Matt Alder, Mervyn Dinnen: Digital Talent

It is fair to say that companies only tend to act when they can clearly understand the consequences on their bottom line.

In 1998, 40 % of the revenue for the Indian software industry came from exporting Y2K services and established it as a dominant global technology force for the decades to come.

Tom Goodwin in his book Digital Darwinism: “The world’s best candlemakers continually made better candles, but they never invented the lightbulb. Today companies need to leap to new business models and rethink fundamentals and what they stand for, not slowly tweak what has worked before.”[1]

Digital transformation is not about evolving or tweaking, it is a whole new mindset. Back in the late 1990s, digital skills effectively just meant programming. By 2021 the skills companies need for the digital economy have broadened even further fueling intense demand for talent with skills as diverse as product management, data science, solutions sales, customer service and recruiting.

2018 Tech Nation report use this classification of Digital jobs:

Digital tech jobs: all people working in digital tech occupation, irrespective of the industry
Digital tech jobs in digital tech: only people in digital tech industry
Jobs in digital tech: all people working in digital tech

Korn Ferry Institute predicts that by 2030 in the technology, media and telecommunications sector alone there will be a global labor shortage of 4.3 million workers leading to an unrealized economic output of 449.7 billion USD globally.

In order for business to effectively digitally transforms, they need to also transform their thinking and approaches around talent.

Digital skills for a digital transformation

Erica Volini noted that to many businesses use the term digital purely to mean the implementation of new technology, whereas she believed it’s really the integration of technology with a shift in mindset.

The traditional organizational hierarchical structure is becoming limiting factor.

Many businesses see digital change and transformation as being mainly about technology, and usually from the aspect of simplifying and streamlining the people processes.

Problem with change is that those who have been with a business for a few years are usually comfortable with the way it operates. They understand the internal systems and rituals; the way works get done and the way their contribution impacts on the greater corporate output and mission. Now start to automate some of the operational processes and see what happens.

What is the purpose of the change? Are they doing it correctly? What is happening with the information? What will happen to their job?

Shadow work – all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of business and organizations.

Dr. Emma Parry is saying that there is evidence that work attitudes are changing over time; that these are continuous long-term trends, not step-changes between generations. Even though the new generations are the ones we think about when we talk about digital changes, but all generations share values and expectations about trusted leadership and continuous learning.

Literacy is the ability to read, write, speak and listen in a way that lets us communicate effectively and makes sense of the world.

Five categories of essential digital skills:

Communicating
Handling information and content
Transacting
Problem-solving
How to be safe and legal online

We can also talk about skills for life and additional skills for work.

Evan Sinar explains that one of the big issues leading to the decline of HR’s influence in the C-suite has been their struggle to keep up with digital transformation.

Three type of HR professionals:

Reactors: ensuring compliance with policies and legalities.
Partners: they are more likely to be involved with performance, development, hiring and workforce planning.
Anticipators: use data and analytics to provide senior management with people insights and help with planning the overall talent strategy that drives business outcomes and goals.

The top two challenges that CEOs said they face is developing the next generation of leaders and attracting and retaining top talent.

In digital transformation HR role is crucial. The way our employees do their jobs, the relationship they have with the business, the impact on their productivity and engagement, how they interact with colleagues and managers, the way they are rewarded, and even the very nature of the terms under which they offer their time and labor, are all changing, shaped by digital technology and a completely different mindset around what our organizations do, and what our customers and clients expect.

There is twofold challenge for the HR. The first is to help prepare workforce for the change and the second is to adapt itself for new way of working in digital way.

The four pillars of a digital HR strategy are mindset, people, process and technology. Employees want their 9-5 to look like their 5-9. And employees 5-9 lives are full of seamless, effortless experiences, largely enabled by digital technology.

Firms with mid-level employees with strong beliefs in the purpose of their organization and the clarity in the path towards that purpose experience better performance. Higher purpose at work coming from two sources. the camaraderie between workers and clarity from management. People closest to the action know the problem long before the leader. But they don’t have the language or authority to make decisions. Listen to the people.

Stephanie Woerner and Pete Weill are talking about four model for businesses looking to thrive in the digital age:

Supplier – selling something.
Omnichannel – owning a customer.
Modular – constantly evolving and expanding business.
Ecosystem drivers – companies that dominate marketplace.

