Modern work: Navigating the evolving landscape

At our #TalentConnect event in New York in October, I had a great opportunity to meet with recruitment leaders and talent professionals from around the world. As I shared in my previous piece, one of the hot topics of conversation was #GreenSkills, but it was also a valuable chance to engage with peers on other impactful themes around modern work and the evolution of talent acquisition in an era of talent scarcity.?

While in NYC, I got to grab a coffee with Ga?lle de la Fosse, president of LHH and an executive committee member at Adecco Group, and we had a great discussion about the changing world of work, the shifting role of the HR function, #SkillsFirst hiring, uniting generations and more.??

Ga?lle describes the changes in the world of work as a “massive revolution” and says companies are exploring the way forward.??

“There are impacts across so many areas – in talent acquisition, in the types of leadership we need, in what type of career paths we are looking for,” she says, noting that has profound implications for the recruitment industry. “How do we move an organisation from a world with an abundance of talent where you can advertise a job and fill it, to one where there is scarcity. We need to look at humans and the skills they have and then put those to work.”?

The changing face of HR?

In the past, HR was often siloed and separated from the rest of the business; today’s questions call for more joined-up answers.?

“I think before it was a double silo,” says Ga?lle. “The first silo was that HR was seen as a support function and wasn’t really integrated into the business. But Covid put HR back into the centre of decision-making around strategy and performance.”?

The second silo was within HR teams, she says: “Things were handled separately, whereas now there is a consciousness that you have to address all of these topics together – recruitment, retention, learning, culture – because they are very much linked. If companies are going to identify their skills gaps and then attract and retain the talent they need, they have to be more holistic.”?

We are certainly seeing much greater recognition that people strategy is not just about teams and talent, but managing the broader picture. The fast-moving skills agenda is highlighting the need for a more integrated take on the talent ecosystem.?

Skills-first hiring?

Over the last two years there has been an evangelisation of skills-first hiring across our industry, as we evolve from a world where hiring is based on university degrees, past roles and job titles towards a focus on skills and candidate potential. There is a growing recognition that this approach is not just industry good practice but is also directly beneficial in expanding and diversifying talent pools for the benefit of employers.?

LinkedIn’s Skills First Report shows we’ve seen more than 45% of hirers on LinkedIn were explicitly using skills data to fill roles in the past year, up 12% year-on-year. We see 61% of US businesses saying its hard to attract top talent right now and studies suggest the traditional indicators of ability, such as years of experience, are flawed. Over 70% of jobs require degrees at a time when less than 50% of US workers hold a bachelor’s degree, while recent LinkedIn data shows the skill sets for jobs have changed by around 25% since 2015 and that will double by 2027.?

When it comes to diversity, in jobs where women are underrepresented, the proportion of women in the talent pool would increase 24% more than it would for men with a skills-first approach.?

LinkedIn is working hard to drive the shift to skills-first, effectively acting as a guide for the recruitment industry. But while the pacesetters are starting to switch, employers are asking where to begin. Talent leaders tell me they are bought into the benefits of the approach and the need to link talent acquisition into the life cycle of talent within the business, but they don’t always know how to drive transformation and what is the most effective starting point.??

“Everybody understands the why,” says Ga?lle, “and the reality is actually that you can’t find talent today unless you have a broader mindset around who you are going to attract. But still they want people that have already done the job. So we are in a transition where being able to identify skills is still critical, because once we can do that it will become easier to figure out whether someone can check the boxes.”?

We talked about how this is both a taxonomy issue and a mentality issue, and there is a tech aspect too, as tools are rolled out to help articulate the skills available in the business, the skills needed, and the routes to filling gaps.?

“The soft skills aspect is tricky,” says Ga?lle. “You can analyse hard skills, have tests with AI, develop taxonomies and create tools to objectively test those. But soft skills are becoming more important and are tougher to articulate.”?

She adds: “We are evolving from a world where it was all about the job description and the title, to one where it is about the skills that are needed. So the questions we have to ask are what are the skills needed from day one, what can be acquired later and how can we help the candidate develop. All these things are changing and link talent acquisition with the life cycle of talent within the company.”?

Mobilisation of talent?

Far greater adoption of technology in the attraction, acquisition and screening of candidates should allow recruiters to focus their time elsewhere. As our Future of Recruiting Report highlighted, three in four hiring professionals expect to automate repetitive tasks going forward so they can prioritise more strategic work, and 59% think AI will help them engage better with candidates.?

