Chief Talent Sourcer?

I must admit I had been struggling to chose a topic to post about this week. Not that it hasn't been a busy period, just nothing inspirational to go on about here.

However, after several meetings with clients from all different sectors, I realised that hardly anybody gets the whole talent pooling/sourcing thing.

You may have read in an earlier post when I talked about receiving an email from Electronic Arts asking me to apply or refer games software engineers to them. The mail came from a lady in the US whose job title was Senior Talent Resourcer. I'll come back to that in a second.

In every single meeting I attended this week in Dubai, I heard the same cry - "we've just lost a key recruiting resource, and we can't find a replacement - do you know anyone?"

Well it's easy to say and hard to do, but it's too late because they've left already and now you're hurting. People leave firms, that can't be avoided entirely. But given that we know that to be true, it suprises me that no companies are identifying replacements before staff resign.

The point of developing a talent pool is to create a pipeline of qualified, interested, screened potential hires. All that recruiting technolgy has done is made that all far more possible.

I think Recruitment departments, especially in growing competitive markets/times should consider having a separate person or team, who doesn't hire against open vacancies, but rather develops pools of potential hires who can be interviewed and offered jobs within 3-5 days of a resignation.

Your Chief Talent Sourcer or Scouts should have their own marketing budget, and be able to make use of the corporate recruiting technology, they should perhaps have their own special area on the careers portal. They need to have some tools and skills to communicate individually and en-masse to groups of target hires. They need to predict where it will hurt the company most if people leave - and build relationships with potential replacements on a daily basis.

Think about it, okay you've still got notice periods and bedding-in periods, but the Talent Scout could save millions of dollars each year in lost revenue, speed up time to market from R&D, retained customers, etc.

The time to hire or gap between hires is extremely costly, but still companies only (manpower) plan and have strategies/suppliers in place to fill new hire roles.

The way the web is used to communicate and the tools available to find and meet qualified professionals out there on the Net - I think this key hiring role is going to become a must for major employers across the Middle East markets today.

If any of you are in a pre-emptive talent sourcing role then perhaps you could share a few tricks that you use with us here on my blog..

Ben.