Recruiting and employee development are core HR functions. When you and your colleagues can successfully find and keep the best-trained, most enthusiastic people for open positions, you make your company stronger for the future. When HR finds innovative ways to align strategy, people and processes, everybody wins. That's why it's vital for your organization's leaders to address talent acquisition and management.

In June 2004, the Harvard Business Review reported, "The skills and esprit of individuals and groups, the strategies, methods, processes, ideas and intellectual property that are the harvest of their thinking - separate winning from lagging companies." The challenge, of course, is how to build a sound strategy for the acquisition and management of a talented workforce.

Developing a winning strategy for employee acquisition and management can be easier than it sounds. Many people think of training, for instance, as the key to leveraging their human capital. Training is not the sole path to success, but it plays a strong role. Training benefits many areas simultaneously, including compensation, recruitment and retention. But recruiting, screening and comprehensive human capital management are important, too. This article will cover three key elements of a sound strategy for building a winning workforce —the recruiting process, background screening and talent acquisition/management technology.

1. Recruiting
Companies across North America are looking to make recruiting strategic, as opposed to reactive. They're moving away from print advertising as the Internet becomes a stronger presence in recruiting at all organizational levels, and many of them are encouraging participation of dedicated hiring managers. Skill testing and psychometric testing are becoming less of a novelty and companies are beginning to target passive candidates as a way to build the most successful workforce. Ceridian hears from HR professionals who seek measurements that can tie together all the components of recruiting - a "dashboard" that will provide meaningful metrics about not just the candidates, but about the entire recruiting process.

Ceridian is proud to offer recruiting solutions that help organizations improve quality of service to their customers, both internally and externally. Our solutions provide greater organization to the entire hiring process and standardize workflows. Ceridian's customers are particularly pleased with our recruiting solutions because they offer access to the latest technology and reduce cost per hire. All this makes it possible to automate administrative tasks, allowing recruiters to focus on top candidates. Look for recruiting solutions that are PIPEDA compliant. Also, make sure the solution you select lets you leverage the company Web site for automatic data entry and maximizing the candidate pool.

2. Background screening
Background screening including reference checks, credit checks, police reports and education/employment verification has come into its own. Why has business embraced background screens so enthusiastically? Take a look at the statistics:

• The average cost of a bad hire is 30 percent of the new employee's first year of earnings (U.S. Department of Labor).
• One in six violent crimes occurs in the workplace (U.S. Department of Justice).
• Twenty five percent of all résumés and applications contain at least one fabrication (Society for Human Resources Management).
• The average organization loses more than six percent of its annual revenue to fraud and abuse (Association of Certified Fraud Examiners).