In the context of labour scarcity, for the first time I am hearing organisations talking about the mobilisation of talent and the need to retain rather than recruit their way through this period.??

Ga?lle agrees: “Probably between a third and a half of all the conversations I’m having with clients today involve mobility and internal mobility, which we weren’t hearing last year. It has come to the forefront as people have faced talent shortages and seen that skills need to change for many jobs.”?

Engagement is key here. Upskilling employees enables career growth and internal mobility, both of which can help bolster retention. In fact,?75% of employees who receive promotions will stay with the company?for at least three years, as will 62% of workers who make lateral moves. Simply altering a team members’ responsibilities increases the likelihood of retaining high-potential employees and top performers by over 20%.?

In fact, LinkedIn’s 2022?Skills Advantage Report?found that having opportunities to learn and grow is?the top driver of a great work culture. And employees of organisations with highly rated cultures are 31% more likely to recommend working for their organisation and 25% more likely to report being happy at work.?

The multi-generational workforce?

The arrival of Gen Z in the workforce, creating five-generation workplaces for the first time, is another theme shifting the dynamics for employers. Our numbers show Gen Z are 47% more likely than Gen X to prioritise opportunities to advance within the company, 45% more focused on developing new skills and 17% more concerned about inclusive and diverse workplaces.??

Gen Z is very much the generation that is less engaged, more anxious and more focused on culture, creating leadership challenges around how that is managed.?

“Gen Z is creating a lot of attention because they started their careers in this new world of work and all they have known is remote,” says Ga?lle. “They stand out for the amount of time they are engaged with tech and for their expectations there, and we need to figure out how to engage them.”?

Part of that is creating positive hybrid working arrangements, investing in and demonstrating the value of time together. Many companies trying to enforce a return to the office are facing resistance. “Our clients want roles filled by either hybrid or in-office employees, and the younger workforce just doesn’t want to commit to that. The key is to find a way to connect those two imperatives.” says Ga?lle.???

Data from The Flex Report shows the flexible work trend continuing to play out. The share of people in the office full time dropped to 42% in the second quarter of 2023, down from 49% in the first quarter, while the share of offices with hybrid work arrangements jumped up to 30% from 20% at the start of the year.?

Middle managers will be at the forefront of the challenges of leading teams comprising multiple generations: “Middle management, and especially first-time leaders, will be the ones in contact with the wider teams,” she says. “Team effectiveness and leadership development is going to require focus.”?

They will also be working with new technology. Ga?lle says: “Someone was saying to me the other day that with automation will come managers leading teams of 200 people instead of 25. I actually think the manager will still manage 25 but they will be spending their day very differently to before.”?

My personal view is that it is not human versus machine in most white collar roles, but the biggest threat is human and machine. Even if a manager is not changing jobs, their job is changing on them.?

Ga?lle finished up our chat with a few words on career transition, where LHH has a large business with companies laying off employees, helping individuals navigate to the next step. Businesses see the value in doing that respectfully, but job leavers have shifting perspectives.?

“We used to have people come in and say, ‘I’ve lost my job as an accountant. Help me find another job as an accountant,’,” she says. “Now people are looking to different sectors, seeking to understand the skills they have and what other jobs they could be doing.”?

As candidates broaden their horizons, the talent industry is going to have to respond.??

A holistic approach??

It was great to spend time with Ga?lle discussing modern work, skills-first hiring, mobilising talent and the multi-generational workforce. The good news is that companies do understand the importance of building out programmes to support the development of their employees’ skills and most are already working on it.??

Recent LinkedIn data shows four in 10 companies are in the early stages of moves in this direction, getting buy-in and assembling a core work team, with a further 37% in programme development and 15% already active with employee learning programmes. Only 4% of the companies surveyed had not yet made a start.?

Development opportunities that enable personal growth and build skills are a big focus for Gen Z, while we know that internal mobility plays a big role in employee retention. According to the 2023 LinkedIn Future of Recruiting report, when an employer is highly committed to internal hiring, employees stay at a company 60% longer.?

As modern work transforms the skills we need and how we deploy them, the need for the talent industry to step up with a new model for learning and development, powered by data and insights, has never been more apparent.?