When an industry’s demand for talent is much higher than the market can supply, employers face the inevitable, an upward spiral in day rates and salaries, and an increased reliance on costly consultancy providers. From a macro perspective in the public sector this adversely impacts budgets, project completion timelines, the quality of public services provided and ultimately reduces value for money for the taxpayers. None of this is a desirable long-term solution.
Whilst there is value in mobilising people around an industry to try and fill roles in the traditional recruitment sense you are not systematically changing things nor providing a longer-term, sustainable solution.
There was a recent article in the HR Director on current labour market challenges that really resonated with me.
“Those who resist the evolution of the workforce at this crucial juncture will quickly find themselves unable to compete.”
I couldn’t agree more.
At Public Sector Resourcing (PSR), managed by AMS, we have been forced to think differently about talent acquisition. In conjunction with Crown Commercial Service (CCS) we have launched a new “Recruit, Train, Deploy” (RTD) service line to allow public sector departments access to market leading suppliers who can deliver bespoke training courses tailored to their individual company needs. For the candidate, they are actually paid to train before being placed on a *2-year assignment with the department, in the hope of receiving an offer of permanent employment at the end. From a diversity & inclusion and social mobility perspective, these newly trained candidate cohorts are always exceptionally diverse, utilising the supply chains reach into untapped talent pools. Being an award-winning DEI employer is a prerequisite of the highly accomplished RTD supply chain! This is a win-win for employers who are able to future talent plan for the mid to long term as well as supporting their wider DEI and Social Value agendas.
But this alone is not an all-encompassing solution, and at PSR we currently offer contingent, RTD and Statement of Work (SOW) routes to market for our customer base. In the short-term customers will still need to deliver projects and with RTD, there is a lead time to training new recruits. This is where, at PSR, we support and encourage our customers to foster a multi-lateral and dynamic approach to their workforce planning. By having access to multiple resource streams that complement each other, employers can lean on different routes to market with different levels of voracity throughout their project delivery cycles.
Recently a customer came to us with a problem statement, “We can’t recruit Commercial Managers”. This is something we get a lot, as commercial management is a challenging market where talent is in short supply and is highly sought after. On hearing this we conducted a market assessment for the client, before providing market insights that considered availability of skills, barriers, locations, and limitations. We were then able to design a trilateral solution to help give them access to the extended workforce they needed in all timeframes – short, medium, and long term. To address the immediate need, contingent recruitment campaigns were initiated to deliver experienced talent. This was complimented alongside a cohort of newly trained RTD workers on a 2-year assignment with the aim of joining their workforce permanently. The third prong saw us utilising our SOW supply chain to procure a training provider to upskill their existing workforce in the desired commercial skillsets. This proposal not only helped with supporting the short, mid and long-term hiring needs but it also worked to increase employee mobility across their existing workforce and to increase employee retention rates.
If you are a public sector employer with a track record of struggling to hire via traditional means, then I encourage you to talk to your PSR Account Manager about extending your workforce with a trilateral talent solution. This model is a more strategic approach to narrowing the talent gap and can be applied to almost any industry or role type, Commercial Managers, to Software Engineers to Air Traffic Controllers! What’s more, it is a collaborative, bespoke solution, designed and managed for you by one service provider where you have all bases covered.
*2-year assignments are the average assignment length for candidates placed via the RTD model. However, these can vary between from 12 month to 18 month+ contracts.
In today’s uncertain talent climate, both employees and employers are seeking ways to improve job satisfaction and well-being. ‘Job crafting’ has emerged as a powerful tool that empowers individuals to reshape and customize their work experiences, fostering a positive and fulfilling work-life balance. By recognizing the benefits of job crafting, employees can enhance their engagement and productivity, while employers can enjoy the advantages of a motivated and resilient workforce. In this article, we consider the concept of job crafting and explore how it can be leveraged to create a mutually beneficial workplace ecosystem.
