How A Little Guanxi Makes Talent Communities Better
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How A Little Guanxi Makes Talent Communities Better
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By Marvin Smith
Talent Community Development
Microsoft
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[guan-shee] the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence in Chinese society
Building a 21st century talent community requires using the right mix of recruiting art and science. A big take away from our talent community development experience at Microsoft has been in order to have a successful initiative we need to dip back into the prehistoric art of developing relationship with prospects. The “ah-ha” isn’t so much recognizing the importance of relationship, but the type of relationship. 21st century recruiting technology optimized a “technology touch” but it is the “human touch” that is so valued by the potential prospect pool. And the challenge with human touch is that it doesn’t fit well into our transaction based recruiting model.
There is much written about community, social networking, and social recruiting and a “talent community” is held out as the ultimate goal. In a recent article, Eric Kramer makes some interesting predictions with respect to importance of talent communities in recruiting. Kramer suggests that if recruiters want to remain relevant, we must create and manage communities of talent.
So what is a talent community? For the purposes of this discussion, I will use a working definition of talent community that was presented by John Phillips, my boss at Microsoft when he outlined our talent community project.
“A Talent Community is comprised of targeted, qualified, active and passive prospects that Microsoft Entertainment & Devices (E&D) staffing can develop into a self-sustaining source of engaged talent that will be harvested for years to come.”
The Microsoft Entertainment & Devices (E&D) version of a talent community should be viewed as a hybrid. We partnered with Jobster and adopted its Web 2.0 Sourcing platform to engage ten pipelines of talent (plus diversity) in order to meet the current and future headcount requirements of our business groups.
In developing the E&D Talent Community, we made several discoveries worth noting:
- Building community is more than sending “one more email” or even one additional “who do you know” telephone call. It begins with a mindset that embraces a high degree of human touch as an integral part of a recruiting process. It is called Guanxi.
- A high human touch model is completely counterintuitive to a “high bar,” high volume (seemingly insatiable demand) models of recruiting that many corporations such as Microsoft utilized
- 21st Century Business models are held to a better, faster and more value standard; we believe our talent community mode should be vetted through that lens. We will describe the better perspective in this conversation, followed by the faster and more value perspective in subsequent discussions.
In a previous article, I suggested the Chinese word Guanxi captures the idea of relationship that we need to have in recruiting very well – it places high touch relationship at the very core of process. If we inject Guanxi into our high bar, high volume model, then the possibility exists to move away from transactions and more toward community.
However, there is still the “counterintuitive thing”. To me, the transaction vs. relationship dilemma is a lot like learning to snow ski. It took a while for me to get my head around “leaning away from the mountain.” Talk about counterintuitive. If I lost balance while turning, my instructor said to lean away from the mountain; away from apparent safety; away from the natural pull of gravity. Every instinct told me leaning away was wrong. Yet, I could not move off the bunny slope until I stopped trusting my instincts and listened to my instructor. I had to change my mind set. In the same way, we must move from a transactional recruiting process, to get closer to community, regardless of what our recruiting instincts suggest.
The E&D Talent Community development experience demonstrated that deepening the relationships with prospective talent brings better results and exhibits the potential to fill the gaps most contemporary approaches create. There are several ways why a talent community is a better solution; I want focus on two of them.
- First, talent communities allow us to do more with less.
- Secondly, talent communities allow us to target a deeper and more diverse pool of talent.
“Do more with less” is the natural companion the better, faster, with more value, mandate. Talent communities allow recruiters to fully utilize the principle of “doing more with less.” Our talent community experience illustrates this by leveraging existing research and relationships as opposed to a transactional model, which feels like we start each search from scratch.
If we thought about something basic, like how many prospects would it take to meet our hiring goals if we used a one-off transactional mode? Rob McIntosh has thought about this, described a scenario where the “funnel numbers” and ratios required a hire become downright scary when applied in a high bar, high volume situation. Using his metrics, my division would need over 80,000 prospects to meet hiring goals. And, as a sourcing strategist, that approach seems daunting.
Contrast that nightmarish scenario with the talent community approach with a target group of reliability engineers; we clearly see how doing more with less is possible.
To put this reliability engineering case study in context; we had a billion dollar problem. Perhaps you read about the Xbox 360 melt down? In the profit and product quality sensitive corporate world, this was top of mind. E&D Staffing’s role was to identify and recruit the reliability engineering team to ensure this type of error did not occur in the future (not just for Xbox, but across the entire Hardware organization).
Figure 1 shows our reliability engineering talent community and the results realized by employing a strategy we call TalentStream (generating a steady stream of prospects). Notice that over the period of one year, each message created additional interest in our opportunities by different individuals visiting our Jobster outreach site. This is a nice illustration of doing more with less. Our first message, centered around an industry event, attracted 385 visitors. Our visitor rate grew to 701 as we highlighted some key jobs and finally peaked with 983 visiting to learn more about our opportunities. We see similar growth in prospects expressing interest and folks that joined the talent network (our talent community on Jobster).
Figure Reliability Engineering TalentStream*
TalentStream refers to creating a steady flow of prospects
Figure2 breaks down the results in detail and reflects our strategy of multiple messages to the same target audience. We build on this approach for two reasons. First, marketing teaches us that a message needs to be constant because the audience’s needs are always changing and you need to build trust with a target audience before they buy. Second from the recruiting school of hard knocks; timing is everything–people change jobs every two or three years.
The metrics reflect the cumulative impact of multiple outreaches. For example: in addition to having two and one-half times the visitors to the web site, three times the initial number of prospects expressed interest in our opportunities. The additional messages built trust with the audience; we enjoyed a nice increase in viral activity as the targets forwarded job information to their colleagues as well as nearly doubled the number of members of our talent community (joined Jobster Network). The all-important bottom line was that we realized seven times the number of hires with this approach.
Figure 2 Metrics of Reliability Engineering Initiative
The second reason that a talent community represents a better solution for a high bar; high volume environment is that we can access a more diverse and deeper talent pool. We employ a Data Aggregation (Figure 3 below) Model to harvest our target prospects. Data aggregation is just as it sounds; we comprehensively gather data from a variety of sources and combine it prior to a talent outreach initiative.
Figure 3 is an example of our approach to identifying reliability engineering talent. As the figure illustrates, we used multiple sources when we put together a target list of talent. Our goal is to have a cross section of talent (at all levels) for current and/or future opportunities regardless of whether they are active or passive prospects.
Figure 3 Reliability Engineering Initiative: Sources of Talent
Data Aggregation Model
The GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) principle certainly applies here. We take great pains to put a high quality filter on the information that is put into the target database. In addition, we use CRM best practices as we engage and interact with the talent prospects.
To summarize, we have found the talent community to offer a better solution than our current approach for a very important reliability engineering initiative. It was better because we able to generate a steady stream of prospects and filled eight key positions. These candidates were generated from a talent pool that represented a deep and comprehensive data mining effort. Not only did this talent community yield 8 hires in 6 months, it is currently providing candidates for our current positions.
Moreover, you would be amazed at how fast a prospect can become a candidate. However, wait; that is next month’s topic. Next time, we will explore how a talent community can be a faster alternative to the current solutions.
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Global Sourcing Conference | Atlanta, Georgia | September 2nd – 4th 2008
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Martin,
Interesting and well documented use of a talent community. I would be interested in what you did (are doing) to retain the interest of the talent and maintain the community. What is the ongoing value of the community to the members.
Eric