According to the 39^th Annual Deltek A&E Clarity Industry Study, one of the top three firm initiatives to address financial challenges is managing growth. Firms are needing to quickly expand departments, hire and train new employees, and find ways to retain them to prevent turnover. Not only are project managers dealing with staff shortages, but inexperienced project managers ultimately lead to client dissatisfaction and poor perception of firms in the marketplace. Firm financials are being directly impacted by issues with human capital management.

Turnover and Talent Acquisition

The results of this year’s Deltek A&E Clarity study show that human resources (HR) professionals are seeing higher voluntary turnover, more open positions with longer average time to fill plus difficulties with talent acquisition. Turnover has increased by nearly two percent compared to last year, and the percentage of firms that take 31–60 days to fill an open position went up by four points. Regarding talent acquisition, many firms are not focused enough on improving the efficiency of the talent management process. The majority are still using outdated HR systems with 63% of small firms having not updated their HR systems within the past five years making it a challenge to track KPIs. Talent acquisition remains the most expensive business process facing HR.

Drop in Utilization Rates

Additionally, firms have seen utilization rates drop slightly for the second year in a row, declining to 59.4% from 60% last year. This may be due to firms having a harder time recruiting, onboarding, and retaining talent this year and leading to higher employee salaries to attract the best talent at lower billable utilization. This shift in utilization rates is also reflected in the small increase in overhead rates. Firms should develop a strategic onboarding process to reduce the time it takes to get new hires assigned to billable projects. Another issue affecting financials is that increased turnover means senior staff are pulled to train new employees pulling them from their current tasks.

HR Stuck in Recruiter Mode

This year’s Deltek A&E Clarity report also noted that with growth management, HR professionals tend to get stuck in recruiter mode leaving little time to focus on other essential tasks to help keep staff engaged. Firms need to first properly train their staff, so they are productive. They must then find out what professional development and learning opportunities their employees are looking for to ensure retention. According to the study, only 13% of firms said they have a learning management system (LMS). This is down two percentage points from last year, when 15% of firms reported having an LMS.

Succession Planning and Retention

Another key aspect to employee retention is succession planning. The Deltek A&E Clarity study showed that of all firms, only 43% have formal succession plans. Therefore, firms need to focus not just on identifying tomorrow’s leaders, but also on engaging high-potential employees in a way that keeps them at the firm and lets them know that the firm is invested in their success. For 68% of firms with a succession plan in place, it only applied to current leaders or those next in line. Only 7% had plans that applied to all employees. Regardless of size, without a succession plan, the future of the firm is especially at risk if something happens to its current leaders or key staff.

Future Human Capital Management Strategy

Of particular interest, the Deltek A&E Clarity study suggested that to develop an effective future human capital management strategy, firms must evaluate what different generations want and need. With baby boomers voluntarily retiring, firms must change their approach to new hires by offering tailored benefits such as tuition reimbursement and the ability to work from home. Overall, firms that offered these and the more traditional benefits, including stock ownership options, medical, 401(k) or retirement plans, performance bonuses, or paid overtime, do have higher total employee costs. However, firms that did so would have higher employee retention rates, thus reducing the financial burden of turnover.

Clarity Outlook for Human Capital Management

Firm financials are being impacted by challenges in human capital management. In the next year, firms should focus on updating outdated human resource systems, appealing to the new workforce generation, providing strategic onboarding, offering top professional development and learning opportunities, and creating succession plans for all employees. For the future, financial leaders must manage growth by tracking the costs of talent acquisition and investing in their employees to prevent turnover. To really understand the true cost savings of employee retention, HR must continue to work closely with financial professionals. Lastly, make sure to download your free copy of the 39^th Annual Deltek A&E Clarity Report now.

With repetitive sourcing for candidates, constant scheduling, and continuous boilerplate interviews, recruiting and hiring has become very mechanical in nature. It should instead be focused on discovering the best talent fit for the company culture and be done in a more strategic and efficient way. To accomplish this, recruiters need to improve their methods which have often been unknowingly biased, think outside the box, and find ways to streamline the recruiting and hiring process for quality talent. Let’s check out the top 4 recruiting trends.

Seeking Out Diversity

It has been shown that diversity is directly tied to company financial performance. Companies with diverse leadership are more successful and are thus better able to win quality talent. There is also increasing evidence that diverse teams are more productive, innovative and engaged. Based on these facts, recruiters are now actively pursuing more diverse candidates in the gender, ethnicity, age, and LGBT categories. Nonetheless, for the diversity initiative to really work, it must start at the management level. Senior executives should be held accountable for the company diversity and inclusion outcomes.