Job crafting is a proactive approach that enables employees to restructure their job tasks, relationships, and perceptions to align with their skills, interests, and values. It involves employees taking the initiative to shape their work environment and responsibilities, transforming their roles into more meaningful and fulfilling experiences. Where individuals are able to personalize their work, they will achieve more autonomy and be more creative.
Whilst an employee displaying self-awareness is pre-requisite to succeeding at job crafting, harnessing it means leads to the following benefits for them:
Increased Job Satisfaction:
Job crafting allows employees to align their roles with their strengths and passions, resulting in a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. By focusing on tasks that energize them and leveraging their unique skills, employees can experience a greater sense of purpose and engagement.
Enhanced Well-being:
When employees have the autonomy to shape their work, it leads to reduced stress levels and improved psychological well-being. Job crafting enables individuals to reduce or eliminate tasks that cause excessive strain while increasing opportunities for growth and personal development.
Improved Work-Life Balance:
Job crafting offers flexibility in tailoring work responsibilities to better suit personal circumstances. By aligning their work with their personal values and priorities, employees can strike a healthier work-life balance, leading to increased overall happiness and reduced burnout.
Benefits for Employers:
Improved job performance:
Engaged employees who are able to customize their work tend to be more motivated and committed. Job crafting empowers individuals to focus on areas where they excel, resulting in higher productivity and better quality of work.
Enhanced retention:
When employees have the freedom to craft their jobs, they develop a stronger sense of ownership and commitment to their roles. This increased autonomy and job satisfaction can significantly reduce turnover rates, saving employers time and resources associated with recruitment and training.
Innovation:
Job crafting encourages employees to explore new ideas, experiment with different approaches, and take calculated risks. This increased creativity and innovation can have a profound impact on an organization’s growth and competitiveness.
To foster job crafting within an organization, employers can consider the following strategies:
Encourage Open Communication:
Establish a culture of open dialogue, where employees feel comfortable discussing their work preferences, strengths, and aspirations. Regular feedback sessions can help identify opportunities for job crafting.
Provide Autonomy:
Empower employees with the autonomy to make decisions regarding their work processes, schedules, and task allocation. Offering flexibility and trust encourages job crafting and empowers individuals to take ownership of their roles.
Support Skills Development:
Offer training and development opportunities that enable employees to expand their skill sets and explore new areas of interest. This will provide them with the tools to craft their jobs effectively.
Recognize and Reward Job Crafting Efforts:
Acknowledge and reward employees who actively engage in job crafting. This reinforces the importance of personalization and encourages others to follow suit.
Assuming employers and employees have good alignment on expected goals and outputs, job crafting has the potential to revolutionize the way individuals perceive and experience their work. By empowering employees to shape their roles according to their strengths, interests, and values, organizations can foster a more engaged, productive, and satisfied workforce. Employers who embrace job crafting create an environment that encourages personal growth, diversity of thought, innovation, and improved well-being.
External Links with more on Job Crafting and on becoming more self-aware.
Where individuals are able to personalize their work, they will achieve more autonomy and be more creative.
Skills-based hiring is a recruitment strategy that focuses on identifying and hiring candidates based on their skills and abilities, rather than their educational background or work experience. One of the main advantages of skills-based hiring is that it helps to reduce bias in the recruitment process. Traditional hiring methods often rely on factors such as educational background, work experience, and personal connections, which can lead to discrimination against certain groups of people. By focusing on skills, employers can ensure that they are hiring the most qualified candidates, regardless of their background.
Another benefit of skills-based hiring is that it allows employers to identify candidates who have transferable skills. Transferable skills are those that can be applied to different jobs and industries, such as communication, problem-solving, and teamwork. By hiring candidates with transferable skills, employers can build a more diverse and adaptable workforce that can easily transition between different roles and projects.
Skills-based hiring also benefits job seekers, particularly those who may not have a traditional educational background or work experience. By focusing on skills, employers can provide opportunities for individuals who may have been overlooked in the past due to their lack of formal qualifications. This can help to promote social mobility and create a more inclusive workforce.
