Sourcing talent in the post-pandemic world
If you were ordered on a mission to travel back in time to tell an office worker from the ‘90s what their day-to-day will be like in 2020, you would be laughed out of their cubicle, and then escorted past the watercooler and by the stationery storeroom on your way out. This imaginary worker from the dialup internet slash paper-based era would not be able to fathom how their job could be done from anywhere not named the office.
And yet, to be fair to the imaginary worker, just one year ago none of us would have thought that our future morning commutes would be a different kind of door-to-door journey: we've ditched public transport and traffic congestion for a short stroll down the hallway to our makeshift home offices. From video conference platforms, to a greater trust and reliance on cloud-based technology, and an adjustment to working remotely on the fly, organisations (and their employees) have made it work.
Organisations and their employees have proven their resilience
According to Microsoft, the early stages of the pandemic saw the daily record for meeting minutes obliterated — their previous record was 900 million meeting minutes logged on March 16, and that number ballooned to 2.7 billion meeting minutes on March 31, a staggering 200% increase in a matter of 15 days. This data may come as no surprise given the global working from home policies implemented by human resource (HR) teams; however, it demonstrates how agile organisations had to be to ensure they could continue to do business during unprecedented times.
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has accelerated a whole catalogue of underlying trends, such as artificial intelligence, big data and automation. The pandemic has been more of an agent for hurrying along trends that were going to happen anyway, rather than a force of sheer disruption. The effect of the pandemic on our ways of working has brought about some HR challenges for the new normal as it pertains to finding and nurturing employable talent.
Nurturing talent is proving to be a stubborn challenge
It’s now more important than ever to identify individuals who can demonstrate the abilities and traits that enable them to work effectively in the new normal. According to Pearson research, organisations are struggling to find candidates to fill job vacancies, as well as to effectively evaluate the skill sets of candidates. Additionally, jobseekers are finding themselves in a career progression conundrum: they’re finding that they’re overqualified, under-skilled, or in some cases, both.
The research found that human resource and learning and developing professionals are focused on identifying what the impact of the changing world is on their organisation and the skill structure of the workforce, which involves understanding (and identifying) skill gaps. According to the data, 57% of organisational needs are understanding how the pandemic has impacted the structure of teams, ways of working and overall organisational design, and 33% of attention will be directed at reskilling the workforce.
The new ways of working have made soft skills, such as critical thinking, adaptability, collaboration and communication, more valuable than ever before. In addition, and while they’re deemed critical in today’s landscape, some of the core soft skills are indeed a skill gap among jobseekers and today’s workers. Critical thinking and complex information processing are two soft skills that are sought after by industry, but are lacking in the talent pool.
According to Pearson research, these are the following top 10 skills in demand in order of priority, as deemed by organisations:
- Adaptability and continuous learning (38%)
- Critical thinking and decision making (34%)
- Complex information processing and interpretation (31%)
- Project management (29%)
- Leadership and managing others (27%)
- Basic digital skills (25%)
- Advanced IT skills and programming (25%)
- Quantitative and statistical skills (22%)
- Advanced data analysis and mathematical skills (22%)
- Entrepreneurship and initiative taking (20%)
Many HR professionals are considering online tools and services to address the skill gaps and to assess their immediate (and future) organisational needs. Activities such as workshops, e-learning solutions and advisory services are being increasingly leveraged to reskill and upskill workforces as form of on-the-job education.
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Sourcing employable talent is presenting to be an even greater challenge, but should it be?
One of the biggest realisations in the new world of remote work is that technology has proven that employees are not merely doing their jobs remotely — they’re doing them efficiently, effectively, and are providing more output. According to the Harvard Business Review, technology firm Humanyze mined anonymous company emails, chats, and calendar data, and what they found is telling: the amount of time that employees spend working has increased by an average of 10-20% since remote working policies were mandated.
A number of leading global companies, such as Twitter, Upwork, Facebook, Coinbase, and Square have given their employees the option to permanently work remotely. Some of these organisations are calling this remodelled way of working a “working from anywhere” policy, where employees can determine where they work, even if they never step foot in the office again. A blend of organisational quick-thinking, employee resilience and technological capabilities have made this possible — things that were evidently innate, but never truly realised until necessity forced them into action.
Technology has unbound talent from a physical location, which has forever been a blocker for talented, employable individuals who possess the core soft and technical skills organisations are seeking today. Historically, the ask for found talent based in another location is to relocate — this is now a non-issue. If the best talent on the market presents itself, and they have access to a reliable internet connection, there’s no reason they can’t be hired. The only thing getting in the way of hiring the right talent — wherever it is located — is traditional thinking and stagnant org design.
According to The Economist, an opening of borders to unleash intercontinental talent will make way for an estimated $78 trillion increase in global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). If organisations shift from a narrow hiring focus that’s limited to a local talent pool, this will have as much of an impact on bottom lines as it will on talent attraction, identification, retention and development.
Implementing a watertight talent strategy to unlock the workforce
Efficient, effective and timely hiring continues to be important. Many organisations are considering looking at tools that connect the right talent with a hand-in-glove jobs, and according to Pearson research, for those who aren’t considering investing in external tools, it’s because of a lack of internal hiring resources.
One of the key findings of the research is that guidance and diagnostics — those discovered by external tools — are important in the role they play to match skill levels with the right courses, in order to effectively nurture employed talent. Fundamentally, sourcing talent is the sticky issue that’s on the mind of all hiring managers, but talent retention is key in the new world of work. Managing and rewarding performance is another one of those trends accelerated by remote working, as employees are increasingly reliant on feedback, coaching and mentoring in the new working environment.
In essence, organisations need to have clear understanding of the workforce’s skills gaps, a progressive mindset to sourcing talent that boasts in-demand skills, and an optimised, agile org design that’s built for the post-pandemic world.
