Acquiring Young Professional Talents: how does talent’s previous workplace affect talent’s real working capacity?​

Acquiring Young Professional Talents: how does talent’s previous workplace affect talent’s real working capacity?

One of the challenges Recruiters often face when trying to acquire new employee is to identify fit talents from thousands of recruitment applicants. Some may find that administrative filters such as talent’s university background, GPA, or previous company may be the easiest way to shrink the pool. However, does this method actually help Recruiters to find the right talents? While it does help to make the process faster, but is it actually effective? Does it not do more harm than good?

To answer the question, we analyze our talent pool who finished our assessment with working experience ranging from two to five years, coming from diverse functions and workplace. We try to understand if top companies, which stereotypically have stricter recruitment process and have the ability to offer better development initiatives, would naturally have better talents compared to other organizations.

We compare the assessment result of those who come from top companies (companies who are listed in Universum’s top 50 companies) and those who do not. The result can be seen in the graph below:

From the graph, it can be understood that there are several factors that talent from Non-Top Companies scored higher compared to those who come from Top Companies, including Problem Solving, Value Focused, Self Projection Integrity, Perseverance and Self Management. While talents from Top Companies scores higher in Collaborative Ownership, Situational Integrity and Self Awareness. (find more details about our assessment here)

This shows that there are many other determining factors that better correspond to talent’s working capacity than generalizing them based only on their past working places. Filtering or eliminating recruitment applicants based on talents’ previous companies to shrink applicants pool may adversely affect the effort in acquiring hidden gem talents with capacities that match with the company’s needs. It is suggested to rely in a more objective and targeted method to capture talent’s real capabilities in a recruitment process.