To effectively implement this strategy, employers need to use a variety of tools and techniques to assess candidates’ skills and identify the most qualified candidates. Some of the most important tools for skills-based hiring are:
1. Skills assessments: These assessments can be used to evaluate candidates’ skills in a variety of areas, such as communication, problem-solving, and technical skills. Skills assessments can be conducted online or in-person, and can be customized to fit the specific needs of the employer.
2. Behavioral interviews: These interviews focus on asking candidates about their past experiences and how they have demonstrated specific skills in the past. Behavioral interviews can help employers to identify candidates who have the necessary skills and experience to perform the job successfully.
3. Reference checks: Employers can contact previous employers or colleagues to ask about the candidate’s skills and work performance. This can help to confirm that the candidate has the necessary skills and experience to perform the job successfully.
4. Online portfolios: Online portfolios are becoming increasingly popular as a tool for skills-based hiring. Candidates can create online portfolios that showcase their skills and work experience, including examples of their work and projects they have completed. Employers can review these portfolios to get a better sense of the candidate’s skills and experience.
5. Applicant tracking systems: Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are software tools that can help employers to manage the recruitment process more efficiently. ATS can be used to screen resumes, track candidate progress, and schedule interviews. This can help to streamline the recruitment process and identify the most qualified candidates more quickly.
The role of AI in skills-based hiring
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the recruitment industry, and its role in skills-based hiring is becoming increasingly important. AI can help employers to identify and assess candidates’ skills more accurately and efficiently, making the recruitment process faster and more effective.
One of the main benefits of AI in skills-based hiring is that it can help to reduce bias in the recruitment process. AI algorithms can be programmed to focus solely on a candidate’s skills and abilities, without being influenced by factors such as gender, race, or age. This can help to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce, as candidates are evaluated solely on their skills and not on any other irrelevant factors.
AI can also help to identify candidates with transferable skills. By analyzing a candidate’s work history, education, and other relevant data, AI algorithms can identify skills that are transferable to different roles and industries. This can help employers to build a more adaptable and diverse workforce, as candidates with transferable skills can easily transition between different roles and projects.
Another benefit of AI in skills-based hiring is that it can help to automate the recruitment process. AI algorithms can be used to screen resumes, conduct initial interviews, and even evaluate candidates’ skills through online assessments. This can save employers time and resources, as they can quickly identify the most qualified candidates without having to manually review hundreds of resumes or conduct multiple interviews.
However, there are also some challenges associated with AI in skills-based hiring. One of the main challenges is that AI algorithms can be biased if they are not programmed correctly. For example, if the algorithm is trained on data that is biased towards a certain group of people, it may inadvertently discriminate against other groups. To avoid this, employers need to ensure that their AI algorithms are trained on unbiased data and are regularly audited to ensure that they are not discriminating against any particular group.
Overall, AI has the potential to revolutionize the recruitment industry and make skills-based hiring more efficient and effective.
In our increasingly digital world, demands on technical skills have been high for some time. That demand has now reached crisis level. Our paper, Is the tech Skills Gap now a tech talent crisis? reports that job roles requiring systems design and related areas are expected to increase by 15% by 2031, so the problem is far from going away.
We typically see hiring managers put out requests for candidates that look specifically for key skills, experience and education that will meet all the needs of the job role. This is no longer a viable option, however, one of the solutions offered in our paper is to expand the ‘last mile’ of your talent pool.
So, what do we mean by the last mile when it comes to talent? Metaphorically speaking we are talking about employing a candidate, in many cases a graduate, who fulfils much of your requirements and has the energy and cognitive dexterity to excel in your role but perhaps lacks all of the specific skills that you need.
This might be a developer who hasn’t yet learnt a particular programming language or a marketer who knows the theory but lacks experience with a specific digital tool. In most cases this gap between their starting skills and full job competency can be bridged with a last-mile training programme; a 2–3-month digital training course or a one-year software apprenticeship, for example.
While on the surface it might look like it would take longer for that candidate to reach full competency, this strategy will have a positive impact on how quicky roles are filled and talent acquisition costs are lowered.
