Talent Acquisition As A ‘Rat Race’ : What are your thoughts?

Headsup Corporation conducted a webinar session on Human Resources Business Partners and the world they have to navigate. Three gems of the HR fraternity, Abhishek De from BrowserStack, Kushal Bhat from Myntra, and Ramasubramaniun K from Swiggy were invited to discuss the topic.

Abhishek is a talented leader who spoke about what organizations should do to attract talent. This is what he had to say, here’s a gist of his take on the same:

Organizations need to pause, take a deep breath, and step back rather than getting into the bandwagon of being a rat and winning at the talent marketplace which is clearly a rat race. This has been learned the hard way, an Employee Value Proposition (EVP) is not necessarily what you project in the talent market outside but it is also how the process and policies come together internally to serve the employees. Unless these things match outside, people will just join and leave. Instead of portraying the organization as what it is not, organizations should stick to their persona and the truth of how they function. These days, a lot of startups want to replicate and mix and match the policies of Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook instead of creating their policies according to their circumstances. It’s not possible to create a mix and match because the context of the organization, the comparative landscape and the value proposition presented to the talent market are different.

There is a fundamental need to have congruence across all the talent priorities. You can’t signal a cash-heavy sentiment to the market and not have your salespeople joining in and not getting enough revenue, because they are not able to meet their targets. From a tech standpoint, you can’t have a whole bunch of ownerships and not give out enough stocks. You should be able to signal to the talent market the sort of organization that you are.

Talent problems need to be thought of holistically. Every person retained is more important than one person hired, this does a lot more for the employee value proposition than fancy digital media things. All the fancy digital stuff will be bells and whistles till everything else in the organization is sorted.

The core principles and values need to be translated into actual practices. Tech startups and founders seem to think that paying people will make them stay and a lot of times people are not able to speak up. Today, there are options galore in the market, we see resignations being handed over out of nowhere. Rather than having solutions and playbooks for problems, let’s figure out a way where we don’t have a problem in the first place or anticipation of a problem because by the time people get to a solution, the person quitting has found a place in another company. The challenge is on a global level, companies are competing with Indian companies only. The boundaries are blurred and the opportunities have exploded. Organizations need to get their house in order because blaming talent acquisition for not being able to hire back fills will never help. It has to be a collective effort if it is a war for talent. Companies need to have a united front to thrive.

Can you relate to his thoughts? We’d love to hear what you’ve got to say. Feel free to share your views in the comments section.