Is Cat Herding your Talent Acquisition Strategy?
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 6:18 am
Early in my career I had the pleasure of working with Electronic Data Systems (EDS). During the height of the first dotcom bubble we hired a brilliantly creative advertising firm (Fallon) that produced an advertisement originally aired during the 2000 Super Bowl. The ad lampooned the challenges of herding cats as a metaphor for wrangling organization’s IT systems and information. I was working in the Bay Area (San Francisco), where the competition was fierce. We were struggling to hire enough new staff to support our many new outsourcing engagements. My recruiting team was constantly challenged to find creative ways to generate candidates, our Hiring Managers were under consistent pressure to fill positions and the analogy of “herding cats” seemed apropos to our hiring. Our strategy was to do whatever was necessary to hire quickly. In hindsight, not a very effective strategy.
Fast forward to today. As a consultant, I am constantly exposed to organizations austria phone number list that are seeking assistance to move their recruitment effectiveness forward so it would seem natural that my perspective would be skewed towards organizations that are in greatest need of help (or greatest awareness of that need). However prior to my work as a consultant, working internally as a Recruitment Leader or as an RPO provider, the majority of recruiting departments that I encountered operated without any strategy whatsoever, neither macro nor micro. Over the years it has become abundantly clear to me, that without a focused strategy, continuously adjusting that strategy to the employment market, technology and other environmental factors, we all end up chasing our tails. I am often reminded of the “herding cats” analogy when I spend time with customers discussing their recruitment and hiring strategies.
What are the steps to setting and maintaining an effective hiring strategy? First, what is strategy? Webster’s simple definition; “a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time”. When working with my customers, I break down strategy discussion into two areas, macro and micro.
Fast forward to today. As a consultant, I am constantly exposed to organizations austria phone number list that are seeking assistance to move their recruitment effectiveness forward so it would seem natural that my perspective would be skewed towards organizations that are in greatest need of help (or greatest awareness of that need). However prior to my work as a consultant, working internally as a Recruitment Leader or as an RPO provider, the majority of recruiting departments that I encountered operated without any strategy whatsoever, neither macro nor micro. Over the years it has become abundantly clear to me, that without a focused strategy, continuously adjusting that strategy to the employment market, technology and other environmental factors, we all end up chasing our tails. I am often reminded of the “herding cats” analogy when I spend time with customers discussing their recruitment and hiring strategies.
What are the steps to setting and maintaining an effective hiring strategy? First, what is strategy? Webster’s simple definition; “a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal usually over a long period of time”. When working with my customers, I break down strategy discussion into two areas, macro and micro.