Engagement
In the world’s largest study in team performance and engagement, the Gallup report, Employee engagement and performance analysed data from more than 100,000 teams.
The report shows that engagement partly centres around the growth and development of the individual employee, who is keen to be known for what they’re good at. When studying the most successful organisations they report that where there is a culture of high employee development, it results in the most productive environment for the individual and the business. This aligns with their findings that the top reason given for a change in job, is ‘career growth’.
Taking ready-made candidates who fit perfectly into your role might be the utopia but there isn’t then room for that person to develop their skills. The last-mile training option puts personal development at the heart of your talent acquisition and these new employees are likely to become much more engaged which we know to have a knock-on effect on production. Chances are, there will be a lot less churn amongst this cohort too.
Have you also considered looking internally for these candidates?
By giving development opportunities to individuals who have been within your organisation and gained invaluable domain knowledge, can enable candidates to make the jump into roles in more niche areas. For example, do you have 1st/2nd line support workers looking for a foot into development, or network engineers keen to make the move into DevOps or cloud roles? Last-mile upskilling can be a perfect option.
DEI
Nurturing a talent pool that focusses on training candidates can allow you to expand your talent search to more diverse groups. This can increase economic mobility in under-utilised communities or drive more women into your technical roles, and your organisation will gain the benefits of having a more diverse workforce.
Without doubt, refocussing your energy from finding job-ready candidates to finding graduate or early-career individuals that are digitally savvy – that have enthusiasm and aptitude will create a flexible and engaged workforce. Opening up your talent pool to last milers will meet your immediate hiring needs while also drive long-term employee engagement and business objectives.
With the pandemic an almost distant memory, the wider economic and political events of recent months are now taking their toll on young job seekers. The end of 2022 gave us a glimmer of hope that confidence was returning to our Gen Z audience, but feelings of anxiety and nervousness have dashed this.
A recent report highlighted that 41% of females were experiencing these feelings compared to 27% of males. However, 32% of the male population is experiencing a lack of confidence compared to 20% of females. So what’s going on? Much of this can be attributed to the economy and financial uncertainty, but as the pandemic hugely impacted this group, they likely felt it more.
Feelings of being underprepared and lacking specific skills are now paired with economic uncertainty and finding their place in the world. And whilst many organisations might be scaling back on programmes, or in some cases headcount, there are ways in which they can still help and assist the Gen Z audience with these thoughts and emotions.
Provide support to your talent pools
Here are a few ways to support your talent pools for a ready-made group of prospective candidates without relying on reactive campaigns to get their attention or gain their loyalty.
Upskilling This remains a key need for our audience. If you can’t currently talk about your upcoming programmes, upskilling can help prepare candidates for registration. It helps keep you front of mind and enhances the candidate experience.
Skills training workshops This is best done in person as the audience responds well to face-to-face, despite being on their mobile devices most of the time! You can build this out with additional virtual or pre-recorded content available on-demand.
Mentor An informal mentor programme can be highly beneficial, even for a set period, so think about how to set one up.
Industry focussed sessions Educate your audience on the industry and try targeting new audiences who may not realise there are opportunities for them.
Strengthening your connection These three principles will guide you to get the best out of your Gen-Z audience, and create a connection based on an honest understanding between you.
See the individual beyond the grades Firstly, and most importantly, they need to know that exam results aren’t the key driver in their success. Gone are the days when academia counted for everything – the values of employees, businesses and society have shifted, and there’s a much bigger focus on the person behind the grades.
We want to know everything that makes the candidate who they are and what they can bring to your organisation as individuals with unique views and ideas. That’s not to say exam results don’t matter; there’s just far more to their story.
Detail, detail, detail Give them as much detail as possible about the role. From what their day-to-day will look like to career prospects and available training, the more up-front you can be about the job, the better. It enables students to opt out earlier if the role isn’t suitable, leaving you with applicants more suited to the job or programme.
Current figures show a distinct lack of loyalty from Gen-Z, with 44% expecting to move employers multiple times and the average student applying to between two and six programmes to secure employment. However, a focus on career development and investment in their individual growth will help them view us as an employer with longevity and can hopefully help reverse this trend.
