These four rules are the foundation of any recruitment function. Understanding them and practicing them is vital to your success.

#1. Talent is scarce and getting scarcer.
Talent, defined as people who possess the skills, capacity, motivation, and energy to create value for your organization, are increasingly hard to find, attract, and keep. This talent is also highly fickle and mobile. 

Half of all workers change employers every three years. This applies to the senior-most levels as well as to entry-level employees. Some organizations report more than 100% annual turnover. Traditional methods of attracting talented people are losing their effectiveness.

Instead, emerging networked, community-based, and referral tools are gaining effectiveness. Retaining talent is also increasingly challenging and traditional methods (e.g., higher salaries and more benefits or perks) are less effective. The Great Resignation and the lack of engagement are clear symptoms that employees are seeking better managers who can coach and guide their careers and who care about them as people.

#2. Talent is wherever it is
Talent is everywhere and recruiters have to recognize that. The talent equation is complex and good people are found in both the active and passive candidate pool as well as from within the current employee population. They can be local or remote, in your country or elsewhere. College students also are poised to become strong talents given fertile working conditions and solid managers. While external recruiting was a very effective primary way to find talent five years ago, in many industries, this is no longer true. There are no single good sources of talent and no one reliable source. Talent is wherever it is.

Traditionally we have relied on “input” indicators to find talent. These are degrees, years of experience, and proof of previous activity. These “inputs” do not necessarily mean that the output will be sound. Numerous ineffective employees have stellar “input” criteria.

It may be less expensive and faster to develop the talent you need or seek out talent from within, but this requires a broader and better-defined set of selection criteria. The focus has to shift to selecting people for basic skills, key behaviors, and accomplishments.

Output-based criteria are more difficult to get than input ones, but they are also much more valuable.

#3. Develop talent or lose
Throughout the 20th century, talent was easy to find and easy to employ. Work was less skilled, and most organizations could quickly assimilate a new employee through basic training programs. If an employee had worked somewhere else for a while, the training required was even less. Training and development were seen as perks and not as essential to success.

That has changed as talent has become a competitive advantage and less abundant. Developing talent is the only way to guarantee that there will be a supply no matter what happens in the marketplace. 

Manufacturing companies long ago realized the value of developing their proprietary sources of raw materials. Service organizations are just understanding that the ability to do this consistently is a competitive advantage. Changing to a development philosophy after 100 years of acquisition philosophy will take time. Only the best see it. Many of the older firms that have established development programs are not reporting talent shortages. They have quietly built their own supply.

Not all development is formal or expensive. Most of what we learn (maybe as much as 90%) is from informal sources such as books, friends, networking, observation, trial-and-error, and inquiry. Environments where people exchange ideas and teach each other emerge in the best organizations. This allows recruiters and managers great flexibility in finding and placing people where they are needed.

#4. Technology is both talent blood and glue
Technology is blood as it carries the life-sustaining “nutrients” or information and decisions about talent to each cell of our organization. Technology is the glue that holds disparate systems together and makes sense out of what we see as chaos. By integrating a complex mixture of websites, referral tools, collaboration sites, screening material, applications, and candidate relationship management software; effective organizations will achieve a systemic paradise.

Candidates can be attracted and “sold” by good technology-aided communications, career sites, chatbots, and so on. They can be vetted and recommended by screening tools and educated and informed by the various collaboration and communication tools at our disposal. By not using these tools, we limit our reach and narrow our sources to the point where we will fail. By using and mixing tools in ways that deliver good talent to our managers when needed, we ensure our success.

While human intervention is important to candidates and hiring managers, we have to change when and how we intervene. As I have written about many times, the skills we need are vastly different from those that ensured success five years ago. It is all about how we interact and live with these four simple rules.

Each of these rules has been tested over the past five years and stands strong. They cannot be argued about, nor can we choose to like or dislike them. They are the way it is, and we have to adapt to their implications if we are successful.

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