Career development insight
Charles Hipps, chief executive officer and founder of Oleeo, discusses how organisations can battle talent scarcity Scarcity of talent
I t’s an age-old problem for almost all talent acquisition professionals. Not only is there a deficit of talent, but many do not actually know what their ‘strongest candidate’ looks like, making the art of recruitment seem a more difficult task then it ought to be. It’s a problem getting worse not better. But as we look to the future, and assess the impact this will have on human resources (HR), what does this worry really mean? At Oleeo, we believe it means something acute and serious – the simple fact is that without effective coping strategies, not all organisations will survive. It is evident that the right talent is the greatest competitive advantage there is for an organisation – and that talent is getting scarcer every day. Studies consistently reveal that there already isn’t enough skilled talent to go around, so by 2030 organisations and economies could find themselves in the grip of a talent crisis. In the face of such acute talent shortages, workforce planning and a comprehensive understanding of the talent pipeline are critical. Korn Ferry’s latest study on the future of work, The Talent Crunch (https://bit. ly/2xRz3Gp), explored the gap between future talent supply and demand across these three sectors: finance and business services; manufacturing; and technology, media and telecommunications (TMT). It found that if left unaddressed talent deficits could have a significant impact on several global economies. Indeed, the UK and Germany face the greatest threat to the TMT sector, with potential loss of annual revenues of $27.70 billion (£20
billion) and $30.70 billion (£22.5 billion), respectively, by 2030. So, the only long-term option that business has is to find answers to why they can’t find the talent they want. We believe this will increasingly involve getting to talent faster and earlier. Intelligent automation driven by data driven decision algorithms that help talent acquisition teams speed process and gain competitive edge are key to this. Machines can analyse exponentially more data in a fraction of the time it would take humans. While we’re not so great at unbiased decisions, humans are great at forming relationships: intelligent automation means recruiters can get back to the high- touch, human-touch part of recruiting. Because when we let machines use data to make prescriptive recommendations recruiters can get back to what they love: nurturing great relationships. Algorithms are just smarter and faster than we are, so when we let machines do the repetitive work we are free to spend more time on the high- touch, human side of talent acquisition – nurturing great relationships. But simply predicting that a person is a good fit isn’t enough anymore. What if they won’t accept the offer? What if they are highly likely to leave within the first ninety days? Recruiters focused on high- quality outcomes also need to know who is most likely to accept an offer and stay with the team long enough to make a real impact. Far from just hiring clones of successful employees from yesteryear, talent acquisition is a more end-to-end game
now. Candidates need to be wooed from a very early stage and kept on the adventure up to the point of hire before then using the employee as a future advocate. This means employers must constantly be diversifying from where they get their talent in the first place. Inevitably, organisations do have the capacity to survive, but only if they adapt their strategies for finding talent. For leaders this might mean not taking university graduates at all – but using big data to redefine what a good candidate looks like in different roles and understanding from where the best people in those roles come. This is a move away from academic matching, and more towards making other correlations. It’s only by understanding who succeeds and who is engaged that leaders can redefine exactly who they’re looking for. But there’s another area we believe needs confronting, too: the need for organisations to make much more of early talent recruitment. Today, individuals with the scarce skills companies need to make new connections earlier and earlier. If leaders fail to track and make their own connections with these good people, they’ll lose the first bite of the recruitment cherry. It’s our future leaders who will take decisions about how to adapt and change their businesses, so getting to the best people to make these important choices must be the future focus of HR. Speed, accuracy and relationships – underpinned by technology – are all needed now, and even more so in the future. If leaders improve in all these areas, perhaps dire predictions of skills shortages ahead of us will not come to fruition. But the only way leaders can avert this is by starting to do things differently, starting now. So, what does your best fit hire look like? n
...employers must constantly be diversifying from where they get their talent...
13
Issue 45 | November 2018
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker