Innovation has become a much needed organizational strategy to survive in the current business environment. And that's never been truer for the HR function. Today the business transformation is driving organizations to look at rapid skill changes when finalizing their talent considerations. Skills that were considered niche and domain-specific, especially with tech-related fields, now dominate a company’s skill requirements. Adoption of technologies like AI, robotics, and the increasing pace of digitalization and automation of processes in the recent years have impacted sectors across the board and today many non-tech companies too feel the need to evolve with the times, all leading to them updating their talent preferences. 

With a skills gap that today occurs in most developing markets like India and companies requiring to fill positions fast, recruiters today play an important role in ensuring a company’s success. Much of their company’s profitability and success depends on the people that recruiters hire to bring out any technological transformation successful and sustainable. With this growing responsibility, hiring models and recruitment processes have been ‘agile.’

In a recent Deloitte survey, 79 percent of global executives rated agile performance management as a high organizational priority. But how can companies truly make their hiring and recruitment agile? An important part of doing so is to move away from a ‘rules and planning-based’ approach toward a simpler and faster model driven by feedback from participants and one that can respond to changing talent requirements of the company swiftly. Experts note that such shift is mainly from top-down planning models are giving way to nimbler, user-driven methods that are better suited for adapting in the near term, such as rapid prototyping, iterative feedback, team-based decisions, and task-centered “sprints.”

Strong Metrics and Talent Acquisition Strategy

A key part of making TA agile is to establish a proper talent acquisition strategy, and determining the metrics that are required to monitor its success. With technology today enabling recruiters to gather real-time data, often in larger quantities to predict trends. This rise in the uptake of data and the reduction of unnecessary data points enables recruiters to focus on key metric and ensure their fulfillment. By approaching talent acquisition from the position of increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction, HR leaders can better demonstrate not just the importance of their work, but also its results.

Hiring those who recruit

Today adopting an agile approach requires a level of innovation and creativity, aspects that haven’t traditionally defined talent acquisition teams. Recruitment teams that choose to adopt agile TA should be highly skilled, experienced, and trusted by their organisations and the broader hiring community. They should possess the requisite knowledge of how best to deploy technology and data collection to ensure their business’s talent demands are met. By bettering the quality of their TA teams, HR heads help better position them to gain a seat at the leadership table, helping them to garner senior leadership support for agile practices. 

Accurate forecasting and leveraging tech

Another key element of successful agile TA adoption is the ability to forecast future talent demand and identify pivotal roles that will impact business performance. Although data collation and analysis methodologies have become popular, it’s also important to leverage them strategically to make informed decisions.  This process of planning and predicting talent needs enables a merger between the agile talent acquisition process and workforce planning. It helps many TA heads take important decisions as to how best address their companies talent demands. including permanent, contingent, contract, and seasonal workers.

But to accurately forecast workforce needs, HR professionals need to leverage the latest in data, analytics, and technology. Investment in AI-enabled technologies can enable the data collection process as well as free up valuable time for recruiters. Technology and AI that can handle tasks, such as sourcing, helps make recruiters more time-efficient, agile, and productive, and it also helps find the right candidates thus enabling recruiters to make decisions fasters and enabling TA to be agile.

Using agile work practices, one that stemmed from the fast-evolving tech world of earlier years, today has influenced companies and organizational function far beyond its original conception. Today many organizations are undertaking tech-driven business transformations, albeit in a slow organic way. With innovation becoming the bedrock of 21 century HR practices, making TA models agile is no easy task. But one that can greatly benefit firms who face a rapidly changing economy today.