8 Recruiting Strategy Game-Changers from 2021 to Impact 2022

Written by Erin Geiger | December 31, 2021

Wrapping up our webinar series in 2021, we had three talent acquisition leaders form our latest peer forum. It was a lively, no holds barred discussion focused on having gone through the ringer this past 20 months but also a look toward talent acquisition in 2022.

What were the biggest challenges that kept them up at night?
What was their biggest lesson learned during all of this?
How has their talent acquisition organization shifted?

These and many more questions are answered at length. You can tune into the entire discussion, “A Talent Acquisition Peer Forum: Lessons Learned and Winning Strategies for the Future” here.

Below, we’ve curated just a few of the responses given to some of these critical questions. Take a look as you solidify your strategy for 2022 and beyond.

Things have changed quite dramatically in the past 20 months in that many of us have been primarily working from our home offices and not only has the pandemic caused a lot of people to rethink their priorities, but the criteria that candidates use to decide who they work for and where they work has changed dramatically with both flexibility and values front and center; along with what has traditionally been priorities around compensation, title, and development opportunities. As a result teams have had to quickly understand how our company offers things around those priorities – flexibility, values, diversity, equity and inclusion and how to change our narrative to really display the employee value proposition that we have around those. In addition, we were caught off guard by what became the “Great Resignation” and we’ve had to very quickly recognize that the things that attract candidates are the same things that help our employees understand the value of staying at BioMarin so we both recruit and re-recruit as part of our day-to-day efforts.

– Johanna Lucas, Executive Director, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc.

With a compelling enough business case, an organization will meet the needs of flexibility (even if they dragged their feet pre-pandemic)

– Shelia Gray, VP, Global Talent Acquisition, Quadient

The world of video interaction completely went to a whole new level very quickly. For our TA organization a lot of initial candidate interfacing was over the phone and then onsite interviews. We then had to switch to doing everything virtually. That led to technical issues, had to create a more robust technology strategy and gave us a whole new approach. Really did it to help things move in the short-term but it has stuck around because we found the candidate experience was much better. They tended to like the video interaction and it gave us another tool for reporting and made us more efficient than before. It was supposed to be a short-term reaction but it has ended up being standard practice moving forward.

– Rich Genovese, Talent Acquisition Leader, Jazz Pharmaceuticals

We had to change quite a bit with the changing priorities of the candidate, so rather than highlighting certain aspects of our value prop that we traditionally have done, we’ve had to talk about our belief in a flexible model to support the wholeness in life, our commitment to social justice and the environment predominantly to the younger employees as their ratio has increased. We are dealing with a limited candidate pool so looking at how to draw from the well but also to replenish the well. STEM programs, partnering with agencies to find critical and underrepresented students.

– Johanna Lucas, Executive Director, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc.

Global mobility and relocation sat with TA but now looking at certain functions and programs in TA, would it be housed there or in HR or within the responsibility of business units?

– Rich Genovese, Talent Acquisition Leader, Jazz Pharmaceuticals

We were caught off guard by the level of resignations we had last year so had to very quickly stabilize the organization, part of that was bringing on 5 additional contract recruiters and an additional coordinator. Quickly pivoted my whole FTE team to focus on projects in order to continue to progress tools and systems. When saw the results of the resignation, had to tell them to table the project work by bringing on 6 additional people to stabilize the organization and backfill the roles lost. Continuing to try to figure out – do we have the right people in the right places, can we outsource, in a state of flux as changes continue to happen.

– Johanna Lucas, Executive Director, BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc.

The amount of competitiveness in 2020 and 2021 caught us off guard as we thought everyone would hunker down and stay put but we saw the total opposite. The venture capital market was busier than ever, a lot of companies from a retention perspective didn’t count on that causing the attrition rate. The attrition rates created much more demand.

– Rich Genovese, Talent Acquisition Leader, Jazz Pharmaceuticals

Our cost per hire has gone up. Our time to fill has gone up but so has the industry average. We pride ourselves on retention and have seen pockets of turnover that we’ve not seen before. We still use the same measures of success but the baseline has gone up as the market has changed. We had to implement more things around sign-on bonuses, lump sum relocation, so the cost has gone up for recruiting to maintain the quality.

– Shelia Gray, VP, Global Talent Acquisition, Quadient

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