How focused on talent strategy are you, really?

Ted Bauer is a contributing author to College Recruiter

By Ted Bauer, contributing writer to College Recruiter

A year ago at the Reinventing America Summit, one session was on “Winning The Big Talent Game.” (The sub-title of the corresponding Forbes article was “It’s not about snacks and scooters.”)

Kip Wright, SVP of Manpower North America, had a sobering thought at this event: “Do you, every month, look at your financial plan? Of course,” he said. “How many of you spend months looking at your talent plan? We’ve got to fundamentally think very selfishly and aggressively about how we manage our talent.”

We do. And if you’re a smaller company, this is even more relevant — because your resources may be limited compared to some of your enterprise competitors. If you have better people, you’ll win those key market share/partner battles — but there’s a belief that you need to break the bank to get better people. You don’t.

No matter how you approach digital vs. in-person, your goal should be to maximize your ROI from your college recruiting efforts. To do that, you might need to move around some budget buckets: less on-campus and more interactive/digital/social/job board work.