High-quality talent contributes to business outcomes quickly and substantially, even as business goals change. To find these high performers armed with the right skills, recruiters must evolve far beyond filling roles based on traditional profiles.
Here are tips on how to reimagine recruiting strategies to identify, find and appeal to high-quality talent with the right critical skills to drive business performance.
- Digitalization drives need for new skills
Given the fundamental transformation that organizations are going through — that is, digitalization — there are new skills that organizations need to be effective, to be competitive today. Now those new skills might be skills that are new to the organization or new to the world. Regardless, data shows a massive increase in the evolution of skills in the past few years. That means that hiring managers aren’t as familiar anymore with the skills that they need to be successful and lead successful teams.
- Employee value propositions need modernizing
When you think about the employee value proposition — what an organization chooses to focus on in terms of the offer that they put to a potential candidate — that offer is based on what we know about that candidate. If you’ve been hiring in the past for a particular role, you’ve come to know who is a competitive candidate for that role.
We’ve done years of analysis and research into what that individual’s preferences are, so we get to a point where we say, not only we know that you’re the right profile for this role, but we also say, we know what you want in terms of compensation and benefits, future career opportunities, development opportunities, the quality of the work and the people you work with. And we put that together in an employment value proposition that we know will be attractive to you.
That doesn’t work when you don’t have that fundamental understanding of the profile that you’re seeking to fill, particularly for a position that is radically different or where the profile that you want is different or more diverse than the profile that you’ve had in the past.
We need our employment value proposition to be not just a broadcast to the market, but also a listening device, a device that understands where we see and where we hear different preferences from new and more diverse segments of the skills market that we’re recruiting from. We need to be able to adapt and create roles, create jobs, create attractive opportunities, not to talent that we’ve recruited in the past, but that we want to recruit in the future.
- key hiring phases
Macro shifts in the global labour market have impacted the way we’ve traditionally done hiring and the ability to bring quality talent, specifically diverse talent, into the organization. The three key phases of hiring are:
1) “Needs definition”
The macro shift that has affected the way we’ve done needs definition historically is the evolution of skills. We’ve seen a rapid evolution of skills, new skills coming into organizations today. New skills that we need for which we haven’t recruited before, as well as unusual world skills related to digital and other areas of digitalization in the global labour market.
2) Sourcing
We’ve seen in terms of sourcing, the dispersion of skills. Skills today don’t just come out of the cast-iron gates of an Ivy League university. They come out of basements, they come out of libraries, they come out of cafes.
3) Talent conversion
We see the rising value of the employee experience — increased expectations for employees in which their employment value proposition, is personalized, customized. A static promise that we typically have placed in the market or that we’ve extended to candidates as potential hires of our organization is no longer resonant.
Potential hires want to find different aspects of their offer and fine-tune not just compensation and benefits, but things related to the actual design of the job itself and the actual design of the work that they’ll be doing day to day.
So overall, shifting the focus of job descriptions toward outcome rather than inputs into a job is a simple, yet powerful way of appealing more broadly to diverse and otherwise excluded segments from your hiring process.
Bastian Consulting is a boutique search practise that concentrates on sourcing leaders that deliver change across the Asia Pacific, we have the expertise to source leaders that can transform your business and thrive in times of rapid change. To know more, you can reach out to Tony on +61 (0) 409 090 434 or tony@bconsult.io
Source: Gartner
