March 2024 In-Person Meeting | Scottsdale

The springtime in-person meeting of i4cp’s Talent Acquisition Board took place at the Fairmont Princess in Scottsdale, Arizona in advance of the 2024 Next Practices Now Conference.
We started the morning by recognizing Melissa Thompson, Global VP of Talent Acquisition at Ford Motor Co., who  has skillfully served as board chair for the past two years. We also formally welcomed Daniele Monaghan, who succeeds Melissa (who will stay on as member co-chair) as our next chair.

The topics covered throughout the day were prioritized via a survey of board members a few weeks prior—we covered:

Internal Mobility: Identifying the most critical skills by priority of the business; job architecture work is critical; some post roles to internal audience first; how many interviews and who needs to be involved, who provides feedback to the candidate (interviewer, recruiter, or current manager), and transition period. There’s a strong case for internal mobility given the ROI (keeping top talent to prevent attrition), but companies are citing very low natural attrition rates.

Recruiter Scorecards & Capacity Planning: Each board member shared their respective scorecards and walked their colleagues through the fine points. Regarding capacity: Teams leverage a portfolio of resources to help with fluctuations in capacity, resources, and demand (RPOs, contractors, other TA functions, etc.). Some have close partnership with finance and business key to model and understand output and levels. Organizations are at various stages of maturity and resourcing for data and analytics for capacity planning—some have a data scientist and developers while others are working in Excel with manual inputs. (materials available for download)

Sourcing / Talent Attraction: Danielle discussed the Talent Acquisition Academy Program (known as TAAP) in use both at orgs such as Amazon and Uber, which recruits and trains non-traditional professionals (e.g., NFL athletes, former military special forces personnel, etc.) (see this article for details). Location strategy plays into the ability to attract talent; some companies want folks to come back, but lack adequate space for everyone, or even when working onsite, folks are on Zoom instead of meeting in person.

What keeps TA leaders up at night:

• Data, systems, location strategy
• AI: adoption, legal, data privacy (risk is a concern—low appetite for lawsuits such as the one that accuses Workday of facilitating bias via its AI)
• Matching capability (Workday)
• Companies continue to see flatness, but beginning to see things tick up
• Movement to offshore work
• How to compete in the future—and find the new talent required