APAC Strategic Human Capital Management — Talent Acquisition



As Australian enterprises, including federal agencies, healthcare organizations and higher education institutions, grapple with outdated legacy systems while attempting to evolve in order to better address the new challenges of the 21st century, many Chief Human Capital Officers (CHCOs) and other HR leaders look to take a two-tiered plan of attack. In the long term, they understand the importance of establishing a framework built around ensuring their organizations are equipped to handle their missions and human capital priorities, policies, procedures and business requirements. At the same time, some initiatives can’t – or shouldn’t — wait for 2, 5 or 10 years to be implemented.

The good news is that today, many critical initiatives don’t need to wait.

Targeted Human Capital Initiatives

Real, impactful improvements can be made in the short term, and thoughtful HR leaders throughout the APAC region are making moves now to implement important changes. They are looking to increase the number of high-performing employees in order to improve their ability to meet their organizations’ missions.

Various functional areas comprise the big picture of how HR leaders are looking to improve human capital management in order to drive increased strategic value to their organizations. In a series of posts, I’ll take a look at each of these areas, beginning with the talent acquisition piece of talent management. With the hiring freeze recently lifted, Australian federal agencies have an opportunity to efficiently improve their workforce – but improving their hiring process is a key element of doing so. Leaders in other industries have the same opportunity.

Fixing Talent Acquisition

It’s a vicious cycle, but it all starts with talent acquisition and the problems are voluminous:

  • Time to hire takes too long
  • There are too many manual, error prone processes
  • Workflow processes for requisitions and job approval are inefficient
  • Assessing candidates is too time consuming
  • There is a disconnect between HR and hiring managers
  • Interview management, including scheduling and coordination, is inefficient
  • Tracking job and vacancy statuses is cumbersome
  • Onboarding new employees takes too long
  • Inefficient use of existing talent pools
  • High-level information for senior management and executives is generally unavailable.

The challenges don’t end with hiring top talent, but getting the best possible people in the door is a logical place to start for organizations. If candidates are too frustrated with a cumbersome hiring process, they are bound to move on to other job opportunities, and any chance to engage and develop a new employee is wasted.

Hiring and People Analytics

Acendre has worked closely with HR leaders across the APAC region from the federal government, healthcare and higher education to understand their business requirements. It continues to be our goal to help these organizations meet their mission needs and help them achieve their human capital priorities.

A key area of focus and expertise for Acendre is business intelligence and analytics to help organizations become more data-driven in their culture and decision making. An important element of this philosophy is an understanding of the complexities of the myriad of different systems that typically comprise a full HRIT and the data sharing that must occur seamlessly between them. This starts with talent acquisition. The importance of data and analytics to human capital initiatives, including talent acquisition, shows no sign of abating.

A Solution Suite

A longstanding goal of integrated talent management has been to quickly find the best possible talent and ensure it develops well and remains with the organization. A frequent winner of talent management awards and recognized industry leader, Acendre’s Natural Talent solution suite addresses these needs. While the focus of this post is talent acquisition, it is always important to remember that is just one piece of a much larger puzzle, so I’ll touch on a couple other areas here very briefly.

Acendre’s award-winning eRecruit talent acquisition system has been designed specifically to address enterprise hiring challenges and requirements. Numerous federal agencies and other large enterprises use eRecruit to streamline their hiring practices, ensuring the bests candidates are selected faster, hit the ground running and perform productively from the start of their employment.

ePerform addresses the performance management, engagement, succession planning and employee development needs. The solution helps streamline and fast-track organizations’ performance and appraisal processes by aligning individual and team goals with organization goals to help the organization meet its mission and objectives. ePerform also helps identify the next generation of leaders and ensure continuity across your organization. With ePerform, organizations can nurture top performers and ensure their best employees are fully engaged, taking corrective action if they are not to improve retention.

Many of these improvements are driven by reporting and analysis of data. By capturing data at all touch points – from recruitment and hiring through performance and development. Data can show where your recruiting resources are best spent, what characteristics make up your best employees and managers, which employees are most engaged and the best fit for meeting your succession plans, and a plethora of other insight. Acendre’s People Analytics Center of Excellence focuses on every aspect of data analysis for HR organizations.

Getting Strategic

Australian Chief Human Capital Officers and their teams recognize the need for a more strategic view and plan to address human capital management requirements and drive increased strategic value. As they collaborate on the best ideas to achieve this, there are also more tactical initiatives that can be undertaken in the near-term that will ultimately drive strategic plans and missions. While several HR pillars comprise the overall strategy, improving talent acquisition is one area proven to have rewards as agencies embark on their integrated talent management journey. 



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