VISUALIZATION – TALENT ACQUISITION

Sophie Shaw  June 10, 2018

CHALLENGE

Talent Acquisition (Recruiting) is viewed as a broken process delivering suboptimal value to stakeholders  throughout our global organization.  Although there are pockets of excellence, the standard customer  experience is perceived as having little to no value with hiring managers sometimes believing they could  do the job themselves and wondering about the necessity of Talent Acquisition.  Negative perceptions of  the effectiveness of Talent Acquisition are amplified when the organization is unable to produce talent  in what hiring managers believe to be a reasonable amount of time.

We held a design thinking workshop and used all the tools discussed, however, after the brain-storming,  mind-mapping and exploring the possible (however blue sky it may have seemed) we were challenged  with providing a visual for one of the ideas that “wowed,” thus we used the visualization tool.

APPLICATION

At a high level, we discussed creating a global employer branding campaign that would serve as the  framework for all employment marketing and nurturing a prospective global talent pool.  Using  visualization at this stage made absolute sense, for this goal, at a high level, is amorphous and requires  on to put some meet on its bones.  We hope to draw-in and engage semi-passive candidates into  creating a relationship and dialogue with our company even when they were not seriously looking for a  role and thereby create a readily identify and accessible talent pool for current and future openings.  At  its core, the roughed-out solution would include elements of gamification and social engagement.

We created a display oard that included green army man (we had limited resources – no need to read  any more into that), walking into a career site at which time they are promoted to answer a series of  questions about the kind of professional and person they are (we used bubbles to represent these  questions).  The answers to these questions led the professionals to be classified as one of our  company’s brand and thus created a searchable profile in our system.  This group, then, represented our  readily accessible and identified talent pool.  We also had a picture of a manager, suffering through her  work and frustrated by her workload and the stress resulting from having too few resources.  We  showed her picking up the phone and calling Talent Acquisition to engage them in assisting with  resourced identification.  We then show a recruiter tapping into the already identified talent pool (green  army men) and delivering qualified talent in less than 1 week.  We also attempted to show the business  impact by depicting a happy hiring manager and used play money to show increased revenue  opportunities when the organization is running at full capacity a greater percentage of the time.

INSIGHTS

The design thinking workshop provided many ideas which individually showed promise, but some, taken  as a collective, played nicely together and held even greater promise.  Using the visualization tool,  helped the overall team to fully understand our proposal and ask the right questions providing further  direction into creating a solution that would “wow” if ultimately implemented.   We were able “to  achieve a sense of agreement and consensus with people (our team), (and) …draw out conversation.  As

VISUALIZATION – TALENT ACQUISITION

Sophie Shaw  June 10, 2018

Angela Meyer suggested, we were successfully able “to get things done and to solve problems” ensuring we  were understood and that people “align{ed} their ideas with [ours].”

APPROACH

In describing our visualization tool (display board), we enhanced the description with a little role play.  The  role play, while effective, may not have been true to the true essence of visualization, so if I were in a  position to do it again, I might opt not to use the role play as it may introduce ambiguities in meaning.

