Recruitment teams create talent profile insights for recurring roles or roles that are deemed challenging and hard to fill.
In most large or global organisations, TA functions are structured into centres of expertise.
That way, recruiters work as specialist for corporate, technical, GTM, product, operations, or other domains of expertise.
With this model, recruiter’s are able to successfully partner with their business stakeholders and hiring managers.
That partnership goes beyond hiring delivery. Recruiters can also provide impactful insights to enable the leaders act or make the right hiring decisions.
What is Talent Profile Insights
This document help Recruiters and Talent Sourcing functions to better understand the top recurring job profiles, with detailed & insightful talent market knowledge.
A practical document should be written as an FAQ. Why?
It answers questions around why a company hires for the role.
What a recruiter needs to consider when sourcing candidates for the role.
It should also include the skills required, technical and behavioural alike.
Finally, it should highlight information about where likely to find this talent using data, anecdotes, research, and tools like LinkedIn Talent Insights.
Why create Talent Profile Insights
Builds credibility across the hiring manager community on the value the recruiters bring within niche or peculiar markets
Helps the recruiters to build domain expertise of the functional teams they support, along with specialized knowledge of the actual job profiles they recruit for
Ensures continuity in hiring knowledge, especially when an incumbent recruiter leaves or another recruiter is hired to support that organisation
How to create Talent Profile Insights
In previous employers, I led teams and made the case for talent profile insights.
In each case, the purpose was the same. However, the process and the outcomes where slightly different due to the size and scale of the project.
Whilst at Amazon, the process from conception to actual go-live took 3 months.
The TA leaders identified that we all had a team of recruiters who were relatively new to Amazon. At that time, most of our recruiters lacked strong domain knowledge for the peculiarity of the roles Amazon hires for.
For example, a typical Finance Manager or HRBP role in other large organisations operates differently in Amazon Operations.
So, I made the case and engaged with peers to create a detailed document that provides additional insights that can be reusable for each recurring role.
Then, we brainstormed to identify the top 20 recurring roles – each functional TA leader had to propose their top 3-5 and then we debated and aligned on the top 20.
Next, we recommended specialist recruiters who supported those job codes/job profiles to partner and work on the section for the roles they hire for.
For each job role, we needed a knowledge page and a Linked Talent Insights screenshot providing industry data to anecdotes.
Admittedly, some of the sections were well written than others.
So this was an opportunity to coach certain individual recruiters on their ability to convey insights that will be impactful.
Final Steps to Create Talent Profile Insights
Following the creation stage, we had a Senior Recruiter to conduct the first review of the entire document. This stage checked for errors and inconsistencies in content.
As Talent Profile Insights project lead, I conducted a final review of the document. My focus was to ensure balance in language and validate data sources.
The result was a 40-page Talent Profile Insights document.
Feedback from the recruiters and sourcing recruiters teams were overwhelmingly positive.
Thinking big, the ambition was to transfer the content into a new online platform.
We considered integrating live talent insights/market intelligence for the TA team.
In a future post, I will provide an abridged sample of a talent profile insight.