subject: Talent Acquisition in the Modern Age [print this page] Talent Acquisition in the Modern Age Talent Acquisition in the Modern Age
Success in the business world depends on talented individuals. Even for low-tech companies, the most successful organizations employ individuals with specific and tested expertise in their field. This notion is particularly true for technology companies. When your business is reliant on engineering skills and out-of-the-box thinking, your personnel are the life-blood of your organizational success. Given the nature of the technology sector, competitive forces are constantly breathing down your neck and forcing you to out maneuver them in a bid to stay relevant. As computer technology rose to prominence the art of talent acquisition was forced to change along with the times. Recruiting moved away from more rudimentary, slower paced standards towards highly integrated and highly organized processes focused on capturing the top echelons of technical talent.
Prior to the advent of the internet age, recruiting computer science majors and engineers was a completely different process. Educational pedigrees, old boy networks and stacks of resumes formed the pillars of technical recruiting. Not unlike today, communication between candidates and companies consisted of phone calls and on-site meetings. Even the most tedious aspects of relaying experience levels or open positions were forced to travel through manual systems. Automation was a long way off. Companies emphasized finding candidates from specific technical schools like Stanford and MIT. Candidates expected long tenures and passing on a job offer was a much more serious issue.
In some ways, the old methods of recruiting resulted in inefficiencies throughout the technical hiring process. Candidate management was driven by paper files and rolodexes. Interviewees were judged more from gut reactions by hiring manager than easily accessible and comparables notes. Any process contingent on paper files is bound by the time lag in sending those files. In a strange sense, walk-ins had a leg up. The process was slow and generally retained less pertinent information to help decipher the best candidate for the open position.
With the globalization of engineering skills and the expansion of technical educational opportunities, the modern candidate field is no longer secluded to the MITs and Stanfords of the world. Today's computer engineering candidates are sources from a variety of schools and countries. Capturing information at pertinent steps in the recruiting process is vital to finding the best pick for an open role. Distributing open positions has dramatically improved with large job board sites. While experience and referrals still count, the playing field for technical recruiting has opened up to the realities of the modern age.
New tools provide important organizational advantages for technical recruiters. Paper resumes and mail-in references have been replaced by modern recruiting software. With the advent of the internet age, recruiting technology providers have begun to leverage web-based software platforms to standardize and centralize the core components of the recruiting process. Modern applicant tracking software aims to increase collaboration, enhance candidate tracking throughout the recruiting funnel and reduce overall costs per each hire. The new tools provide the perfect blend of speed and agility to service talent acquisition needs in the technology sector.
In an age of globalized candidates, regularly competing job offers and a more specialized expertise bases, recruiters have adopted many of the offspring technologies from the internet revolution to modernize the field of technical recruiting. This modernization has provided more effective talent acquisition methods to help service the needs of today's technical recruiters.