HR operations itself it ripe for digital transformation. The shift from systems of record to systems of engagement. Digital transformation is also changing the way we attract, select and hire our digital talent.

Talent acquisition

According to Tom Godwin there are two reasons behind the dichotomy between the words and actions. First is that companies are announcing change initiatives as part of their corporate marketing. Investing in technology is far more visible than investing in people. The second is that actual change is extremely hard, since in most cases you need a change in the culture of organization.

A key area of digital transformation is doing business in a different way and potentially serving a different type of customer and that is likely to mean a different type of talent is needed. Ensuring the right talent is available at the right time for digital transformation, that we make sure we have the right leadership, internal mobility, development and the employee experience are all critical.

Credentialism and hiring based on outdated metrics could be seen as conscious biases which are making it very hard for employees to recruit the people they need for their businesses.

Francesca Gino argues that disruptive thinkers are fully engaged with their jobs and offer the degree of creativity to businesses that they need to transform. Five main characteristics that people she would class are “rebel talent” have are novelty, curiosity, perspective, diversity and authenticity.

Recruiting in areas of skill shortage requires a huge amount of influence to cut through the noise. In order to have a large enough pool, you need talent intelligence.

Branding is essentially about differentiation. Most employer branding initiatives tend to be very internally focused, even if that isn’t the original intention. Current state of employer branding is that many companies, especially those in the same sectors, push out very similar messages.

The businesses that are most successful at recruiting digital talent have carefully curated a separate digital employment brand to break down any unhelpful perceptions and properly sell themselves.

In the feedback-driven society we now live in, it is now impossible for employers to stay in control of their employer brand message.

Shane Snow identifies four critical elements of compelling business storytelling:

Relatability
Novelty
Fluency
Tension

The format of storytelling is not limited to text. Pictures, videos and increasingly time-limited short-form stories via social media are all tools companies need to have in their employer branding toolbox. Developing effective content marketing and storytelling strategies will be critical to successful talent acquisition in the future.

One example of an approach to outreach and persuasion is the inbound recruiting. Inbound recruiting is the strategy being pioneered by digital marketing software provider HubSpot.

We are seeing an increase in the use of programmatic advertising in recruitment marketing. Programmatic advertising works by using technology to automate the planning and buying of digital advertising and introduces an exciting opportunity for more precise targeting and increased ROI. Data-driven marketing is finally entering the recruitment space.

A model that helps to simplify the landscape and make strategies more effective is presented in authors book Exceptional Talent. There are four elements to this model:

Attention: how do you find and get the attention of your target audience?
Persuasion: we have talked about pre-suasion in the context of employer branding.
Conversion: with attention so hard to come by, converting any interest generated into an application or registration is absolutely critical.
Experience: almost all talent acquisition professionals would agree that providing a good candidate experience is critical.

The future of recruitment marketing is data-driven and personalized.

The digital talent experiences

A new age of customer capitalism – a move away from the traditional era of shareholder capitalism into a business climate in which the consumer, customer or client was the top priority.

What we offer to our customers, we now need to offer to our employees. Digital talent expects nothing less!

We may talk about different stages of talent journey, about application experience, candidate experience, hiring experience, employee experience and learning experience, but when we talk about talent experience, we mean the whole journey.

Some challenges in hiring and retaining digital talents are: pipeline of future skills and future leadership, the concept of talent itself will be redefined, retention of talent is becoming a key consideration, onboarding is important due to higher expectation for performance of new hires, job seekers are much more informed and their career expectations have changed. People want to work somewhere that supports and enables them to learn, grow, develop and achieve, while recognizing and rewarding their work.

One of the problems in creating seamless work experience is that each stage of talent cycle has different stakeholders who are rarely able to offer a consistent approach.

Two points on the entire journey at which candidates felt least engaged with the business were in-between their first and second interview, and while they were working their notice period having accepted an offer.

When we talk about the employee experience it is usually framed from the company’s viewpoint.

Research shows that one in three would quit their job if they felt the technology they are using is outdated, and three-quarters need to have an opportunity for professional development to feel satisfied in their job.

Micro-experiences employees have been very important. Like onboarding. For your new hire, this may be their first experience of how the organization really operates on a day-to-day basis. In the Power of moments Chip and Dan Heath are talking about the impact of positive or “peak” experiences and negative or “valley” experiences, showing that positive benefits of a “peak” experiences can last up to for weeks, while the negative impact of a “valley” experience lasts two weeks. Although it is shorter, the negative experience might initially seem to have a deeper and more immediate impact.

