Increasing your chances for success in finding and keeping Top Talent

According to an article in The Wall Street Journal, Google is now in a Battle to Keep Talent. It's a pretty stunning state of affairs. Let's face it the economy in the U.S. is worse off currently than Canadas and this isn't just any "boring" old company we're talking about. It's Google, a company with a reptutation for attracting top talent simply on the strength of its name alone.

What does this mean for Canadian companies? Well we think it's a another sign that that finding and keeping top talent in Canada is going to be increasingly difficult. We're all at least somewhat familiar with the work done by Statistics Canada and the Conference Board of Canada that predicts a shortage of 350,00 skilled workers in Canada by 2015, this is a example of how that shortage isn't going to just suddenly appear. There simply won't be enough workers until midnight December 31st, 2014, followed by the vanishing of over 300,000 people. The labour shortage is a process that will be ongoing, and in many cases has already started.

So what can you do to make sure your company doesn't feel the pinch?

At TalentOyster we talk about Canada's Hidden Talent Pool, what that means and our access to it. In short there is a currently a candidate pool of nearly 5,000,000 Canadians who are seldom reached by "traditional" media. We connect with this pool using non-mainstream media like in-language, community or "ethnic" newspapers, websites and radio. It's a unique audience of virtually untapped sourcing potential.

We would be the first to agree that you should be posting on mainstream job boards like Monster, using talent and recruiting agencies for candidate intake and continuing to make efforts with your employment branding strategies. But you should also look to diversify your sourcing strategies to make sure you are including everyone, and we think TalentOyster helps you do exactly that. In the end we think having a sourcing strategy that is truly all-inclusive increases your chances for success in finding and retaining top talent. If you're not in a battle for talent yet the Google example should serve as a warning of what's to come.