Be honest about the culture Gen Z wants to know who you are and how they might fit in, so don’t pretend to be something you’re not, as they’ll see straight through you. It doesn’t matter if you still need to get the latest technology, your DEI strategy sorted, or you aren’t that company that rides scooters around the office. Instead, focus on what you do have, whether flexible or hybrid working, a great learning culture or impressive sustainable practices.
Whatever culture your company adheres to, everyone looks for different things, and it’s impossible to please everyone. So be proud of who you are and what you can offer while acknowledging where improvements can be made.
What does all this mean?
Getting under the skin of your audience to uncover their drivers is essential, but more is needed. An authentic campaign requires you to understand your company’s identity and find the link that connects you and your Gen-Z audience.
In the new digital insights report created in partnership with Raconteur I discuss the enormous challenge that lies ahead of us in the renewable energy sector – how to overcome the talent shortage that will hit organisations in the next few years and beyond.
Some of the topics covered include the extent to which employment levels in the renewable energy sector are set to rise exponentially, the necessity of looking to other channels, skills and experience to meet demand, the importance of ensuring the renewable energy sector is as attractive as possible in a competitive market for talent, and the need for increased collaboration between government, business and education.
As a passionate advocate of securing a sustainable future for the generations to come, I don’t think there can be many more important problems to solve for talent acquisition professionals.
At AMS we aim to be part of the solution to this problem by providing products and services that allow organisations to scale at pace, cost effectively, with minimum risk, enabled by leading technology and quality people. So, if you find yourself facing these challenges, please do contact me or use our form through the website Contact Us – AMS (weareams.com). We hope you enjoy the read!
McKinsey forecasts that global solar and wind power capacity will quadruple between 2021 and 2030 as nations reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. It says a “staggering” additional 1.1 million blue-collar workers will be needed to develop and build these plants, along with 1.7 million extra workers to operate and maintain them.
Ten steps everyone can take to improve hiring success
“Marginal gains is not about making small changes and hoping they fly. Rather, it is about breaking down a big problem into small parts in order to rigorously establish what works and what doesn’t.” Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking
Volume hiring has always been hard, and it keeps getting harder.
Wage inflation, demographic challenges and unpredictable business demand – most likely in locations which have often always been challenging – have only added to the pressure. According to a recent Forbes analysis 74% or organizations in the service industry list recruiting as their top business challenge – and the result can be a kind of organizational paralysis. ‘This is just a problem, there is nothing we can do’ or, most commonly ‘we don’t have the budget’.
But simple initiatives can be quick to implement, and impactful and multiple simple initiatives can really start to move the needle. Most are free or – better – will stop wasteful spend and have a positive impact on your budget.
So: here is our AMS guide to help you Moneyball your high volume hiring.
Diversity and Data – Before, not After, Thought If you read no further read this: diversity and data matter. Understanding your hiring metrics (even the absolute basics) and how your organization reflects the communities you serve is a non-negotiable baseline. If you don’t have this, you are a chef without a recipe; a coach with no gameplan; a driver without a map. Do NOT be intimidated by the challenge. Not everyone can access cutting edge predictive analytics, but you have a finance function and almost everyone has a friendly team member with a head for numbers. Pull some basic data and build from there. And if you have those analytics but don’t have ‘the time’ to review them, cancel a meeting and look at them now. They are your friend not your enemy.
Needs Assessment – What and Who Are you Hiring? Everyone knows who they are hiring…don’t they?
Even if you do feel you know your most common profiles, get back to the floor – those roles you have been hiring for ever will most likely have shifted significantly in focus or even in skills required given the changes in the world post-Covid. What is important in that role today? Have any of your ‘must have’ requirements evolved or even disappeared? Plus, your employees can be inspiring: if anyone knows how to hire for their roles, it’s them.
