A good monsoon and implementation of reforms announced in 2016 indicate that 2017 will, in general, be a buoyant year for recruitment in India. While the impact of reforms on different sectors may vary, there seems to be a general consensus that organisations will hire more talent in 2017 than they did in 2016.
Keeping the macro environment in mind, following are the 5 resolutions, we feel, the HR leaders in India must take for a professionally successful new year.
Resolution 1: Ensure talent scalability
An expected increase in the workforce will result in more pressure on the HR function to step up and meet the talent requirements of the organisation in the shortest possible time span.
How to keep the resolution: To keep this resolution, the question that HR needs to answer is whether the internal talent acquisition teams are equipped to scale and de-scale to meet the fluctuating demands. Creating a workforce requirement plan for the year can help you plan in advance while the right staffing partners can help you easily ramp (up or down) manpower in the shortest time possible thereby ensuring minimal productivity loss.
Resolution 2: Ensure access to right talent
Not all talent is right talent. Identifying, attracting and recruiting the right talent at the right time will go a long way in making 2017 a happy year for HR. Organizations often encounter issues such as hard-to-find skills in short supply, geographical challenges, the need to build employer brand attractiveness, and the activities of competitors.
How to keep the resolution: The ability to engineer solutions to meet these challenges comes from access to the right recruitment expertise backed by the latest tools, methodologies, and analytical processes necessary to devise a successful strategy and make key talent recommendations.
Resolution 3: Ensure cost control
Organisations are under a lot of pressure to improve their profitability and shareholder return. There is a need to consolidate costs and HR has an important role to play in this regard by ensuring budget optimisation.
How to keep the resolution: A substantial portion of HR costs go towards employee engagement, business alignment and employer branding initiatives. However, there seems to be a disconnect in the time vs capital invested curve for these initiatives. The primary reason for such a disconnect is management time consumed in activities such as recruitment process. For HR to manage costs it’s important to focus on big ticket items.
Resolution 4: Ensure process efficiency in recruitment
Process efficiency is directly linked to quality, time, and cost that most often manifests through protracted time to hire and limitations of the tools available to recruiters. The net result of this is difficulty in meeting demand or a reliance on additional resourcing personnel. Decentralised recruitment processes result in increased costs and time-to-hire while diminishing the candidate experience and employer brand.
How to keep the resolution: When the ask is to ramp operations in a particular geography for a specific skill set in a short span of time, it is essential that you have access to talent that is ready to deploy. A strong talent pipeline and a robust process enabled by experts can help you keep this resolution.
Resolution 5: Ensure visibility and measurability in recruitment
Recruiting is a continuous pipeline development process that is built through extensive processes, systematic improvements, and measurable accountability. HR generalists have multiple priorities and limited bandwidth to gain visibility on recruitment metrics, talent mapping, supply and demand, and candidate experience.
How to keep the resolution: Data, metrics, and analytics are very important and provide a comprehensive view of the current recruitment processes and systems, highlighting gaps if any. Investment in tools that help HR improve predictability and measurability in recruitment will go a long way in making 2017 a successful year for HR.
yeshab giri
chief commercial officer - staffing & RT professionals
yeshab is responsible for leading the development and expansion of randstad India’s value added staffing services which currently encompass field force, engineering and technology roles.