Proactive, Aware or Reactive Talent Acquisition?

Start using those words to describe your talent acquisition / recruiting organization and its behaviors. Proactive, Aware, and Reactive.

I totally stole this from HCI on a webshare the other day, but it hits a nerve:

Proactive – you start sourcing for a role before its posted or the manager is ready
Aware – you know about it, but don’t start working on it until its posted
Reactive – manager is ready, job posts, and you get moving

In the study HCI did, 25% of organizations said they were proactive, 50+% said aware, and the rest came in at reactive. My challenge to you is to go through your organization functionally, by business, or by level – whatever – and start figuring out what you SHOULD be (utopia), and then do what you COULD be (given realistic re-alignment of resources) and then what you ARE (your resources today).

Now have a discussion with your leaders, especially the business, and tell them the could and should, and have real business reasons for it. You can get more sales, higher retention, better quality, expand growth platforms – and so on.

I think you would find the PROACTIVE, AWARE, and REACTIVE definition combined with the SHOULD, COULD and ARE will get you a nice roadmap for 2012 🙂