Peter Cappelli is saying that business have never done as much hiring as they do today and they’ve never spent as much money doing it and they’ve never done a worse job of it.

A new arrival may lead to established employees losing enthusiasm for their business and becoming less productive, particularly if they feel that their options for progression have become limited.

Leadership IQ concluded that two out of every five external appointments turn out to be bad hires within the first 18 months.

Recruitment and HR leaders must work closely with all their hiring managers to both educate them on the changing trends in the talent marketplace and also involve them in designing both the candidate experience and EVP, making sure that they are able to give these values to the candidates who will work for them. The talent acquisition team needs to see themselves as part of the overall business talent planning strategy, and not merely vacancy fillers.

New thinking around talent management

Digital transformation is agile and ongoing, and the workforce needs to adapt their thinking and learn new skills in real-time as they meet new challenges. Furthermore, work itself is more distributed. People work across teams, functions and disciplines, sometimes on projects over which their line manager has no visibility. Digital talent has intellectual curiosity, a desire to discover and understand how their roles are evolving. They look for support, enablement, connections, self-management and access to what they need to know as and when they need it.

A culture of learning, a culture of performance, a culture of recognition all leading to a culture of innovation.

New practice like video call also brought additional challenge, since video call demands more focus than face-to-face. Also, silence is another issue you need to address during video calls.

The main barriers to embedding a learning culture:

A tendency to confuse learning with formal training and knowledge management.
An approach that tried to structure informal learning.
Lack of support or buy-in from senior leaders and line managers.
Siloed approaches across more complex and multi-function businesses.

Learning is something that happens on an ongoing basis, in real-time, and not at specific times set by an organization.

The user experience of workplace technology has become a key factor in both employee engagement and their overall satisfaction levels.

The HR Trends institute listed “From job-based HR to skills-based HR” as one of its 2021 megatrends. The ability to know and understand the current skills, the skills that can acquired and the adjacent skills (those related to a skill or competency that a worker already has) will be hugely important in the future.

Quest for the best HR AI platform is on. Skills, relationships and experiences must be reflected in the platform. Key data metrics for HR:

Quality of hire
Employee engagement
Critical business roles for which no successor had been identified
Competency or skills gap analysis
Average time to hire for key roles
Best sources of hire
Top performer retention

Ratings do not improve an employee’s performance, but relationships will. Using modern people analytics, managers should have a rich dataset that measures all employee inputs and achievements that can help to properly assess performance, potential and impact. Modern businesses are no longer hierarchical and tend to work differently.

Research indicates that development-oriented feedback is a key driver in engagement and in creating feelings of inclusion.

Three main problems with feedback:

A misguided belief that it requires “brutal honesty”.
Something that is “dumped” on us at various times of the year rather than something that is used constructively when needed.
As individuals we tend to turn it back on to the giver, spiraling the negativity.

Personas in feedback can be divided into: seekers, receivers and extenders.

The four key components of successful onboarding:

Starting the process early.
Helping the new employees to establish personal connections.
Ensuring they have clear objectives, goals and timelines, with a structure for feedback so there are no surprises.
Making the first day as special as possible.

Internal hires need onboarding too, through a process normally referred to as cross-boarding.

Leadership in the digital age

Vineer Nayar distinction between management and leadership is that management consists of controlling a group or a set of entities to accomplish a goal and leadership refers to an individual’s ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organizational success.

Accountability is a vulnerable process that takes courage and time. Blame is faster. The top qualities that employees look for in leaders – accountability, honesty, decisiveness and confidence – can be displayed during the interview and the onboarding phases.

Today’s modern workforce don’t see gratitude or recognition as part of a reward program but as something they expect to be embedded into organizational culture. Moments of gratitude between employees can be powerful and have huge benefits.

To really embed recognition in culture, quite a few things need to happen:

Recognizing all efforts.
Encouraging frequent peer-to-peer recognition.
Ensuring that recognition programs are regularly reviewed and improved.

The most impactful recognition is personalized.

