What Is the War for Talent?

The War for Talent is a phrase indicating the increasing competitiveness to attract and retain the best candidates. While the term was coined in 1997 in a study published by McKinsey, its use in recent years has accelerated.

While the War for Talent is not a war in the literal sense, it conceptually indicates the need for better “weaponry” to compete on the battlefield for talent. As a result, companies need to dramatically improve their processes and tooling in order to continuously compete for candidates in today’s environment.

With workers quitting at the highest rate in decades coupled with the explosion of vacancies, talent teams and leadership are struggling to fill critical roles. Anecdotal stories of candidates coming in with several offers all well above their current compensation level have made the rounds on LinkedIn.

Today, strong compensation packages and flexible work policies are table stakes. Standing out in this environment requires a long term focus on candidate experience and employer branding. Both of which stem from strong process and tactful recruitment marketing.

How Recruiters Are Affected by the War for Talent

Recruiters are fighting the talent war on many fronts. You need to have an effective strategy for fighting the talent war on many fronts (social media channels like LinkedIn and Facebook; job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor; referrals from current employees). This means recruiters need to be creative, innovative, and persistent. Sometimes things don’t work out right away when sourcing, recruiting, and hiring processes change — it may take time to see results.

How To Win the War for Talent

Selling the Vision

The road to hiring the best talent starts with the groundwork set by leadership. Many growth stage founders cling to the interview and hiring process long after they have removed themselves from other day-to-day operations.

While not practical at some point, founders – and all executive leadership – need to set the tone and vision for why a candidate should want a seat on their rocket ship. In a way, leadership needs to be present in every candidate interaction (not literally) by setting the standards and vision presented by their team members over the course of the hiring cycle.

Learn from Sales & Marketing

Sales teams are metric driven and have the marketing strategies to back them. Constantly honing prospect funnels, lead scoring techniques, and processes are all part of the craft for high impact sales strategies. Additionally, top sales teams invest heavily in data, tools, and training. Tools today like – Chatkick Talent CRM and Chatkick’s Interview Insights – offer massive amounts of data, intelligence and reporting functionality to allow you to sharpen your recruiting and hiring process. Hiring managers and talent teams should be doing the same if they want to stay ahead in this War for Talent.

Candidate Experience

In the race to automate nearly every corner of the business world, hiring teams should reflect on how excessive automation may destroy the candidate experience. While we at Chatkick are not shy about espousing the need to automate mundane tasks (e.g. email follow-ups with Chatkick Talent CRM), we strongly believe excessive automation in the interview process through 1-way interviews , such as HireVue or SparkHire, or AI screening tools built into some ATS systems will damage your companies brand substantially over the long haul.

The war for talent is a competitive one, and it’s important that companies understand their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to recruiting.