Doug Battista

Doug Battista, President of North America Field Operations at Jenny Craig, was honored to be a featured speaker at the 2011 Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference in New York. The conference, titled Setting the Stage, Getting Results: Recruitment Process Outsourcing Roundtable, was hosted by Human Capital Institute, an association that specializes in talent management.

Doug Battista joined John Havanaar from Cummins in a roundtable that centered on outsourcing recruiting using an (RPO) organization. Doug Battista worked with RPO FutureStep in building an entire team to support Nestlé’s ice cream division. While the process achieved the goal, Doug Battista discovered there were challenges to bringing an outside organization in for recruiting.

“No matter how good your RPO partner is, they don’t know your culture like you do,” Doug Battista said in the panel. He added that in order to successfully work with an RPO, an organization would need to get up to speed on the ins and outs of their own particular organization.

FutureStep is a worldwide recruiting firm that specializes in recruiting entire teams to fit an organization’s needs. FutureStep can also hire on a person-by-person basis. While working with FutureStep, Doug Battista learned the challenges of educating an outside recruiting firm on the social environment of a company—often involving things that were hard to put into words.

The conference centered around the impact of the end of the economic crisis on hiring, Doug Battista explains. According to Doug Battista, many sessions discussed the difficulties of recruiting talent in a business world that has changed since recruiters were last scrambling to find workers.

Doug Battista was impressed with the sessions at Setting the Stage, Getting Results, which included an overview of how recruiting firms could utilize social media to get good workers. Digital media has changed the field of staffing, Doug Battista emphasizes, with old methods of recruiting replaced by methods that deliberately attract workers that are connected and up-to-date with modern technology.

Other sessions centered on strategy and competency. As Doug Battista describes, human resource departments are challenged with not only attracting new talent but also ensuring that talent fits an organization’s needs. The competency session focused on the recruiting team itself and why HR teams must be fully staffed with those who have the skill set necessary to meet an organization’s needs, concludes Doug Battista.