Growing pains for HR leaders with changing economic climate, signalling winds of change to recruit, train and retain potential talent within companies. The challenges of HR professionals are not just limited to recruiting, there are number of others especially when the economy experiences boom, these include:

• Direct and indirect competitors vying for talent in the market, which produces scarcity in the job market and in turn, drives up salary and hiring costs.
• Talented employees are enticed to leave their employers for a better pay rise and opportunities for career advancements in other companies. This leads to attrition in many MNCs and corporate.
• Workplace culture, management and other factors have become increasingly important for people seeking to join or leave companies.

When record numbers of baby boomers retire from the workplace, they leave many senior vacant positions that are hard to fill. Also if new employees are identified for their job roles, they lack experience, skills and institutional knowledge that baby boomers possessed.

As firms experience high growth rate, they are sometimes tempted to lower their hiring standards to fill in open vacant positions. This can initiate further problems wherein lesser qualified individuals for the job roles will incur higher training costs, high turnover and potentially damage the firm’s reputation. From perspective of the HR, growth is both a welcoming opportunity and a ruthless challenge.

Today’s brightest workforce has choices and no dearth of opportunities to explore new career paths. The modern job seeker is quickly able to determine if his employer is old-school by just looking at the recruiting technologies adopted by the company.

See: Top 6 Questions HR Experts Should Ask to Retain Talent

The power as we rightly know has shifted from the employer to the employee/jobseeker, so this poses another major challenge for HR professionals to battle out the talent crisis.

Here are 7 interesting tips for HR managers to win the war for talent:

1. Make big bold changes in recruiting, training and retention strategies to catch up with the market. Stay away from the temptation of making temporary incremental fixes on top of old, irrelevant technology.
2. Reboot careers and aspirations of the team to show appreciation for their loyalty and sacrifices.
3. Possess HR technologies that are relevant with today’s workforce. At least, these must have a full suite of HCM applications, empowered with the ability to recruit via social media and mobile-cloud technologies to speed up recruitment, on boarding and career development of job seekers.
4. Accelerate speedy workings as a part of your core competencies. If HR processes are too time-consuming in nature, then the potential talent rethinks about their association with a potential employer. While many at times, the blame for delays rests outside the HR scope (owing to increasingly overloaded schedules).
5. The elapsed time for initial applicant identification to the tendered job must be short. For some hot positions, employers are required to identify, interview and make valid offer to prospective employee within 72 hours of that person available in the market. Are your processes so fast and efficient?
6. If your HR processes are buried in paper work, then it is time to rethink how your existing processes and technologies look like in the internet age. When was the last time you re-evaluated your HR operations, maybe it is time consider realignment.
7. Put ‘human’ element back into human resources. It might be quite possible that your workforce is missing out on all the attention, feedback, training and career development. If you do not show interest to provide valuable feedback and do not engage with the workforce, then there are chances they would look for opportunities outside, as they feel sudden disconnect with the organisation culture.

When overall economic growth coincides with your firm’s own growing fortunes, then a war for talent will surface. HR managers are required to devise new strategies and incorporate new technologies and processes that will help them retain talent they already have, recruit new talent into the organization, rediscover how to build a new leadership pipeline, and take big bold steps in retooling their HR operations.

Also read: Top 10 Tips for HR Managers to reach Out to Passive Talent

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