How Do Organizations Battle Talent Scarcity?

The problem of talent shortage is getting worse

 
One key number starkly illustrates this – McKinsey estimates that by 2020, there will be a global deficit of 40 million university educated people. So pronounced is this, we’re already seeing firms entering salary negotiations to ensure they get first-time job seekers. To me this is already the first sign firms are fighting for survival - but by making wages a larger proportion of costs, it’s not a sustainable solution.
 
The only long-term option business have is to find answers to why they can’t find the talent they want. We believe this will increasingly involve getting to talent faster and earlier – for instance forming partnerships with schools to create internships and work experience – or by diversifying where they get their talent from in the first place.
 
Between 2003-2013 Asia’s university population grew by 54 million (representing 74% of the growth of global student numbers). India alone will add another nine million undergraduates to its standing student population by 2020. As a result, we now have clients shifting two-thirds of their recruitment to the Far East – but are other organizations doing the same to tap into this vital talent pool? Possibly not.
 
We believe organizations do have the capacity to survive, but only if they adapt their strategies for finding talent. For some CHROs this might mean not taking university graduates at all – but using big data to redefine what good looks like in different roles, and understanding where the best people in those roles come from. This is a move away from academic matching, and more towards making other correlations. It’s only by understanding who succeeds and who is engaged that CHROs can redefine exactly who they’re looking for.
 
But there’s another area we believe needs confronting too – the need for organizations to make much more of early talent recruitment. Today, individuals with the scarce skills companies need make new connections earlier and earlier. If CHROs fail to track and make their own connections with these good people, they’ll lose the first bite of the recruitment cherry. It’s our future leaders who will take decisions about how to adapt and change their businesses, so getting to the best people to make these important choices has to be the future focus of HR.
 
Any solution must involve technology. Today relationships are digital, and the best firms will create digital value propositions that talk not only to those they’re attracting to their talent pools, but to their existing staff too. CHROs must engage with talent at virtual events, and even encourage existing staff to be brand advocates within their own networks. Technology provides intelligence, and it is vital technology helps CHROs understand what potential is. Do this, and when HRDs need to sift through the hundreds of resumes they’ll get per advertised role (more people will be chasing the same amount of jobs), they’ll at least know who they should devote the most time to during the selection process. Virtualization technology – using video or psychometrics – can also help this, and should be some of the solutions adopted.
 
While the future is hard to predict, it’s fair to say that ultimately it will demand much more joined up people thinking. Firms that understand recruitment will know that their success depends on creating relationships. Even when dealing with people they fail to hire, the best firms will realize they need to create some level of engagement – such as by giving feedback for next time. Why? Because who knows, one day, the candidate they once turned down could be just what they’re looking for a few years down the line.
 
Speed, accuracy and relationships [all underpinned by technology] – they’re all needed now and they will all be needed even more in the future. If CHROs improve in all of these areas, perhaps dire predictions of skills shortages ahead of us will not come to fruition. But the only way CHROs can avert this is by starting to do things differently, starting now.