Talent Gap: How to find, retain, and grow the talent you need?

Organizations are not a stagnant entity. If they were, they would perish quickly.

?These organizations need to adapt to the requirement of the market in order to survive, and thrive. In order to do so, they need to develop a cohesive team that can achieve that. But how is this done when hiring is becoming more competitive than ever, and the talents are scattered and their means of attraction are more complicated than before? If you were encountered by such dilemma, what would your plan be?

In order to achieve that, organizations need to invest simultaneously across the entire “hire to retire” life cycle, where they should aim to develop a focused team dedicated to managing the entire employee experience and creating a work environment where people can do interesting and meaningful work while nurturing and promoting a culture compliant with human-centered design principles.

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Hiring new employees is done because there is a gap in the organization that needs to be filled.

However, organizations most of the times miscalculate and underestimate the size of this gap. The skill gap, as some organizations prefer to refer to it, is determined according to the analysis done by the organization in order to determine the skills required to be present in the future employees that will fill the gaps.

However, currently there is a gap that is widening between the talent present in the job market, and the organizations. This can be the result of the fast-changing work environment, which some organizations are not fully aware of its impact, because their response to such fast-paced change is stagnant, where the officials perform talent gap analyses once or twice per year. Also, the approach to most of the organizations to fill their skills gap is very role-oriented, and doesn’t take into consideration the skills people have, want to acquire, and the amount of reskilling and upskilling the new employee should go through to be able to fit into the role.

?Does your organization fall into the same category? Or do you prefer to follow some unorthodox means when hiring new talents?

On the other hand, one should consider the fact that the talents in the new generation are the ones interviewing the organizations and companies, not the other way around. This is because the new generation needs to achieve things beyond job security and financial freedom, as important as these things are and sought. This new generation is living in a fast-paced world and work environment.

Living under these conditions drives top talents to always seek developing new skills, building meaningful and long-lasting connections, in addition to being a part of a culture that values continuous learning while doing purpose-driven work. These are sought of besides money.

Therefore, the approach of HR should take these new criteria into consideration, in order to attract top talents. They should be aware of the fact that top talents nowadays want to meet the people they’re going to work with, complete the interview process as fast as possible, and start their progress in the company the moment they are hired.

How long does the recruitment process take in your organization? Have you ever had any feedback on it?

Furthermore, HR people should pay attention to a certain detail, where new top talents don’t spend a lot of time surfing job sites. Hence, the traditional “Post and Seek” approach to hiring may not be as effective as it was before. In fact, talents may be found in more interesting, and unconventional channels, such as hackathons, events, seminars, coffee shops, curated sites, etc.

As were mentioned before, a work environment should be revolved around learning and should be human-centered. ?

Humans dislike stagnant environments, and so they seek new experiences and adventures to expand their horizon and knowledge. Talents need to craft their careers in a way that fulfills this need. So, in order to attract top talents, organizations and companies should craft personalized career paths for people inside and outside the organization. This will keep them continuously motivated and provide them with options to grow where they feel interested. This is done by redefining the positions, or the journey in the organization, to be more human-centered around roles, skills, capabilities, projects, and initiatives.

Moreover, the company should create teams and empower them, mainly by removing bureaucracy roadblocks and bottlenecks and enabling team-level decision-making. This will lead to a spike in the positive human experience markers, and the company would gain reputation as one of the companies’ people would like to work for.

This results in the increase in the employees’ satisfaction, and thus higher productivity and performance. The company can accelerate achieving that by augmenting technology into the core of its operation. This will make the employees focus on innovation and creativity and solve challenging business and life riddles, instead of performing mundane work that isn’t considered a challenge for top talents.

Once all these ingredients are mixed together, the company is ready to attract top talents of different backgrounds, and top talents, in turn, would want to work there. Having talents of different backgrounds and cultures is healthy for the company or organization, as the diversity of proficiencies, knowledge, expertise, exposures, skills, competencies, interests, stories, backgrounds, education, thoughts, beliefs, and philosophies make the workplace an unlikely exciting and vibrant plateau where people can exchange values.

The business world is fast and new challenges are arising. Thus, modern problems require modern solutions. This human-centered approach to jobs will solve most of the problems for the companies and organizations, by ensuring they analyze and assess more precisely the needs of the institution, create a hub for attracting the desired top talents, and establish an environment that supports them in the various aspects they desire to grow, personally and professionally.

But what about MSMEs and startups, which can’t afford to implement these mentioned practices despite facing the same, and even tougher, challenges in finding, retaining, and growing the talent they need. What advantages do these organizations have compared to large ones? How can they benefit from them to face those talent challenges? How can these organizations leverage their scarce resources to win in the “future of work”?