Hemsley Fraser defined leadership traits for new times:

Curiosity, critical thinking, vulnerability and confidence may not automatically seem like traditional leadership traits.
The need to analyze, reflect, investigate and embrace uncertainty is added on top of them.
The leaders should be empathetic towards employees, but not at the expense of being decisive when difficult calls must be made.
Leaders need to be brave enough to challenge and disrupt their business when necessary.

Perhaps two of the most important traits for modern leaders are agility and attention.

Digitization represents a leap into the unknown for most businesses, bringing with it ambiguity and uncertainty, which can create a tendency to embrace guesswork. The role of leaders is to oversee a transition that limits the guesswork and slowly builds proof points using data-driven insights.

Your employer brand is what your employees experience, and therefore what they say it is, rather than what an organization says about itself.

Modern leaders are expected to engage both the brain and the heart of their people through coaching, developing and empowering them. Transparent governance is important to our digital workforce.

Diversity and inclusion

Companies with the most diverse top teams are also top financial performers.

The other key advantage of a robust diversity hiring strategy is the opening up of additional valuable pools of talent to bring critical skills into the organization.

Baking bias into assessment is unfortunately not just a historical problem; in fact, the recent rise of technology powered by algorithms and artificial intelligence has created the potential for bias to be magnified on a massive scale.

While diversity is often seen as a recruiting problem, it is actually more of a retention problem. Recruiting a diverse workforce is pointless if that workforce isn’t engaged and productive.

Work Tech

Traditional corporate technology has struggled to keep pace with the rapid acceleration in the development of consumer technology, particularly in terms of intuitive interfaces and overall user experience.

The level of venture capital being invested into HR technology had already been growing massively in the years leading up to the COVID-19. Over 5 billion USD was invested in areas including Core HR, payroll, wellness, L&D, talent management, internal communication and talent acquisition during 2019.

Josh Bersing suggested that rather than the software being labelled as HR tech, the name Work Tech would better reflect the changes taking place. AI, automation and data are the critical components. AI has been the biggest buzzword in Work Tech for several years.

Talent acquisition is the most significant growth area of AI.

The way that technology is revolutionizing talent management and learning and development:

In recent years career site systems have come onto the market offering a true digital marketing platform for talent attractions.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, video interviewing moved into the mainstream of talent acquisition.
Technology is now enabling the use of data to make the candidate experience a science, something that can be personalized and optimized in real-time.

Automation is essentially powered by AI and driven by data but also has its own set of challenges and consideration. A few examples of where we are already seeing automation working in practice: sourcing, recruitment marketing, interview scheduling, candidate screening, onboarding, objective setting, coaching, engagement monitoring and elements of outplacement.

Process automation is driven by the rise of robotic process automation (RPA). RPA scenarios range from something as simple as generating automatic response to an email to deploying thousands of bots. The second type of automation we are seeing deployed in the talent lifecycle is matching automation. The third and perhaps most significant type of automation from the perspective of people-centric functions is conversational automatic.

A dedicated recruiting system is likely to be more flexible than a system that is also providing payroll and core HR services.

Critical elements of an effective Work Tech strategy:

Objectives – what are you looking to achieve with technology.
Ongoing research – this is a continuous process of education on the Work Tech market.
Analysis – keep asking the following questions to understand your current position and what you need moving forward. What are the limitations of your existing software?
Selection and implementation.
Adoption.
Evaluation and Optimization – understanding the critical measures of success it vital.

There are three types of trends in Work Tech which employers should be following closely:

Technology trends
Market trends
Strategic trends

The new future of work

Many people have now been working from home for the best part of two years, forming new habits and establishing new norms. Employers cannot expect their employees to unquestioningly return to the office as if nothing has happened.

There can be nothing more dishearten than commuting to an office in anticipation of face-to-face interaction only to spend all day on video calls with colleagues who are working remotely that day.

What you want for productivity is two extremes, a mixture of solitude and sociability. You also need a mixture of very high-intensity work, concentrated work and periods of discretionary free time.

So, any attempt to optimize for an average is a fatal mistake in any complex system. What you want is an optimal level of variance, non-optimal average.

The future of the labor market is precarious. Fixing the skills imbalance between those being displaced and the requirements of the roles being created is critical.

Jeff Wald in his book The End of Jobs is talking about total talent management, that will see companies breaking work down into specific tasks and managing all of their labor resources in a single platform.

Four stages of the digital talent journey are: