Having a clear strategy is essential to recruitment, and to the human resources department of an organisation in general. With so many different objectives to meet and a limited pool of resources - human and financial - to be used, teams must decide clearly what their priority is.
A portfolio approach is one way to allocate resources efficiently, and so gain a competitive advantage over your peers by finding a way to do more with less. In this article we’ll be explaining what the portfolio approach is, how it can be used, and how it delivers results for your business.
What is the Portfolio approach?
The key behind the portfolio approach is that it mirrors an investment strategy - the same way that those who design financial portfolios aim to invest wisely to deliver the maximum possible return, those who are managing a human resource team aim to invest resources wisely to get the most out of their team.
Practically, this is done by allocating your resources according to cells in a grid. The cells should represent elements of your strategy - areas such as talent retention, career management and the tracking of employee engagement - and should be filled according to the proportion of your resources your department wants to use on them. This can be done in relation to the actual amount of money your department has to spend, or simply as a percentage.
Being precise about the aspects of your strategy is fundamental to getting the portfolio approach right. Recruitment strategy can focus more on the use of job board aggregators or on social media, on building up a pool of strong candidates to draw from or on driving recruitment in specific expansion periods.
Talent retention, training and onboarding can all also fall under the purview of the recruitment team. If new hires find themselves leaving soon after arrival, it may come out with word of mouth that new arrivals aren’t finding the work what they expected. While all of these are important to a recruitment team, they can’t all be focused on to the same extent, which is why it is vital to allocate resources wisely between them.
How does the Portfolio approach add value?
It can be difficult to keep hold of differing priorities - the portfolio approach makes what can be confusing even to recruitment leaders much easier to understand and implement. The analogy of a portfolio makes strategy clearer and simpler, and allows priorities to be understood with numerical clarity, rather than a vague mission statement.
When your recruitment strategy is put down in the form of a numerical grid, it is also simpler to tweak with time, as all of the initial initiatives are visible in one easy to understand document. If a certain priority - such as fostering a collaborative culture within the recruitment department - has been achieved, it is then easier to divert resources away from it and to other recruitment initiatives.
How does inploi’s Attract module help your business with the Portfolio approach?
If you’ve been convinced to give the portfolio approach a try, inploi’s Attract module can help. Primarily the module’s broad reach will make it easier to increase the diversity of your talent pool, and hit your organisation’s recruitment targets, freeing up other resources for other parts of the portfolio.
With inploi’s Attract module you’ll gain instant access to multiple audiences and millions of potential job seekers. And our perfect data markup, firm partnerships and direct integrations will ensure that your jobs are listed quickly and indexed properly. The module’s ease of use with one connection extends further to inploi’s campaign management, which includes designers, data insights, media buying, inploi’s technology, and highly detailed performance analytics.
