A quick thought about talent

Graduate recruitment has become obsessed with ‘talent’ and me included. The top recruiters all want talent and only talent! A recent article in managament today got me thinking about this. One of the points they were making is that to survive the current economic climate we all need to be positive. Our attitude will help us get out of the economic downturn faster. But if we are busy saying we only want talent that implies many do not have talent.  Keep spreading that message and many may give up or stop trying. And right now we need everyone trying and striving. So perhaps we as graduate recruiters to do our bit for the global economy need to be saying we want ‘talent that fits’..rather than blindly obsessing about talent?!

Graduate Recruiters are too busy being busy…

Every graduate recruiter would agree that the advent of online tools have revolutionised graduate recruitment (as it has most industries) You can now communicate your message to huge audiences and as a result generate large volumes of applications with much less money than you used to. This however has a downside, it creates more applications which means more resource taken up dealing with the applications, crunching the data and trying to make sense of it all (not to mention all these new job boards springing up offering essentailly more of the same i.e. more mass email traffic)

Meanwhile students, especially finalists, are receiving greater and greater volumes of emails from would-be employers saying ‘we are great come and work for us’ – so much so they are deleting most of it without reading it and very importantly then looking for other ways to get the information they want. This other way, more and more, is through talking to real people from the business. Students want to spend time talking to employers and their graduates.

But here lies the problem, graduate recruiters are so busy dealing with applications, planning their online activity, crunching data and reporting on the status of the campaign they do not have the time to spend the additional time they need to in front of more students – despite the fact the students, their future employees, want to do this!

“Fewer, Better Applications” should not only be our mantra but also drive our actions. Graduate recruiters and their demanding bosses need to STOP and take a fundamental look at how they can attract & generate more of the very best and to my mind this means spending less time in the office playing with online activity and more time on in front of the ‘customers’ – the job hunting undergraduate!