HR teams to focus their time and energy where they can have the most strategic impact, leaving the tactics to technology. First Advantage automates and integrates all the functions of candidate screening, efficiently managing the candidate pool against open requisitions and with minimum recruiter intervention.

Tracking talent

It is critical to create a profile for success in a job role or function by assessing the traits and skills of a company’s best performers. First Advantage is able to collect and analyze data to create benchmarks for new employees joining an organization, as well as for those employees a client hopes to promote. Gaining insights into your hiring cycles and ideal candidate profiles enables clients to proactively manage their talent pipeline. Having a system and a process for understanding your talent flow allows companies to create a talent plan and significantly minimize the cost of vacancies and turnover.
It has never been easy to identify and successfully recruit employees with the skill sets and attitudes that match both the business needs and the organizational culture. As market forces turn ordinary recruitment challenges into a high-stakes business wager, the implementation of innovative candidate assessment solutions and other recruitment best practices can help companies both mitigate the most intense pressures of the growing skills gap and make the recruitment and hiring process far less of a gamble.

Taking a non-strategic view of recruitment puts companies at risk of sacrificing quality of hire for quantity or speed. Certainly, the market’s current use of rapidity as a success metric indicates that companies may already be heading down that road. Getting an open position filled as quickly as possible is important, but not nearly as critical as getting a positioned filled with a candidate possessing the right skills for the needs of the business.

Partnering with clients to provide “smart-sourcing” solutions across the employment continuum is First Advantage’s answer to managing employment risks and addressing today’s most critical business issue: talent. Further, First Advantage customizes the mix of talent acquisition management services and solutions to deliver only what clients actually need, creating a unique talent acquisition strategy for each client and adding exponential business value to their company.

For more information about First Advantage Talent Acquisition Solutions, please visit http://www.fadv.com/EmployerServices/index.html.