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The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com November 2019
The Global
Talent Acquisition Survey A personal touch in the digital age
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 2
Leathwaite recently undertook a global survey of leaders within corporate &
inhouse recruiting with the aim of better understanding the needs,
frustrations and challenges faced by the group responsible for ensuring their
organizations are attracting their most valuable asset: talent.
The results of our survey speak of a function in a period of transition, and a
market that has not yet coalesced around a single operating model for the
digital age.
The majority of respondents feel the
large tech giants have a competitive
advantage, and that apart from LinkedIn,
the market hasn’t yet provided them
with the game-changing technology
tools to be more strategic and insightful
when making hiring decisions or
streamlining the transactional side of
recruiting. Deep diving into the data, we
can reveal our survey produced four key
findings:
Firstly, talent acquisition leaders are
feeling stretched – budgets are down,
hiring volumes are up and they are
under pressure with regards to
attracting diverse and specialist skillsets.
Secondly, professionals working in talent
acquisition are struggling to
comprehensively leverage digital and
data-enabled processes in a field they
feel is built on interpersonal
relationships.
Thirdly, recruiters feel that the factors
most significantly influencing their firm’s
ability to attract talent are outside of
their immediate control - brand, culture
and visibility.
Finally, the short-term challenges faced
by recruiters to source diverse and
specialist talent may be superseding
their ability to align new talent to other
longer term corporate goals related to
enterprise culture.
In the current climate, all corporate
leadership roles are about balance -
balancing cost management with
expanding deliverables, building
commercial teams while maintaining a
focus on process and reconciling the
benefits of a human touch with the
efficiency of automation. While
recruiters have been instrumental in
ensuring their companies have the right
talent in place to navigate these changes
at an enterprise level, our survey reveals
that recruiters are not immune from the
same challenges they are helping their
organizations to solve.
It is important to note that nearly 40% of
respondents feel that when it comes to
balance, their functions are doing
excellent work. Recruiters are often
inherently competitive people -
competing to find the best talent, fill the
most jobs and best serve their
businesses. So while the findings from
this survey do clearly suggest there is
work to be done, this is perhaps just a
symptom of great people striving to do
even better.
Acquiring Talent in 2019
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 3
Leathwaite’s survey polled a diverse group of professionals from the Talent Acquisition
community, as the graphs below highlight:
Audience: Who did we speak to?
Q: Where are you based? Q: What is the headcount of the Recruiting function within your organization?
Q: Which best describes the scope of your current role?
Other includes COO/COS’s for talent acquisition and broader HR professionals who oversee recruiting.
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 4
The market is at varying stages of evolution—nearly an equal number of functions see
themselves as operating at a very high standard, as those that see their functions in
need of drastic change.
Q: Overall, how would you rate the quality and effectiveness of your current TA function? 10 being excellent, 1 in need of drastic improvement.
Performance: How are we doing?
0-2.5: 35.1% of respondents (drastic improvement required)
2.5-5: 14% respondents (not great)
5-7.5: 11.7% respondents (fairly good)
7.5-10: 38.2% respondents (think excellent)
// Specialist leaders, including Heads of
Graduate or Executive Recruiting,
feel there is the most work to
be done within their
functions.
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 5
Q: What do you consider to be the biggest strength within your TA function?
// Diversity statistics. Execution track record
// Executive / Campus Recruitment advisory capabilities
// Understanding the business. Strong process
// Highly responsive to client needs and ability to manage high volume
recruiting with a high level of client satisfaction
When asked about their biggest strengths within their recruiting functions, respondents reported
commercial acumen and robust process among the top attributes—and a marriage of the two as
key.
Getting the balance right
Like most corporate leaders, it is clear that
talent acquisition teams are being expected to
do more with less—over 60% of respondents
expect the volume of hires they will need to
manage to increase over the next 12 months,
while the majority also expect the headcount
and budgets available to recruitment functions
to remain flat or decrease.
More with less
Decrease significantly
Decrease moderately
Stay the same Increase moderately
Increase significantly
Budget to hire within your recruiting function Row Response %
2.9% 20% 54.3% 25.7% 0%
Headcount of your recruit-ing function Row Response %
5.7% 5.7% 54.3% 37.1% 0%
Volume of hires managed by your recruiting function Row Response %
2.9% 5.7% 31.4% 40% 20%
Budget for hires made by your recruiting function Row Response %
2.9% 11.4% 51.4% 28.6% 5.7%
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 6
LinkedIn remains the leading platform for finding individual talent, even for executive recruiters.
Perhaps more surprising is that LinkedIn also ranks as the number one utilized resource when it
comes to staying abreast of company news and broader cross-industry themes.
Q: When seeking talent-related information, which sources do you currently use?
The global market:
What does good look like?
Q: Which Company’s talent acquisition function do you most aspire to emulate?
