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Integrating Talent Acquisition to Dramatically Improve Business Impact

John Sullivan

When it comes to managing the capability and capacity of the workforce, organizations really only have three choices for augmenting their current state: Build talent in house, buy it from the labor market, or borrow it from others. The latter two options are the domain of talent acquisition (even though most talent acquisition leaders refuse to accept responsibility for total contingent labor management), and the first option is dependent upon an organization’s ability to recruit talent that can be developed, so it is safe to say that talent acquisition is a key talent management activity.

In business, just like in sports, if you are responsible for bringing in innovators, superstars, and game changers, your impact can and should be clearly demonstrated. To maximize the impact of talent acquisition, organizations must make sure that talent acquisition operates smoothly as an integrated component of the overall talent management effort. Unfortunately, in most organizations, talent acquisition is not integrated and instead is overly siloed and operates autonomously. The isolation produces pervasive weaknesses in how organizations engage talent throughout the employee–service provider life cycle and results in staggering salary waste.

The Isolation of the Talent Acquisition Department

It’s not enough to acknowledge that for decades HR departments have operated in silos and that for quite some time there has been a need for more integration. To remedy this problem, we first need to identify the root causes of this departmental isolation. My research and experience have led me to believe that one of the primary causes is that talent acquisition professionals differ from many other professionals in talent management. Successful recruiters are often very aggressive, competitive self-starters who work on projects that historically have been structured as independent activities. Talent acquisition also operates in a competitive environment where external entities are challenging them every day. Their isolation is compounded when other talent management professionals view talent acquisition activities as alternatives to their talent augmentation solutions and establish barriers to integration.

Talent acquisition leaders who have successfully overcome these issues generally began by identifying and acknowledging them. They then helped the organization understand how each departmental activity, when coordinated at a greater level, could produce more benefit than optimizing each independently.

The Negative Consequences of Isolation

Before turning our attention to talent acquisition, it’s helpful to identify problems that occur when any business activity is not integrated. Business functions such as supply chain management and quality control have led the way in demonstrating the real cost of poor integration. Thanks to efforts in those areas, most executives today understand that when any interdependent function is too isolated or siloed, it can dramatically affect the output of an entire process. Just like a steel chain, a process is only as strong as its weakest link.

The primary consequences of poor integration are

Delay in process cycle time: The lack of coordination between departments that touch the life cycle of the process can cause significant delays in workflow.

Increase in error rates: As work flows through many disparate processes, there is a greater chance that steps will be omitted, or that transactions will get lost, resulting in a dramatic increase in costly errors.

Mass duplication of effort: When departments do not coordinate well and rely on similar sets of data, there is a significant risk that the resulting processes will duplicate effort.

Limited process improvement or innovation: Isolation can limit the sharing of best practices and information about opportunities, trends, and common problems.

Lack of accountability: When departments operate in silos, internal customers may be confused about who is responsible or may be forced to shop around for solutions. It is also highly likely that performance metrics will be limited in scope to low-value transactional activities, limiting visibility into the full scope of positive/negative business impact.

In the case of talent acquisition, the effects can be direct or they can indirectly increase the workload of other talent management functions. For example, any weakness in coordination and integration throughout the process will directly affect the quality of recruits and new hires. A low quality of hires can certainly affect the image of the recruiting function, but it can also diminish organizational success.

Low-quality hires may not only produce poorer quality work, but they may also bring fewer innovations and new ideas to the organization. In addition, a series of bad handoffs between talent acquisition and other talent management functions responsible for helping new hires become productive more quickly (relocation, onboarding, training) may result in significant delays in the time needed to achieve minimum productivity.

Workload effects that result from improved integration include a decrease in the demand for performance management and training aimed at helping below-average performers reach minimum performance standards, a larger talent pool for promotions and leadership development, and an opportunity for the training and development function to focus more on capability building.

How Do You Determine Where to Integrate?

Talent management leaders should utilize these four criteria when choosing activities that require greater degrees of integration:

The degree of activity interdependence, or the extent to which the success of one function relies on the actions of another. Using this criterion, you must determine to what extent an error or delay in one process directly affects the work or the results of another.

Whether there is either a direct handoff of work or a direct sharing of information between two interrelated functions.

The potential dollar loss resulting from work errors or delays attributed to talent problems.

The existence of a gate that can stop progression through a linear process.