Job Titles – Will Your Target Audience Understand? So many job titles have been designed with an internal audience in mind. Your CEO may get it, but your target candidates most likely do not. Use simple, natural language in your job descriptions so that candidates can find you, even if they are not looking for you. And keep descriptions short and to the point: has anyone ever told you they are NOT a ‘team player who can also work individually’? If key requirements matter, don’t bury them! Someone will confess that they do not have them at some point, so make it clear up front – better now than two weeks into the job.
Sourcing and Attraction Strategy – Average Never Works If you are lucky enough to have a budget, plan for where you spend and be ready to pivot. Programmatic advertising programs and partners are easier than ever to implement but their key role should be to fill gaps in local organic traffic. If candidates want to walk in and ask about a role, let them, and make it as easy as possible for them to do so (more on that later). Remember that local communities are always, always happy to help. Churches, sports clubs, housing groups, charities and local rehabilitation charities and will go the extra mile to align those in need with opportunities. Just make the time to ask.
Execute Your Plan – No One Else Will Having a plan is one thing, make sure to make it happen. A series of great ideas in a notepad or in a spreadsheet do not action themselves. ‘We are just about to’; ‘we do not have time to’, ‘I will get to it after’ are all off limits. Break it down and commit to trying something that will make a difference at least once a week, or even every day.
Take some swings.
Screening – Pull candidates IN do not screen them OUT This is your first chance to treat candidates as they should be treated. And this should not be by asking them aggressive questions, requiring hours of their time or understanding their life story. Align this stage to the critical data you need to know – really need to know – and make sure your process is aimed at keeping the right candidates engaged. Screening process as endurance event is helping no-one unless you are hiring for a role that requires endless form completion of parsable data.
Assessment and Selection – Relevant and Making a Difference? Formalized assessment tools can be useful – they can give candidates a sense of the role, help prioritize high quality candidates in bountiful markets and ensure rigor. They can – but do they do this for you? Or are you running a legacy battery of tests with only an indirect relevance for the roles you are hiring, most likely at a point in your process where quality candidates are looking to proceed quickly? Oh, and do you expect them have to set aside time at a desktop, remember a code and then follow complicated instructions to gather their results? Try the process yourself, you may be surprised how your flow chart looks great for you but not so good from the outside.
Interviews – Train, Train and Train Again People write books on this, so we’ll keep this simple. If someone is interviewing or spending any time with candidates (face to face, virtually or on the phone) make sure they know what they are doing. There are free resources out there on best practices, you may have in-house guides on a (virtual) shelf or maybe now is the time to pull something together?
And if you are running through multiple phases of screening, assessment AND interviews: think long and hard about the why and if there are opportunities to simplify further.
Offer and Onboarding – Stay in Touch Maybe you and you team concierge candidates all the way through to their first day, or maybe you hand a fully hire-ready candidate to an HR or business function. Consider either way that it is in your interest to keep in regular touch with candidates here: if it is in the thousands, leverage some basic tech to help: if numbers are smaller, keep the contact 1-1, direct and personable. If you don’t, someone else will.
Hire – Do Not Stop at Hire Volume hiring is relentless but that can also provide a rhythm to your activity that is difficult to manage in other areas. Schedule time after 10 and 30 days to check in on the most recent intake of hires. How is attrition? How are they performing? Find out from those hires what they think of their role. The elephant in the room can frequently be that it is on-the-job culture or management that most affects these numbers and can impact the overall perception of a TA function, so don’t ignore feedback and work with your partners in the business to make a difference.
In the words of Billy Beane: ‘If we pull this off, we change the game. We change the game for good.’
If you found this article helpful and you would like to talk more about how you can improve the effectiveness of your volume recruitment, please do get in touch.
Over the last decade in the tech market, we have all witnessed these accentuating themes; a widening global tech skills gap, rapidly increasing contract rates and more recently a growing emphasis on DE&I and Social Mobility in hiring agendas.
We have seen companies caught in a feedback loop, forced to address their short-term needs by paying higher and higher contract rates each year. Whilst paying the higher rates solves the immediate problem, it isn’t a long-term solution and does little to address the bigger skills gap issue.
