What makes the difference between winners and losers in today’s digital world is the ability to identify, recruit and retain the digital talent that makes the technology work
Delivering digital transformation without the right talent is hard. Especially when the talent pool is shrinking.
In their New Way of Working Series, Boston Consulting explains, “There can be no Digital Transformation without the right people. As Digital Transformation disrupts the workplace, one factor more than any other will determine which companies turn digital to their advantage. That critical element is people”
Businesses that want to thrive in the modern economy are embarking on a Digital Transformation journey and need to deliver the necessary people, and cultural change to do so.
Digital Transformation requires a new generation of talent with an entrepreneurial mindset who can harness technology, drive innovation and empower this change.
However, organisations are struggling more than ever to find the right people with the right technology skills because a perfect storm is brewing; we are faced with exploding skills gaps combined with a fundamental shift in the way people are increasingly looking for work.
The move to digital isn’t just disrupting the way in which we order taxis or book holidays, it is also creating new societal norms. The way in which we interact with each other, the very nature of how we communicate, is changing the entire employment industry as people increasingly look for work in different ways.
What are the main trends we’re seeing today?
Now harder than ever to engage people
Candidates are becoming de-sensitised
Active candidates moving to online recruitment platforms
However, the active talent pool is shrinking as more people expect work to find them
Move away from Linkedin
Balance of power shifted from employers to candidates
DX means it’s now a level playing field for all employers
Ghosting
Structural change in the skills base
Talent Acquisition is now one of the biggest challenges to growth
Increased digital footprints mean it is now easier than ever before to identify talent.
However, this increased visibility is now making it harder than ever before to engage people. The anti-social effect.
The constant barrage of job notifications across all social platforms is causing apathy and desensitisation to opportunities presented by recruiters.
As a result, were seeing a backlash towards recruiters. Recruiters (both agency and in-house) have a bad name, commonly now viewed as a form of paparazzi. The association has rendered your traditional approach, the one you are associated with, as ineffective. The recruiting professionals who aren’t focused on their personal brands and improving the Candidate Experience are operating in the same fashion, with similar, or declining results.
The uberisation of the recruitment industry can now be seen in the way in which people prefer to look for work.
Driven by the speed and convenience of the App Economy, it is clear more and more people are choosing online recruitment platforms as their preferred method when looking for work.
They are looking for an end to end, seamless experience, moving away from intermediaries such as Job Boards, CV databases & recruitment agents.
The days when talent acquisition strategies were focused on attracting candidates are gone. That’s because less and less people are actively looking for work.
More and more in-demand professionals are adopting a reactive mindset when looking for career opportunities due to their increased online visibility and the steady flow of new career opportunities that find them daily, sometimes, hourly.
People are no longer looking for work, the best people now expect job opportunities to find them
Once a valuable tool for recruiting, the talent you want to hire just don’t use the platform as much as they did. When they log on now they are faced with a barrage of mostly irrelevant job offers and irritating messages.
Instead, they are choosing other specialised social networks, groups and forums such as Slack to communicate.
As Digital Transformation becomes mainstream, every company has something to offer as they strive to use advanced technologies to innovate.
Digital Transformation is causing exploding skills gaps. As a result candidates have more choice than ever before as the balance of power shifts from employers to people with in-demand skills.
Digital Transformation has levelled the playing field.
Every company now has the same ability to market their vacancies to the same talent pool and most have something of value to offer digital talent as they invest in digital transformation. A 5-person start-up can captivate the imagination more than a prestigious Fortune 500 business these days.
The net result is that it is now harder for employers to stand out than ever before.
The employee value proposition (EVP) and the candidate experience (CX) are key, and along with strong brand equity, mean everything when attracting digital talent into your organisation.
“Ghosting” is the act of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly withdrawing all communication without any explanation, and it has entered the job market in a major way
It is now a major challenge for in-house recruitment teams, with a surge of candidates no-showing interviews, or pulling out of an interview process and not returning calls, or accepting a job only to never appear for the first day of work, giving no reason. Some employees are even quitting by walking out and saying nothing
The flow of top-rated skills moving from employed to freelance is at record levels. A profound change to the way people view employment combined with digital recruitment platforms and exploding skills gaps is changing how highly skilled professionals want to be employed.
Employees of the future value choice and flexibility over job security.
According to the 21st PwC CEO Survey 2018, finding and hiring employees with the key skills they need to succeed in the digital world continues to keep CEOs awake at night. With 80% of the 1,300 CEO’s surveyed extremely concerned about the lack of digital skills in their country.
TA should now be one of the leading organisational strategies for businesses looking to thrive in the digital age.
The last few years have seen a new, third-era burst onto the scene.
The Digital Age can be characterised by apps and digital technologies centred around improving your ability to ID and source talent, engage with talent, improve the Candidate Experience (CX) and improve assessment.
The Digital Age came in response to the failures of the preceding two, with a focus on adapting to candidate behaviours.
The technologies that it comprises of are known as Recruitment Technology, or RecTech.
The third-era is being created by the need to adapt to changing candidate behaviours and the new trends we are seeing today.
Just as Digital Transformation is radically changing many businesses around the world, its effect on the recruitment industry can be seen through vast numbers of new tools, apps and digital platforms. Some focus on talent pooling and sourcing, some focus on improving engagement and bots can transform the candidate experience to create a seamless process for candidates.
Artificial Intelligence, what we like to call Augmented Intelligence, has the ability to radically improve the abilities of in-house teams, by reducing time spent on routine, low skilled, repetitive behaviours and more time on value areas that can drive productivity.
As every CEO in every business is driving digital transformation, the goal for every Head of Talent is to move successfully from one era of recruitment to another, as they undergo Recruitment Transformation (RX).
As we move deeper into the Digital era of recruitment, only the recruiters leveraging modern sourcing techniques and the latest apps and digital technologies will be able to access the industry’s top-rated candidates.
Through a combination of technology and the interpersonal skills from the analogue age, a renaissance of the talent acquisition profession is driving performance for those recruiters who are adapting to change.
We call this change in sourcing Recruitment Transformation (RX). It is characterised by the move away from traditional recruitment methods to more modern, forward-thinking resourcing methodologies.
Cultural change is the recognition, throughout an organisation, of the market trends impacting candidate behaviour.
The Candidate Experience (CX) has to adapt to a market where candidates now have the power, and every stakeholder involved in hiring needs to be changing their mindset and behaviours in order to move with the times.
Strategic change sees diversified, omni-channel recruitment strategies, along with modern sourcing methodologies, plus the creation of new roles such as Recruitment Marketing.
Technological change embraces the new RecTech eco-system of apps, tools and platforms that have the ability to help recruiters source, engage and assess new pools of talent more effectively.
People change replaces 2nd era recruiters with those who have a flare for modern recruitment; people who are networkers, headhunters, and digitally native.
At the people level, recruiters now need to learn new ways of sourcing talent. That means learning new skills, new methodologies and how to leverage advanced recruitment technologies.
The modern day recruiter is a marketer as much as they are a sourcer, they are digitally native, have a flair for creative writing, and see themselves as a networker.
“Despite increasing skills gaps in many key job families, embracing Recruitment Transformation and the new recruitment methodologies that underpins it will allow in- house recruitment teams to source and attract the talent they need into their organisations”
© Third Republic
A new model for a new age, Third Republic is a next generation sourcing provider connecting leading employers with top-rated talent specialising in advanced technologies.
Modern recruitment methodologies source deep into the skills base to allow employers to recruit off-market talent.
For employers who prefer to source talent directly, SourceChain, the 1st of its kind in the staffing industry, allows in-house teams to hire skills directly from our talent pools.
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