Six Levels of Working Together

There are different levels of working together, all of which may be utilized by an organization pursuing integrated talent management:

Shared communication: having protocols in place that call for the regular sharing of information pertaining to issues relevant to multiple parties.

Defined cooperation: creating a formal agreement between two parties to help each other, share information, provide services, and measure performance.

Close coordination: reengineering department activities, processes, policies, and timelines to eliminate conflicts between departments and support cross-departmental objectives.

Synchronization: mapping touch points between cross-departmental activities and establishing triggers so that processes directly coincide with or follow related activities.

Integration: establishing a formally documented relationship between departments that maintains some degree of departmental autonomy but that establishes shared goals, joint decision making, integrated planning, process coordination/synchronization, and clear accountability.

Merger: two or more once disparate departments uniting under a single leader and a newly developed organizational model and governance structure. Though rare, this is becoming more common in organizations with workforces that must maintain credentials—for example, healthcare and finance.

Determining what level of working together is appropriate is generally decided with a simple agreement among functional leaders. However, if you wanted to utilize criteria for that decision, two that you should consider include (1) the degree of interrelatedness (the extent that an error in one function affects the success of another) and (2) the average cost of an error caused from a lack of integration. In practice, coordination and integration are the most commonly selected levels of working together between recruiting and other major talent management functions.

Integrating Talent Management With Talent Acquisition

There is no uniform guidance on what talent management activities need to be coordinated with talent acquisition for an effort to be successful. However, early adopters of integrated talent management typically agree that direct and indirect relationships with talent acquisition are a great place to start. Let’s consider each one very briefly.

Direct Relationships

The key direct relationships generally involve

Compensation: Coordination is required with compensation to ensure that job descriptions remain consistent with market trends and that the salary ranges developed are validated against real-time data. Greater coordination is needed during the offer process to ensure that deadlines are met and that offers are presented in a manner that most improves the probability of acceptance.

Onboarding: Nothing can delay the time needed to achieve minimum productivity more than an independent onboarding process that isn’t triggered immediately upon hire. Improved coordination can result in a process that identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the current recruiting process and immediately solicits referrals from new hires.

Relocation : When the relocation function operates independently, it’s important that the relocation process trigger immediately upon acceptance of an offer.

New hire training: similar to onboarding, having new hires who lack the necessary training contributes significantly to delays in the time needed to achieve minimum productivity. Greater coordination is needed to determine the hire-and-train target, that is, whether to hire a more junior employee and develop him or her or to hire an employee who is proficient from the start and to continue to adjust projected training needs based on labor market conditions.

Global recruiting: Although it was once common for international recruiting to operate independently of home country recruiting, changing labor market conditions today require full integration or merging of efforts.

Indirect Relationships

The key indirect relationships generally involve

Leadership development, internal placement, and succession: All organizations must continuously make build, buy, or borrow decisions regarding talent. Whatever the organizational model, functions charged with these activities must be integrated to ensure that decisions are accurate and nonpolitical.

Workforce planning: In early adopters of integrated talent management, the role of workforce planning has changed. While workforce planning used to be about projecting gaps, today it is quickly becoming more about measuring the ability of the current talent management approach to close projected gaps and enable business strategy. Accomplishing this requires that workforce planners model all existing talent management activities, something that requires cooperation at the very least.

Performance management: Performance management should notify recruiting well in advance of a new opening that is likely to occur as a result of an upcoming performance management action.

Offboarding: Recruiting must coordinate with the offboarding/ exit process to ensure that data are shared on why recent hires are leaving, so that the recruiting process can be improved. In addition, exits pointing to systemic organizational issues may need to address organizational design or accepted management practice. When a corporate alumni or boomerang rehiring program exists, greater degrees of cooperation are needed to ensure that individuals who once delivered exceptional performance to the organization are periodically encouraged to return.

Retention: It’s important that the retention department communicate with recruiting, so that sourcing can develop talent pools and pipelines in advance for jobs that have high current and projected turnover rates. Without greater cooperation between talent acquisition and retention efforts, it is impossible to determine whether a retention or recruiting solution would produce a better return-on-investment for the organization.

The innovation function: For organizations with a structured innovation process, it’s important that coordination occurs with talent sourcing activities so that individuals with a greater potential to deliver innovation successfully can be sought out.

