In a recent quick poll of recruiting staff, we found that more than half of recruiting organizations respond effectively to changes in business conditions. So, Recruiting organizations are moderately agile. The story is different, though, when you look at Recruiting’s influence on change. Less than one-third of recruiters think that recruiting plays an influential role in setting corporate strategy, influences decisions made by business leaders, or influences hiring managers’ talent decisions. Proactively shaping – and not just reacting to changes in – talent and business strategy is where most organizations have the most room for improvement and where we see the best ones headed.

As we arrive at the last part in our four-part series about what I’ve learned about global recruiting from leading recruiting executives, we focus on the last core challenge: responding to current and evolving skill shortages. Skill availability is a critical issue for recruiting, and an issue that many CEOs the world over are concerned with. As one recruiting executive put it: “Talent management and long-range planning is squarely a CEO and board issue.” Leading recruiting executives are responding in two ways: (1) optimizing their direct sourcing capability to more effectively compete for scarce, hard to find talent, and (2) strengthening partnerships with universities. Organizations are focused on improving their direct sourcing capability by building

Following up from Part 1 of this post—where I introduced global recruiting challenges faced by some of the world’s leading recruiting executives—now I’ll summarize the first of those challenges: leading recruiting across markets and divisions with varied needs. The complexity associated with managing recruiting operations across multiple (often unfamiliar) markets and/or divisions is substantial. Recruiting executives worldwide grapple with the question of standardization. What do I need to standardize and what can I leave to be locally customized? Many recruiting executives speak about the need to identify the key components that need to be standardized globally, and to focus on managing those while allowing for customization elsewhere. We’ve heard differing theories about how to get