Corporate recruiters feel that large technology
firms are leading the market when it comes to
running best-in-class functions. However
recruiters also feel that culture and a visible
brand are the number one tools when it comes
to attracting the top talent. This then begs the
question—is it really the recruiting processes
of large tech firms that lead the way or are
they reliant on strong branding to do the
selling?
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 7
Alignment to Company Goals:
The Culture Catch 22
We compared results from this survey to the
results from our 2019 Global HR survey, which
sought feedback from CHROs and other leaders
in HR functions who are responsible for the
talent once they’re in the firm.
Recruiters feel that culture is central to
attracting the best talent, while HR leaders feel
that culture is the number one area requiring
improvement across their organizations. Herein
lines the challenge, in which Recruiting and HR
functions need to align in order to solve the
culture dilemma going forward. New people
may be needed to improve the culture, but
without the right culture, can you attract the
right people?
See the answers from both communities
compared below.
Global Talent Acquisition Survey responses
Q: What components do you think are important in the recruitment process in order to attract the best talent?
Global HR Survey 2019 responses
Q: Rank the key areas for improvement within your organization:
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 8
When HR leaders and Recruiters are asked
about challenges, their responses highlight a
misalignment around focus.
As all parties feel that culture is the number one
issue, recruiters don’t even feature finding
candidates who match the culture in their top
three challenges. They are instead focused on
finding diverse or specialist talent, in a
competitive market—suggesting that present
day deliverables may be superseding longer-
term corporate goals.
Are HR and Recruiting Aligned?
Q: What are the biggest hiring challenges your organization faces today?
Global Talent Acquisition Survey responses
Global HR Survey 2019 responses
Below represents the thoughts of the senior HR community, predominantly CHRO’s, from the
global survey we conducted at the start of 2019, clearly indicating that there are differing priorities
between the two communities.
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 9
Data & Analytics:
Big Bad Data (and Technology)
Only 54.3% of respondents said their companies
use data and analytics within talent acquisition,
and only 5.7% noted the use of any kind of
artificial intelligence. Interestingly, most
corporate recruiting functions are still heavily
reliant on traditional methods of recruiting,
using push advertising channels such as job
boards (91.4%) and paid social media ads (also
91.4%) - likely reaching the same audience.
Considering the global appetite for video, it was
also quite surprising to see that it was only being
used by 42.9% of the respondents, highlighting
that there is still plenty of room for growth with
this channel within the talent function.
// Only 5.7% of respondents are
using any kind of artificial
intelligence.
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 10
Q: What recruiting methods do you think are the most impactful in the current landscape?
Q: What are the areas you MOST want to improve within your recruiting function?
Recruiters highlighted that the use of data and
analytics is the area they feel is most in need of
improvement within their functions, but at the
same time they still feel that the traditional
recruiting methods—referrals and personal
networking—outperform data insight when it
comes to tangible impact.
This fuels the need for improved understanding
and use of data within the recruiting functions in
order for recruiters to realize the true potential
and impact that technology can have on their
day-to-day from processes to strategic insight.
Are the old ways the best ways?
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 11
// Information on compensation
data and trends.
// Benchmark data from new sectors
like fintech would be of great interest.
// Quantitative data showing key
trends, rather than qualitative.
// Relevant, pragmatic insight and data in a digestible format - most content
is too convoluted.
Q: Where is there a gap in the marketplace when it comes to content that meets your needs in talent acquisition?
It is clear from the responses in this survey that
recruiting leaders feel technology, and the data
it helps manage & analyze, will be the
foundation on which the future of corporate
recruiting is built.
However, respondents have also been clear that
this is a people business and digital tools will
only be truly effective when they can enhance
the human aspects of their work, not replace
them. We hope that this information has proved
both interesting and useful, and that in some
instances a challenge shared will become a
challenge halved.
We intend to use these findings to create
content and forums to explore the key areas
further and help facilitate the ongoing
development of talent acquisition. We look
forward to working in partnership with the
recruiting community as this sector continues to
evolve.
Conclusion
While there is an appetite among talent
acquisition professionals to improve their digital
capabilities and use of analytics, the market
hasn’t yet responded. The recruiting community
felt there was a big gap when it came to serving
them targeted content around data, specifically
pragmatic insights and digestible formats.
But even if they wanted to improve...
The Human Capital Specialists | www.leathwaite.com 12 Learn more about Leathwaite
Tom Pemberton, Director
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Global HR Team
Chris Rowe, Partner
Anne Loftus, Consultant
Rebecca Otter, Consultant
Dana Slade, Director
Kityu Chu, Senior Associate
Andrew Wallace, Managing Partner
London
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Regional Leadership Team
Chris Rowe, Partner
Zurich
James Lawrence-Brown, Partner
Hong Kong
Martha Harvey-Jones, Partner
London
Paul Groce, Partner
New York
