Each day, the Scoutr team is engaging with talent across the country and with hiring managers from companies of all sizes. Based on our experience and from my role as CEO of Scoutr, a talent intelligence company located here in the Triangle, I’d like to offer a new perspective on the challenge many companies are facing finding the talent to build out their teams.

Yesterday’s article in WRAL TechWire titled Finance Execs See Recession Coming But Confident About Own Firms detailed that over 60% of CFOs surveyed expect to see a slowdown by sometime in 2020. Yet many of these executives expect to continue hiring, and are worried about finding and retaining talent. Our experience tells us that regardless of slow growth or a full-blown recession, acquiring and retaining talent will continue to be difficult. The reason: the current hiring methodology.

Many companies have yet to realize that attracting and hiring talent requires a bilateral qualification process, and the current process simply isn’t effective anymore. Currently, companies will post their jobs on over-crowded job boards and social networks and expect candidates to line up at their front door. However, for skilled labor positions in hot industries such as tech, pharma and finance, this is simply not the case. The current process is unilateral, and only the candidates have to qualify to engage in a job search. This has to change!

In order to make a strong match between candidate and company, employers searching for talent need to know who they are culturally and how to use that information to attract highly-qualified, like-minded candidates who will translate into highly productive and engaged employees. Here are some ways employers can do that:

• To attract talent in this “new age”, you have to diagnose if your organization is branding itself, its managers, teams and positions, appropriately. Identify team culture and work style in your organization. Explore what it is about your teams and positions that will attract the best talent.  
• Find out how attractive your organization actually is to potential skilled labor. What if, as an organization, you have to apply to the candidate? How would you want them to see you? Is the way you see yourself actually accurate?
• Pay attention to your candidate journey.  Examine your current processes, including your use of external resources to help with hiring to determine if those processes are efficient and effective. To address talent attraction, acquisition and retention, an organization must identify and restructure on this level. Please understand, talent is interviewing you and assessing your qualifications as an employer, the same as you are qualifying them.

What I can say with total certainty, is that most candidates demand a better process, and want to learn more about managers and teams before they will apply for a position. The companies who can communicate this information effectively will win the talent war. Yet most organizations continue to post jobs, and/or rely on third party recruiters that are focused almost solely on candidate start dates and collecting placement fees.

In this new age, whether there’s a recession or not, take a close look at your processes. Understand that there is a considerable amount of talented people in this country that can be an incredible asset to your company. I will argue that the talent is out there, and with an update in your methodology, you can dramatically increase your quality of hire and decrease your time to hire. This will require a change in behavior, like any transformation worth making.

Scoutr is at the forefront of this change in behavior. For years, we’ve researched the talent acquisition / recruiting industry, speaking to hundreds of hiring managers and thousands of candidates. We work with PhDs in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and seasoned HR professionals and recruiters, and we’ve tested this new methodology repeatedly. There is a new era coming in talent acquisition, which requires a bilateral qualification (company and candidate). This new age will usher in an exciting new way for companies and candidates to qualify each other and engage.

Brandon Stevens is the Founder and CEO of Cary, NC-based Scoutr. Scoutr has been ushering in a new age of talent acquisition with its use of a proprietary deep engagement system. Leveraging a methodology designed by veteran recruiters and organizational psychologists, we combine high-tech algorithms with high-touch discovery sessions to empower your managers with the data they need to make quality hiring decisions with speed and confidence. You can reach Brandon at bstevens@scoutr.team.