Merger-and-acquisition teams: 7 Because recruiting is familiar with external labor markets and candidate assessment, it can help with the postmerger process of determining which individuals should be retained. It can also help with premerger activities to assess the market value of a target’s workforce.

Shared skills functions: Talent acquisition faces significant down time during periods of slow growth. As a result, the talent acquisition department needs to identify and work with other business functions where recruiters and their skill sets might be able to immediately contribute on temporary reassignment during slack periods. Typically, these functions include sales, customer service, high-potential assessment, and redeployment.

Actions for Improving Integration

Once talent management leaders decide which activities should be more closely integrated with recruiting, the next step is to develop an integration plan. Obviously, the task of integration is a little less complex in smaller, more centralized organizations, but whether your organization is big or small, the action steps to consider are still quite similar.

First, select an integration team and appoint a strong leader skilled in navigating organizational politics. Next, have the team develop the criteria that it will use to identify where and how a better relationship is needed between two currently disparate or poorly coordinated activities. Deliver the need specifications to the leaders of the two activities and allow them and their teams to devise how best to deliver their respective services in a manner that meets the new specifications. If there is general agreement between activity leaders, then the initial team should be dissolved. However, if there is conflict, the initial team will be needed to weigh arguments and settle disputes. Whichever team moves forward, its first actions should include identifying potential problems, putting together a business case that supports integration, and benchmarking integration best practices both inside and outside the organization.

The team should also identify which integration approaches or tools it will use to build cohesion between the two functions. Some of the most basic innovation approaches include shared correspondence, holding periodic joint meetings, and developing common goals. The next level includes sharing databases, joint training, shared goals, and rotating team members between the departments. The most sophisticated integration approaches include utilizing common metrics, a best practice sharing process, shared budgets, and making both individual and team bonuses dependent on the success of both functions. The integration team should also identify potential resistance and develop metrics for measuring the success of the overall integration effort.

Anticipate Resistance

Although dozens of benefits can accrue from closer integration, it is important to remember that even beneficial change within organizations will face resistance. Parties defending the status quo (often meaning their previous work product) can slow down or kill even the best designed integration effort. As a result, you need to anticipate potential resistance and develop a plan to counter each component of it.

Apart from defending the past, other factors that give rise to resistance include

fear of the unknown (changing work rules, duties, processes, and procedures)

fear of failure (an inability to learn or perform under newly integrated processes or procedures)

a loss of power or control (the taking away of status, resources, 7 promotional opportunities, and job security).

You must plan for resistance, but you should expect support from leaders of already closely integrated functions such as the supply chain, finance, marketing, and brand management; managers and employees with a background in process reengineering; Six Sigma specialists, fast advancing high potentials unmotivated by the status quo; and candidates and new hires.

Measuring Your Success

No effort should proceed without one final planning step: a list of metrics or measures and current baseline data that can be used for determining whether the integration effort between any two activities improved performance. Typical metrics to consider include improvement in process time, process error rates, process costs, user satisfaction, user complaint rates, and the average perceived level of cooperation as rated by employees of both activities.

Final Thoughts

For years, organizations such as Walmart, FedEx, and the U.S. military have demonstrated the significant positive impact that results from closely integrating operational processes. Unfortunately, most leading-edge process integration efforts have historically originated in business units outside HR. Though HR might have been able to avoid a high level of integration, all global HR functions are now expected to be fully integrated. The talent acquisition function in particular is also becoming more interdependent, diverse, and complex as a result of its increased use of social media. With this increased complexity and dispersion, closer cooperation and integration become more necessary but also more difficult. Recruiting leaders must immediately begin identifying and breaking down the barriers that slow results and that frustrate stakeholders. Delaying action is no longer an option, and talent management leaders should seize the leadership role as the best integrators within HR.

About the Author

John Sullivan, a professor of management at San Francisco State University, is a provocateur and strategist in the field of human resources and talent management. For more than 30 years, he has offered critiques and insights to professionals seeking to develop a true competitive advantage for their organizations. His work is driven by a relentless dedication to do away with the status quo and drive the development of practices that demonstrate the impact of strategic talent management planning on an organization’s financial performance. His body of published work comprises numerous books and more than 700 articles in the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The Economist, the New York Times, HR Magazine, Workforce Management, and many other newspapers and magazines. When not in the classroom, he travels throughout the world speaking to and working with the heads of leading organizations.