Blog: Improve Your Resourcing Strategy in 4 Steps

Re-think and re-focus when it comes to your resourcing

To get started, think about how you could focus your resourcing to best support the execution of the business strategy.

This might mean reviewing current intelligence on the availability of key talent in your markets, what that talent wants, and how to position your organisation in a way that’s both attractive to that talent and differentiated from competitors. [link to PMNs on talent strategies].

This could also be an opportunity for HR to step into the role of advanced consultant for the business leaders. That way, you can start proactively thinking about resourcing, so it’s included in the business strategy as it’s being formulated. It needs to take into account what capabilities are required to execute it, and to what degree they already exist.

HR can add value to the strategy development process by providing data you gathered in the previous step, and with it help to assess the feasibility of different strategic options. This data can also help identify areas where the business can most effectively differentiate itself from the competition.

Next, you’ll want to approach resourcing as an integrated, end-to-end people process. Talent acquisition needs to integrate seamlessly with other people and talent management processes including workforce planning, external hiring, people development and so on. This is an area where organisations have scope to improve, not least because internal boundaries between different parts of HR often prevent an integrated approach.

To achieve this, you might need to ask some difficult questions about your resourcing processes. When you hire someone new, what do you do with the data you’ve gathered about them during the recruitment process? Does their line manager see that data to help them understand the most effective way to manage their onboarding? And do line managers get any support or advice as to the best way to motivate or manage the individual, based on what the assessment identified?

Once you’ve interrogated each step of a particular process, you can then start asking broader questions, about how those systems are connected. Taking the recruitment example again, could you make better use of your HR systems to share this information between recruiters, line managers and HR?

Once you’ve asked the right questions, you can do something with your answers: you can build a robust approach to resourcing.

What does that mean? It might mean standardising your processes, and applying them consistently, making things fairer and helping you to achieve your diversity goals. Alternatively, it means using rigorous job analysis as the foundation for the selection process, tapping into the science that drives high performance in different roles, and validating after the event whether the selection methods used are most effective at singling out the highest performers.

Whatever it means for your company, it should be followed up by comprehensive evaluation. You should be trying to answer these questions: Is the process efficient? Is it effective? Can the process be improved? You can then focus on the metrics the business is most interested in.

Finally, you’ll want to ask some specific questions about how your resourcing strategy will promote diversity and inclusion. Creating a diverse workforce at all levels is now a key objective for business and HR leaders alike. This is influencing how organisations hire. Helpfully, social science has identified ways in which selection decisions can be framed to increase objectivity and decrease unconscious bias. Try some of the most reliable tactics:

• Using the wisdom of crowds. Numerous studies have shown that taking the average of a number of different forecasts can beat the predictions of ‘experts’. Having multiple reviewers rate the same candidate is a way of bringing this insight into the resourcing process.
• Removing language from job descriptions and job postings that consciously or unconsciously deters certain groups. The words used to describe roles in your organisation send important messages about culture. For example, words such as ‘ambitious’, ‘assertive’ and ‘leader’ have been found to deter women from applying.
• De-personalised recruitment. Some organisations do not ask candidates to supply biographical details so assessors can focus on gathering objective evidence. Studies have shown that the CVs of fictional candidates with white-sounding names are more likely to be invited to interview than identically qualified candidates with non-white sounding names. More broadly, a meta-analysis by Barrick et al (2008) found that biographical information from the applicant’s application form or CV – such as the university they attended – have a big effect on interviewer ratings.