Utilizing New Interviewing Tools

Conventional interviews have been shown to present bias and be an ineffective way to really read candidates. As human beings, we are comfortable with the familiar and often unconsciously choose applicants like us as the best hires even though other candidates may be more qualified. Additionally, with traditional interviews, there is less ability to address soft skills and weaknesses of the candidates. Now, with new interviewing tools, recruiters can get many more useful details to determine quality talent:

• online soft skill assessments - used to measure traits like teamwork which give a better picture of candidates
• job auditions - candidates are paid to do real work, so their skills can be observed in action
• casual interviews - take place during a meal and offer a look into a candidate’s character
• video interviews - recorded or live and help tap a broader talent pool in less time

Being Super Data Driven

While data has been used in the past to make recruiting decisions, the amount of available data for talent acquisition and the speed at which it can be analyzed has increased. This data can now be used to predict hiring outcomes rather than just track them. Data can even be used to test the effectiveness of diversity initiatives. With all this accessible data, every recruiting and hiring decision can be made on facts instead of feelings. Essentially, the sheer volume of data allows recruiters and their companies to compete for quality talent with their own talent intelligence strategy.

Streamlining with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming the recruiting industry standard. Using AI, recruiters can capture information from candidate resumes for qualities that indicate a workplace culture fit. AI can also be used to increase diversity in the workplace as it can be programmed to ignore demographic information when sourcing candidates. Once candidates have been hired, AI can even help with retention by identifying ideal learning opportunities. Finally, letting AI do the more tedious tasks for recruiters will offer more time to build relationships with quality talent which has a greater impact on company success.  

Recruiting Quality Talent for the Future

When vying for quality talent in a very competitive market, recruiters must stay on top of current trends instead of relying on standard recruiting protocols. Recruiters can maximize their talent acquisition efforts by choosing new technologies and streamlining their inefficient processes. With super data at their fingertips and a plethora of AI options to choose from, recruiters are well positioned for a successful talent acquisition future.

Many people don’t realize that talent management is a key business strategy and is vital to a firm’s success. It begins with recruiting potential hires and follows employees throughout their entire life cycles with a firm. Since talent management has such a great financial impact on a firm, talent metrics should be used to show return on investment and to make informed business decisions. So, which metrics are the most significant?

5 Important Talent Management Metrics 

1. Cost to Hire

It is very expensive to hire a new employee. Up front, you have ad placement and sourcing costs. Additionally, there is the time spent by the recruiter and managers to interview and determine the best candidate from the pool. As much effort and time will be put into selecting and onboarding the right match for a position at your firm, you want to ensure the new hire is a good return on investment. You also want to assess whether your ad placements and sourcing tools are getting you the quality candidates you desire. 

2. Time to Full Productivity

Every new hire needs some time to become acquainted with the new position and learn the ropes. Generally, it requires several months before a new hire can be fully productive. However, it is imperative that your firm has an effective onboarding and training program to get new hires up to speed as fast as possible. The quicker a new hire moves to full productivity, the faster there is the return on investment. 

3. High Potential Talent

As part of your talent management plan, you should hire a percentage of people that you expect to provide more value down the road for the organization. This talent should be the best of the best. These employees will be the ones you pull from for future succession into higher-level roles. Making sure you hire talent with potential is necessary to avoid more costs of hiring. 

4. Talent Mobility

Retention of talent is another important factor to consider, especially when concerned with the financial impact of hiring a replacement. Employees need to know that there are opportunities for them to move within the firm, so they don’t stagnate in the same position after several years. Your firm should offer career paths for upward mobility for top performers who seek new challenges. 

5. Talent Turnover

Turnover is probably the most relevant metric of all. Your firm will want to keep this number as low as possible to reduce its financial impact. With turnover, you have the cost of replacing the position with a new hire and the loss of the knowledge gleaned during the years of service. Additionally, turnover stops the cohesive flow of business and causes efficiency to wane.

Manage Your Talent Well

Of course, there are cases where turnover cannot be prevented no matter what the firm does. Overall though, your talent should be chosen wisely, trained properly and given opportunities for mobility. When you manage your talent well, you will in fact reduce your costs because word of mouth is free and high potential talent will come to you.

