On Tuesday, April 3, 2018 at the Spring ERE Conference in San Diego, Tom Darrow, Board President of the Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals (ATAP) led the Association’s first State of the Profession presentation. This presentation focused on 3 topics: 1) demographics of the profession, 2) the results of the 1st TA as a Career Survey and 3) the sharing of three highly innovative TA practices that were among 90 total submitted from those who completed the TA as a Career Survey. The session finished with a special surprise announcement of Global Talent Acquisition Day, the inaugural celebration to take place on September 5, 2018, brought to you by KRT Marketing and ATAP
A copy of the presentation is available below, a summary of the presentation follows.
ATAP State of the Profession Presentation – 2018
Talent Acquisition Profession Demographics
As the professional body for Talent Acquisition, ATAP felt it was important to start to get a better understanding of how many people are in the profession, where they are, what level they are at, who they work for, etc. This was just a first step in measuring the demographics of the profession, ATAP will be diving much deeper into the data from here going forward.
LinkedIn directly provided ATAP insight into the number of TA professionals they have tagged amongst their users, with over 2.2. million worldwide. 844,000 of those were identified in the US, with 87,000 based in the New York City area. ATAP felt that LinkedIn was a good starting point for this research as it’s a good assumption that most TA professionals have a LinkedIn account.
ATAP was also able to search the full LinkedIn database via LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and was able to break down the profession by level (300,000+ Manager level or above, 1.3 Million at the ‘Senior’ individual contributor level) and employer (the largest employers being staffing agencies and RPOs like Hays, Kelly and Adecco, but also large corporate teams at Amazon, Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Facebook).
TA as a Career Survey Results
In January and February 2018, ATAP conducted the very first TA as a Career Survey, measuring the attitudes and perceptions of TA professionals. Over 500 individuals responded, and interesting results included:
- 50{b82145e54dfbe3a58a59cec33300113b09cf99fd28d1209839483dfcfb952449} said that their team increased in size over the past year, 37{b82145e54dfbe3a58a59cec33300113b09cf99fd28d1209839483dfcfb952449} said that team size stayed the same
- 37{b82145e54dfbe3a58a59cec33300113b09cf99fd28d1209839483dfcfb952449} agreed that friends and colleagues outside the profession understood what they did as a TA professional
- 75{b82145e54dfbe3a58a59cec33300113b09cf99fd28d1209839483dfcfb952449} agreed that they would recommend TA as a viable profession/career
- 75{b82145e54dfbe3a58a59cec33300113b09cf99fd28d1209839483dfcfb952449} said that their long-term career ambitions were in TA (as opposed to in HR but not in TA, or outside TA and HR altogether)
The survey will reviewed and revised as necessary, but will for the most part be kept constant to enable benchmarking moving forward.
Innovative TA Practice Finalists
Those who completed the TA as a Career Survey were invited to submit a TA practice that they felt was particularly innovative. Over 90 practices were submitted and ultimately 3 were selected to be showcased in the presentation at ERE. To be considered an innovative practice, one did not necessarily need to apply technology as a part of the practice, or be a large brand name. The 3 finalists were selected purely based upon their ability to apply a novel, creative solution to achieve improved results or to address a glaring issue impacting employers and candidates alike. The finalists included (links to videos describing each practice found below):
- Partnering for the Greater Good – Dynamic Recycling: Kristy Bronk, TA Manager
- Restart@bbh – Brown Brothers Harriman: Laura Scherban, Sr VP, Global Head of TA
- Leveraging Scrum Model – Manhattan Associates: Chris Stanzione, Director TA Americas
ATAP foundational sponsor Checkster also provided a brief recap of the innovative practices here. ATAP will continue to solicit and recognize innovative practices in the annual TA as a Career survey going forward.