Spanish
In our last article, “HR And Leadership For Achieving Business Excellence” we mentioned the report, “Global Human Capital Trends 2014: Engaging the 21st-century workforce” by Bersin for Deloitte which brings together the most relevant trends now in the human capital management field from a global viewpoint. As we already pointed out in our article, leadership development is positioned as one of the key challenges of today’s organizations and more specifically for HR professionals.
One of the other important challenges the report mentions is the ability to meet talent requirements related to capturing, retaining and maintaining talent.
For talent capture, here’s a paradox: the presence of high levels of unemployment in the current market (23.67% in Spain according to the last Labour Force Survey) and the shortage of workers with specific skills and competencies required by companies. This mostly occurs when covering specific technical positions in various sectors, from software engineers to big data analysts, health specialists, industry professionals (IT) and more. According to the ninth annual Talent Shortage Survey from the Manpower Group, 36% of employers worldwide have difficulties finding talent in 2014.
Yet half of the CEOs worldwide plan to increase their workforces next year. However 63% of these believe they will not find candidates with the right skill set to cover their talent needs within their organizations (according to Professional International Mobility survey published by LinkedIn on Europe).
This forces us to at least rethink our recruitment processes, the way we recycle professionals who form part of our organizations and to seek new ways of retaining them aside from their salary.
Today there is no doubt that talent is scarce and companies that need to acquire and hire talent must compete in uncharted territories marked by new networks of global talent and social media communication, as defined by the change coming from the perspective of new emerging professions. The old ways of hiring, acquiring and accessing talent no longer have the same efficiency. New angles must be contemplated for managing this new scenario:
- The battle for talent is now global, a factor that forces us to find new strongholds in areas where we never ventured before. Clearly we can find the professional we are looking for anywhere in the world, so mobility policies must be on the agenda, just like teleworking ones.
- We must consider new ways of building relationships to the new types of professionals who do not seek to join a company in a conventional way:
- Such is the case for knowmads or knowledge nomads who live on the net and who move from project to project depending on how interesting it is for their career or how appealing the project seems to them. High unemployment levels have meant that a great many entrepreneurs have popped up jumping onto this bandwagon, and possibly these will not consider reintegrating into a company but instead look to maintain a subset of clients they manage themselves.
- Those groups of professionals who out of personal needs cannot undertake a standard workday and seek extreme flexibility.
- Groups that have historically been outside the labour market but are trained to undertake certain functions.
- And there is a large group of senior talent that we cannot ignore, leveraging the value of their experience, helping them to retrain and in particular strengthening one of their capabilities in which they are not native: digital identity.
- Beyond all this, it is vital governments become involved in the creation of learning environments that in coordination with the business world are able to prepare the youth to cover the talent needs of companies.
- Additionally we have to work on our employer brand by the same measure as we work on the corporate brand of our businesses, to ultimately create a talent experience that flows towards potentially eligible candidates, working with them even before the need arises. Practices like gamification may be useful in this area.