Gone are the days where human resources (HR) professionals simply focused on just filling staff requisitions. Today’s HR professionals are looking to build relationships which will impact their organization’s bottom line. With this in mind, they must successfully compete for and win the best talent which fits the needs of their firms. The talent acquisition team can boost the efficiency of both the recruitment and on-boarding of this talent using an automated system.

9 Talent Acquisition Processes that are Improved Using an Automated System 

1. Standardized Job Descriptions | Having standardized job descriptions that can be automatically pulled into a requisition allows HR professionals to immediately begin finding qualified candidates. Establishing standardized job descriptions also sets skills requirements, job expectations, and success measurement. 
2. Requisition Request and Approval | Automating the requisition and approval process ensures the team knows about a new hire request. This process also gives team members one last opportunity to evaluate the job description and provides tracking for the position moving forward.
3. Write Once, Share Often | One of the biggest benefits of an automated talent system is the ability to share the job request in multiple locations without duplicating efforts. HR professionals can now streamline the publishing process by posting the position on the firm website, job boards, and social media, while enabling employees to share via their social networks. 
4. One Place for Qualified Candidate Pool | A talent acquisition system ensures candidate submissions go into one centralized location. When candidates submit their resumes online, their information is associated to the requisition and can also be assigned to future pools for searching. No more excel spreadsheets needed nor keeping up with random emails and submissions from various locations. 
5. Quick Candidate Notifications | Letting a candidate know his application was received and is being reviewed can make a positive impression. Even if a candidate doesn’t fit this position, he may fit a future position. The ability to send quick notifications to multiple candidates streamlines the recruitment process because candidate contact is automatically maintained. 
6. Standardized Letters | Standardized letters (offer, decline, interview, etc.) allow HR to respond automatically to all candidates. These letters are significant to the candidate experience, and the automatic response reduces the work it would take to individually contact each candidate.
7. Electronic Forms and Checklists | Reducing the amount of physical paperwork needed throughout the application and onboarding process is necessary for efficiency. Electronic forms and checklists make sure all necessary information is gathered, and that the process is seamless. 
8. Internal Notifications | The first week of a new hire is the most important time to make a good impression. Automated internal notifications keep everyone involved with the new hire in the loop, so no one drops the ball.
9. Let It Flow | The beauty of an automated talent acquisition process is that the flow of information eliminates duplicate entry. Once the candidate enters his information on the job application, it continues to flow through to the on-boarding process thus reducing manual entry. 

Automate Your Talent Acquisition Process 

Every HR professional wants to find and match the right candidates to open positions as quickly as possible. However, they also want the candidate experience to be a positive one for lasting relationships. Having an efficient talent acquisition process can improve new hire readiness and decrease time to revenue, while keeping the candidate experience in mind. Is your firm ready for an automated system?

Organizations with antiquated talent management philosophies will struggle to attract, nurture and retain top talent in 2017. Many HR teams make the common mistake of having decentralized or ineffective systems and processes. This infographic illustrates six key statistics that demonstrate why HR teams can no longer be reactionary and should evaluate their talent management processes and systems.

Learn More about the Challenges of Talent Management

Interested in learning more about how to overcome the increased competition for talent in 2017? Join our webinar where we will discuss how HR can overcome the top five challenges with talent acquisition.

The war for talent acquisition has experienced a major shift in recent years. Historically, the employer held all of the power and candidates vied for the opportunity to prove their worth to the employer. However, in recent years, this dynamic has changed. Human Resources leaders and executives around the globe are faced with both talent shortages and a lack of candidates who possess the required skills to fill critical roles. Whether we like it or not, we are now operating in a candidate-led hiring market.

In a world where demand exceeds supply, we must manage the war for talent. HR must learn how to fight and win this desirable talent through innovative strategies to attract, recruit and retain the skill sets that our businesses require. It’s time to refocus, to get creative and analytical, and to win this war.

Four Proven Strategies to Win the War for Talent

1. Build a Better Brand

Branding is typically thought of as a marketing function. However, what happens when companies apply the same branding principles to their recruiting tactics? It is simple, these companies effectively manage the market perception of what it is like to work for their organizations.

Successful firms stay aware of the perceived image that current and past employees have about their employment experience. Making sure the perceived image is on target involves evaluating specific details such as the company culture, employee benefits and work environment.

Building a strong and strategic employment brand will:

• Create a sense of excitement about working for your company
• Highlight the company mission and product/service offerings
• Provide clear and compelling reasons to work for your company
• Evoke feelings of attaining prestige and professional reward with your company

A strategic approach to employer branding requires a non-partisan examination of how your company attracts, engages and retains talent. It would be beneficial to undertake an employer brand audit. The results will hopefully inspire your leaders to invest time and effort into building a brand strategy to expand your talent recruitment pool.

