When it comes to hiring, does your organization take a ‘spray and pray’ perspective to recruitment? Be honest.
Taking a scattergun approach and hoping you’ll attract the right candidates can be an extensive venture, and that’s even if you find the right candidate. If you don’t find the right candidate, it’s a learning experience at best, and a time-consuming, expensive, and futile exercise at worst — often leaving talent teams hiring the wrong skills that hurt them, and the candidate, down the line.
Building a skills-based workforce for the future
Avoiding a ‘spray and pray’ approach comes down to an organizational shift in building a skills-based workforce, rather than a reactive headcount approach.
A recent Deloitte report commented that; “Instead of planning for headcount, organizations also plan for skills; instead of job architecture, organizations develop a more flexible work and skills architecture; and instead of succession planning as progression planning based on roles, future leaders and successors are identified based on real-time, verified skills and capabilities needed for the future.”
Today, both talent and organizations are increasingly looking for the perfect ‘match’. Finding talent that can fill skills gaps for the future optimizes your workforce now, before problems arise, which means talent teams can hire strategically, not reactively.
So how can you bring personalization to your hiring strategy? And implement it at scale no less?
“Instead of planning for headcount, organizations also plan for skills; instead of job architecture, organizations develop a more flexible work and skills architecture; and instead of succession planning as progression planning based on roles, future leaders and successors are identified based on real-time, verified skills and capabilities needed for the future.”
A personalized approach at scale
Choosing to take a personalized approach doesn’t mean a trade-off when it comes to thinking about scale. But, what you will need is the right tech to operate at scale.
Being given a complete skills match means you can reach out to your talent ecosystem with a relevant, personalized opportunity that brings purpose to both you and the candidate. This goes for providing personalized learning and development opportunities for internal talent too.
Research from Harvard Business Review shows that employees who see good opportunities to learn and grow are 2.9 times more likely to be engaged, so don’t ignore the talent that’s inside your organization. Personalized approaches increase the chances of a meaningful hire or placement as well as planning for the future growth of your organization.
Once you have the skills — and potential — mapped out, it’s all about proactively alerting the perfect people to opportunities, whether it’s getting to external talent before the competition or retaining internal talent who might be ready for a change.
Personalized approaches create a consumer-grade, meaningful experience with workplaces from day one and continue to do so beyond hiring for roles — talent teams can then proactively approach employees ready for change, offer learning and development opportunities and bring meaning and value to every employee’s career beyond just a role.
And this is where nudges come in…
Perfectly timed nudges are worth paying attention to
Now it’s about using nudges to make it all happen. McKinsey says that nudges help people deal with a fact about the human brain—which is that we have limited attention. “The number of things that we can devote attention to in a day or an hour or a year is lower than the number of things we should devote attention to. A nudge can get us to pay attention.”
Enter the personalized nudge engine. Taking action on the insights and recommendations you get with hyper-personalized nudges to your people can predict your people’s next moves and prime your organization for change.
Whether it’s to let specific talent know about an opportunity you think they’d be perfect for, or a development opportunity that will take them to the next step, it’s vital to bring meaning to every career within your organization.
THE IMPACT
According to a 2020 McKinsey Global Survey on future workforce needs, almost nine in ten executives say their organizations either face skills gaps already or expect gaps to develop within the next five years.
When it comes to workforce intelligence, data is key. Reejig’s Workforce Intelligence shows you leading indicators to accurately understand departments and employees poised for growth, predict future skills shortages, understand what skill sets make up your workforce, plus diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging metrics.
How to start driving workforce optimization with a personalized, skills-based strategy:
Understand the skills ontology of your organization now. Look at skills gaps, transferable skills, skills adjacencies, and how they map to your job architecture to plan hires, reskilling, and redeployment opportunities that will shape your workforce for the future now.
Start by rethinking your job descriptions — focus on the results you’d like to see and the skills that can optimize your workforce, rather than the type of qualifications that you think could deliver them.
Reach out to candidates for opportunities that directly address the skills and potential of talent, and aren’t purely based on past roles or job titles. Be specific with how the role relates to their specific skill set and what kind of career pathway it can open up within your organization.
Communicate career, learning, and development opportunities regularly and proactively with talent, including current employees.
Optimizing your workforce starts with understanding the skills inside of it. So, put the scatter gun down and start taking an intentional, proactive approach that puts your people at the center of your organization.
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