Myth 3 of the AMS tech whitepaper discusses the Recruit Train Deploy (RTD) model as a solution. It looks at how AMS’s Tech Skilling team are helping organisations overcome the skills gap by taking a mid to long term approach to building and retaining future talent pipelines.
The RTD model is designed to address niche skills shortages in the economy by investing in future talent from diverse backgrounds. The applicants are selected on their aptitude and future potential as opposed to their academic credentials, following the lead of many companies in the big tech world by removing degree requirements. They are then trained with sought after tech skills before being deploying into long term assignments with the aim of converting into permanent employment. AMS’s Tech Skilling team also offer a reskilling service; helping companies to retrain their existing workforces to keep their skills relevant for future needs, reducing the need for redundancies and increasing talent retention.
We have recently introduced a new “Recruit Train Deploy” service line on the Public Sector Resourcing (PSR) Framework, managed by AMS. It’s a privilege to have recently joined the RTD team which is supporting government departments to not only establish a longer-term solution to addressing their skills gap but at the same time opening the doors to often underrepresented talent and making a positive change by increasing diverse representation across their workforces.
If a department believes they will struggle to hire a skillset through traditional methods, they now have an alternative route to take, an option that allows them to grow and design their own tech workforce from the ground up.
According to a new study by CWJobs, over two thirds (67%) of young adults are considering a career in tech, which highlights the potential we have for narrowing the tech skills gap in this country. I truly believe that this is a real positive, long term and sustainable solution to improving the tech talent marketplace for both employers and employees of the future.
If a department believes they will struggle to hire a skillset through traditional methods, they now have an alternative route to take, an option that allows them to grow and design their own tech workforce from the ground up.
Despite current predictions that the U.S. is on the cusp of a recession, we remain in one of the tightest labor markets in history. Companies haven’t been able to fill their skills gaps in years, so while some sectors have slowed down, companies are still desperately seeking to acquire certain skill sets.
Tech skills such as AI, cybersecurity and digital marketing are highest in demand. While the technology industry has made layoffs, these workers are finding new opportunities in other sectors such as life sciences, healthcare, hospitality and travel. The airlines industry, for example, has promised more investment in tech this year to avoid technology failures.
Growth in these industries has yet to slow down, and companies are hungry for digital talent but they must be prepared to adapt their employer brand proposition in order to attract new, digital talent to their workforce.
A big talent strategy in 2023 will focus on emerging talent. We’ve seen a 30% increase year-over-year in this area with our clients in the Americas. Because the labor market is so tight, companies are laser-focused on interns converting to full-time hires. That means recruiting strategies for students will concentrate on the intern candidate experience; more in-person, intimate events to attract students; and heavy social media engagement campaigns.
This year companies will also be increasing their upskilling and reskilling programs and retention strategies to hold on to the talent they already have. The biggest issue remains workforce participation which has been reducing since 1995.
With 11 million job openings and 5.7 million unemployed and a large skills gap within the employed population, organizations must be very intentional about their talent acquisition strategies.
“Despite concerns of a recession, one of the tightest labor markets in history remains. Companies haven’t been able to fill skills gaps, so while some sectors have slowed down, others are still seeking to acquire certain skill sets.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
The need to upskill and reskill our workforce remains an imperative. Strategies need to be accelerated, and organisations need to prioritise building a more tech savy talent base. Whilst addressing the skills deficit, a build strategy allows hiring for potential, enabling a far more diverse workforce, creating the skills where they don’t exist.
Organisations that are reviewing the skills that exist in their business, mapping the gaps, and planning for the future, are closing the gap more successfully. A proactive approach to planning and investing in long term strategies, will reap the desired results of building sustainable teams.
This week we launched the third myth in our series which aims to explode digital myths in talent acquisition, and on this myth, talks through the tech skills gap challenge.
Myth number 3: Today’s workforce is more tech enabled. The Great Resignation has led to global talent shortages, as employees re-evaluate what they want from work and working lives. As talent leaves the market, employers are facing an increasingly competitive battle to find the right people to fill roles, with wage inflation rampant.