Successful companies go above and beyond to create a great candidate experience during the talent acquisition process. Human Resources and Marketing can team up to create this great candidate experience by focusing on these tactics:

• Improve Your Application Process – When is the last time you reviewed your company’s application process? Most application forms are unnecessarily cumbersome and lead to a large portion of candidates not completing the process because of the time commitment involved. You can improve your candidate experience by keeping your application process to a minimum while meeting all of the firm’s essential requirements.
• Write More Compelling Job Advertisements – A marketing mindset can help improve one of the first touch points with a potential candidate, the job advertisement. When writing, focus on the job description and opportunity rather than stringing together a list of requirements and qualifications. The job description should be intriguing in order to elicit interest and make candidates want to take the next step in the recruitment process.

During the talent acquisition process, both Human Resources and Marketing should work together to emphasize the advantages of working for your company – the great company culture, the reasons your company is a great place to work and the benefits. Using these measures will ensure that those with the right cultural fit have a great candidate experience during recruitment.

3. Create a Culture of Developing Internal Talent

The offer of learning and development is vital for attracting new talent. So why don’t firms spend more time providing learning and development opportunities for their own internal talent? Current personnel can fill employment gaps fast if they are given the chance to pursue another direction in the firm. All internal staff should be given opportunities to learn new skills and develop alternate career paths within the firm. By providing development options to internal staff, the firm will have better longevity with its personnel and keep the skill sets internal.

4. Collect the Right Data to Support Talent Development

Relevant data is crucial to business leaders. Our financial metrics, KPIs and future growth reports are all dependent upon having access to quality data. Maintaining information on talent recruitment and retention are no different, and Human Resources Information Systems make this critical employee data much more accessible.

Just like the other areas of our businesses, we must first understand how to capture accurate information and then how to use this data within the context of our businesses. Before we concentrate on capturing this information, we must assess the accuracy of the data itself as well as find better ways of presenting the data.

Firms that remain competitive in the war for talent are able to contextually embed talent-related data within their business systems. For example, these firms are able to link their staff’s professional development and performance activities to project management and customer service goals and metrics. This data allows company leaders to see real results regarding talent development.

Learn More About the War for Talent

Want to learn more about staying competitive in the modern war for talent? Sign up for our upcoming webinar to learn how your firm can better attract and retain millennial talent for your professional services firm.

Finding and hiring the right talent is a lengthy and administratively burdensome process. The amount of time and money spent announcing job openings and qualifying applicants is barely quantifiable, but we all understand that the price is high. Add in the tasks created by legal requirements and corporate responsibility, and the process becomes crushing for even the most seasoned and organized recruiter. Therefore, hiring smarter in a competitive workforce market is critical to lowering costs of recruiting the top talent.

The Hiring Team

Businesses of all sizes use teams to conduct the hiring cycle. The decision makers on the teams are often professional staff whose primary role is to produce. The cost of time spent by these members can be massive and results in reduced attention to mentorship, production, or development. Having a portal that allows managers to see the progress of the hiring cycle and quickly identify their own action items is an integral to saving time.

The Job

Even if the job announcements are fully standardized, they must still be posted to each site of choice. Each site has its own format and requirements, forcing recruiters to take the same actions multiple times.

Using a tool that allows for automated posting to multiple sites and tracking of non-automated postings is an important time saving device. Having visibility into the applicant pipeline and notification alerts that action is needed helps streamline the requisition process.

The Applicants

There is a shortage of talent. There is no shortage of applicants.

Qualifying applicants and moving them through the hiring process is a time-intensive effort often plagued by manual processes. The mechanics of receiving an application, reviewing the data, and ranking the applicants are most often conducted via email or paper and creates risk legal risks without clear and objective criteria and measurement.

The ability to build a database of applicants who do, may, or do not meet the hiring criteria is highly valuable for this and the next hiring cycle. Hiring smarter requires retaining past applicants’ information so your firm has a deep pool of possible talent for future positions.

The Communications

The hiring process is full of action items for the recruiter. Traditional tools used to communicate with applicants and candidates often force recruiters to create a physical paper trail and allows important communications to slip through the cracks. Scheduling interviews and tracking the stage of candidates as well as memorializing the results, can become overwhelming in a multiple interview process. Leveraging the use of the database, automation, and tacking abilities, including bulk letter submissions, allows recruiters to save time and provides a reference for later use.

