Strategy 2 addressed the quantity, location, and timing of talent needs. Mitigating critical skill shortages also requires a focus on quality, which means addressing the competency, credential, and other hiring requirements for critical jobs. This is the purpose of Strategy 3.
How employers accurately communicate their hiring requirements has important implications for how successful they are in managing their talent pipelines. Setting hiring requirements that are too low will increase costs to employers by requiring more on-the-job training and increasing turnover costs. Setting requirements that are too high will have the unintended consequence of excluding otherwise qualified candidates and potentially reducing the size and diversity of the available talent pool, as well as imposing higher education and training costs on prospective workers. Both can result in positions going unfilled for long periods of time with potentially high onboarding and turnover costs.
Talent Pipeline Management® (TPM) treats aligning and communicating job requirements as a separate strategy for the purposes of the curriculum given its importance and complexity, but it is best to think of the outcomes of this strategy as part of the combined process by which employer collaboratives communicate their combined need for talent and the hiring requirements for filling that need.
As mentioned in Strategy 2, a key decision for employer collaboratives is whether they conduct (1) two separate surveys, with one focused on projecting demand for critical jobs, followed by another focused on hiring requirements; or (2) a combined demand planning and hiring requirements survey, which we call the needs assessment survey. We will discuss the pros and cons of each choice after we review the essentials of communicating hiring requirements.
Strategy 3 Learning Objectives
- Explain the role of communicating hiring requirements in TPM®.
- Recognize different ways employers can communicate hiring requirements.
- Develop a shared language for communicating hiring requirements with an employer collaborative.
- Combine and share the results of demand planning and communicating hiring requirements, as outlined in Strategies 2 and 3.
