CWS 3.0: July 2, 2014

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Silver is the new gold: Leveraging second-place candidates' potential

In the search for competitive, quality talent that can be accessed at the required time, costs, place and length of service, companies are looking at more creative sources for the needed talent and skill sets. One often overlooked creative source is “previously vetted talent,” the so-called silver medalist.

A silver medalist is a candidate who has gone through an organization’s formal permanent talent acquisition process.  They are not the hundreds of folks who submitted résumés to a specific job posting, but the three to five vetted candidates that successfully got to the hiring manager interview stage of the formal hiring process.

Traditional permanent hiring starts with a vetting process that precedes any interview with the hiring manager. There are a number of steps a candidate might need to navigate successfully in order to get to the interview stage. That vetting process can include skill-set requirements, education, experience, growth potential, compensation ranges, cultural fit and can even incorporate company goals on minority and diversity participation in the workforce. This vetting process can result in three to five candidates who move on to be interviewed by the hiring manager.

Recruiting teams invest a lot of time and effort to create the interview slate in today’s professional corporate talent acquisition process. While some of those candidates may be deemed unsuitable, most often the hiring manager has to choose one over other well-qualified candidates. Those folks are your silver medalists.

The question is what happens to these vetted candidates who don’t get hired?

Some progressive and competitively aggressive organizations are creating a process to get these candidates further engaged by connecting them with other opportunities within their organizations. Leveraging the efforts and costs spent on vetting talent should not end when the hiring manager makes the final hiring decision. Indeed, the skill sets and experience and other factors that led the candidate to the interview stage creates an attractive, vetted, cost-effective talent pool for other opportunities (contingent or even permanent engagements) at the company.

Leveraging silver medalists can be challenging, though. Such challenges range from creating a reliable process/talent pool that carefully promotes this vetted talent across an organization, to creating a standard process to engage the silver medalists most effectively. There might also be some risk concerns that will need to be carefully reviewed and addressed, such as establishing who owns the usage rights to these vetted candidates or how confidentiality that was required by some vetted candidates during the original hiring process will be managed in a broader talent pool exposure. Additionally, sometimes the interview stage’s vetting process eliminates any future engagement potential for specific individuals whether that be a perm or CW opportunity. So they need to be removed from the emerging "silver medalists" talent pool.

Silver medalists can create an attractive pool of talent that is available every single day … easily searchable and available for reconsideration for contingent or other permanent needs. It is a talent pool that has been created with careful company vetting procedures, time, effort and costs. It seems wasteful that organizations do not systematically leverage this talent pool to cost-effectively and competitively fulfill needed contingent workforce engagements. But it will also require careful program policy considerations to mitigate risk and leverage the potential cost-effectiveness. It might also serve as an important initial step toward an integrated, total talent management program strategy and mindset.