HR managers need to look beyond engaging just their full-time employees and should start maintaining relationships with temporary workers and retirees, according to John Healy, Vice President and Managing Director for Global Talent Supply Chain at recruitment firm Kelly Services.

In an interview with The Hindu Business Line, Mr Healy discussed strategic workforce planning and supply chain principles that drive proactive management of workforce strategies across both directly-hired and outsourced labour categories.

“Talent supply chain management is what organisations should adopt to manage talent. HR departments usually engage with those that are currently on their payroll.  So, as an HR manager, if 50% of my workforce is on my payroll and the other 50% is on a temporary staffing company’s payroll, am I engaging with the temporary workforce?  HR managers must look beyond engaging just their full-time employees. They need to maintain relationships with temporary workers; with retirees so that the retired workforce can come back some day and mentor employees. Engaging with future employees is also very important to maintain a steady pipeline of talent for the company,” Mr Healy stated.

“Then, there is the boomerang workforce; these are workers who were once on the payroll who left and who came back, as the grass was not greener on the other side. If those workers were highly talented and wanted to come back to the organisation they had left, are HR managers in a position to bring them back at some point?”

When asked if companies should build, buy, or borrow talent, Mr Healy commented: “Globally, 50% of the workforce in organisations are full-time and the rest are temporary workers; unlike in India where organisations prefer to hire full-time employees. The India market is a build-and-buy market for talent. Here, the requirement is more skewed toward full-time talent; therefore, organisations focus on building full-time talent and are going into Tier 2 and 3 cities to build a talent pool.”

Mr Healy identified the online talent community as a market in which India is lagging behind in its talent acquisition strategy: “The entire online talent community is what India is underestimating right now. In India, you have exceptional talent. There is also a focus on repatriating people back into the country, which means there are more people in India with skills that are in high demand as they have experience in international business having worked in different countries across the globe.”

“Many of them may not, for instance, want to brave the Bangalore traffic every day; they may want to work from home, instead. If HR managers are only worried about the company next door that has been poaching its workforce, that’s not enough. I would challenge that and tell them they have more competition than they realise.”

“The war for talent will only get worse as HR managers now have more battlefronts that they are fighting on, and not just with their local competition. They could lose their employees to other organisations from India and abroad that offer opportunities to work online for them. The online talent community is growing, and the people that HR managers are competing with for talent are not all in India, they are all over the world,” Mr Healy concluded.