Hiring Smarter With the Right Tool

Every role in a firm is best served by having the right tools in place. Hiring smarter requires investing in a tool designed for the recruiting function that allows for not only time savings, but also optimization of the process, risk reduction, and increased satisfaction by hiring team members and applicants alike.

What is the lifeblood of your business? Some might say clients and others might say employees. I tend to agree with the latter. Every company needs employees that are enthusiastic about their job and care about the company. Additionally, employees need to bring excitement and drive every day they show up to work in order for companies to be competitive. But how can a boss or employer create driven workforce? Simply by connecting with their employees. Let’s take a look at ways to connect with employees so your company can thrive.

Nine Ways to Connect with Employees

1. Create Dialogue – The act of conversation in itself is a way to stay connected with employees. Far too often though, bosses find themselves leading conversations and doing most of the talking. As a result, employees are not engaged and the conversation is one-way. This doesn’t have to be the case. Whenever you are engaged in conversation with employees, it’s important to ask open ended questions to encourage employees to express their ideas and opinions.
2. Keep Your Ears Open – You have two ears and one mouth for a reason. This might sound cliché, but it’s still a good thought to keep in mind. In reality, many people don’t understand how to listen. A good listener remains patient, absorbs what other people are saying, and ask engaging questions for clarity. More importantly, some people express ideas better than others, but that doesn’t diminish the value of their ideas.
3. Give Ownership to Employees – I’m not saying give them actual ownership, although that could be appropriate at times. What I mean is to allow employees to own responsibilities and tasks within the organization. Give them the power to make decisions that truly affect their job and performance.  
4. Provide a Career Path – Words and actions are two different things. Telling an employee they are doing well and they have a promising career with the company sounds nice, but it lacks an actual roadmap or path to where they are going and how to get there. Instead, find out what the employee’s career goals are and figure out a way to get them there. Put this in writing, and include challenging responsibilities to drive their personal growth. Additionally, include clear milestones that allow the employee to see they are achieving their goals.
5. Educate Employees – Education doesn’t stop when you leave school and start a career. Even more, the skills we learned in school might not be exactly applicable to where your career path is going. Any company can train their employees, but how many of you educate your employee beyond their job responsibilities? Spend time educating about soft skills and even topics that help employees grow as a person. Investing in employee education provides a path to connect with your workforce. It also shows you care.
6. Provide Guidance to Employees – One of the best learning opportunities for employees come from their boss. Furthermore, bosses provide more than explicit knowledge; they also provide a great deal of tacit knowledge. Here’s the difference. Explicit knowledge is formalized and documented. Whereas, tacit knowledge is more situational based knowledge. This experienced based knowledge is hard to teach, but as a boss, you’re in the perfect place to teach this based on your past experiences by applying this knowledge to current situations. For more about knowledge sharing, check out this whitepaper.
7. Be Flexible with Employees – Technology has changed the way we work. The good thing about this is that many professional jobs can be accomplished from nearly anywhere with an internet connection. Additionally, these roles are no longer working from to 8:00 to 5:00, Monday through Friday and some days are longer than others are. Value your employee’s time and recognize the need for positive work to personal life balance. This allows you to connect with employees through trust, and that you know they will manage their responsibilities.
8. Honesty is the Best Policy – Honesty is a powerful personal characteristic to exemplify. In fact, honesty is a characteristic that most, if not all leadership guides list as a key characteristic of a good leader. The reason for this is employers that are honest build confidence and trust with employees.   
9. Always Remain Calm – Keep calm and connect with your employees. In other words, overreacting to stressful situations builds a wall between bosses and employees. By remaining calm and not screaming, employees find bosses more approachable and open minded.

Make It about the Employee

What this all boils down to is that employees want to be seen as people and to know that the company is invested into them. So in order to connect with employees, your goal should be to create a culture that empowers employees and shows you value them. After all, you want them to value the company as well.  

Employee engagement is currently a hot topic in the realm of Human Resources. As a result, the enterprise software industry has responded and created a plethora of solutions to address this growing demand. The era of Talent Management Systems is upon us, and these systems are becoming a vital role in supporting business growth and increasing employee productivity.

Talent Management Systems enable the automation of the recruitment process, performance monitoring, and implementing employee training and development. Additionally, they also enable the performance tracking of your Human Resources department. So how can your firm benefit by implementing a Talent Management System?

Click the infograph below to download the whitepaper on the "Top 10 Recruiting Metrics HR Should Care About."