‘Talent sourcing’ key to success

By Kwon Eun-young

Over the past decade, the business world has become globalized at a rapid pace due to the free flow of information through new technologies. At the same time, the barrier between industries has been blurred as convergence has ruled the global market.

In this complex environment, “talent sourcing” has emerged as one of the key challenges of business today. It is getting more and more difficult to source right people for the right job because talents are always short of supply. Talent sourcing refers to the identification and uncovering of candidates through proactive recruiting techniques.

A global human resources (HR) expert said that talent sourcing has become a top issue as a growing number of enterprises are competing to recruit people equipped with globally-competitive skills and multilingual skills.

“The key issue is development of global talent pool where you can resource from everywhere and identify where is that sources for specific types of talent.” Richard Payne, a practice leader of talent and rewards from Aon Hewitt, said in an interview with Business Focus held in Seoul Monday.

He stresses that in order to address issues associated with talent sourcing, it is essential to develop a model that fits a country’s unique culture and business practice, citing one Swiss firm as an example of a global company.

“For example, one client in Switzerland, and they have twenties of different nationalities working for them. For them, the world is source of talent.”

Payne, who has over 25 years experience in talent and rewards, points out that in order to create an ideal model for talent sourcing, a firm should take into consideration four key elements ― cost, availability, quality and risk ― in a balanced manner.

According to him, Korea lags behind in the talent availability due to rapid population aging and strict restriction on immigration. Availability on Payne’s words means how effectively a firm can source right people for right places.

He emphasizes that cost effectiveness is critical in talent sourcing. However, he said that cost reduction is not the best solution to ensuring cost effectiveness, suggesting that a company find a good mix of four key elements considering tradeoffs among the four.

Payne, who visited Seoul to deliver a speech at Aon Hewitt Conference 2012 Tuesday, said that Korean firms should focus more on cost effectiveness because Korea is a country with both high cost and quality issues.

“Seoul is relatively in a high cost, particularly for professionals and engineers, because Korea has the best educational facilities in Asia. It is very tight to getting into top universities,” he said.

“The supply is relatively small relative to the population size because the education system presses people to get into those universities. So here we have the situation, high cost, high quality and modest availabilty is also a risk in Korea because of high staff turnovers. Labor relations are also can be issues.”

Payne, who previously served as the editor and Asia editorial director for the Economist Intelligence Unit, said that proper planning to identify where the talent shortages are will help firms address talent sourcing issues.

“I think issue is how to utilize your resources in the most effective manner, not just maintaining them,” he said.