Regional Resourcing Heads Discuss: Justifying the Long-Term Value of the Resourcing Team

It was agreed by all participants at the lunch that the ability to improve recruitment ‘at the coal face’ was more important even than influencing Business Leaders in the C-suite, because meeting with candidates in person is the best chance for a company to ‘get it right’ with the communication of their employer brand.

Educating the Business on the Strategic Value of the Function

In using this time to increase the recruitment team’s skills, the Resourcing Head in the previous example was in a position to continue educating the business of the value of the recruitment function as a high-level function that needs to be practiced by high-level people. This has been another opportunity to show how improving the quality of recruitment can shape the way a company is perceived on the market today, and in being able to attract better people into the organisation it will shape the way it will look from the inside in the future too.

Business Leaders also needed to be educated on the continued challenges of hiring high-quality candidates during a perceived economic downturn. Rather than aiming efforts at companies that are shedding their bottom 10%, a potential hirer can only target high-quality candidates in companies going through a period of uncertainty (for example in an M&A situation). In this way, Business Leaders and recruiters alike do not get distracted by the volume of lower-quality candidates that are more available in the market. Competition for the best talent remains strong in a downturn, so it’s in the best interest of an organisation’s long-term values to resist the temptation to hire talent just because it is knocking on the door.

External Employee Branding Strategies During a Market Downturn

Despite the necessity of being internally focussed during this period of restructuring of resourcing teams and functions, Resourcing Heads have also needed to keep a keen focus on the external market. With greater volumes applying for fewer roles, care must be taken to ensure that all applicants are properly tracked and treated well, so that a company’s brand remains strong even if no hires are made.

One Resourcing Head applied this not just to new recruits, but also to people leaving the organisation, putting just as much effort into employee outplacement as they would otherwise put into employee on-boarding. This ensures that the risk of an ex-employee bad-mouthing the company was minimised and its employee brand remained strong in the market. Another Resourcing Head applied the same logic to the relationships that they have with universities across the region, warning against breaking ties in the short term that can ultimately lead to a company being barred from campus hiring in future years.

The current downturn had been the biggest source of frustration in circumstances where some very specialised talent had indeed come into the market just at a time when companies are in no position to hire them. In these situations, while no hires can be made in the short term (due to salary or headcount freezes for example) the Resourcing Head can still ensure that high-level company representatives continue to engage with these rare candidates in an open and frank manner in order to build longer-term relationships. This keeps the candidate ‘in view’ as well as offers them a strong impression of the company’s brand, while finally allowing the hiring manager to act quickly as soon as a hiring restriction is lifted.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the participants agreed that there was no one-size-fits-all solution to the way a resourcing function can position itself at this time to add the most value in Asia Pacific Japan. In particular, the debate on outsourcing recruitment teams was brought up, in which the opinion of some participants focused on the unpredictability of this dynamic region, and the ease in which issues can quickly arise that are ‘out of scope’ of an agreement that may have been made just a few months earlier. Unless an outsourced team can be branded and treated exactly the same as if they were an internal recruitment team, most Resourcing Heads continue to use hybrid models of internal and external recruitment strategies that blend regional centralisation with the flexibility to chooseappropriate alternatives at a country level.