Forward Thinking on Talent

"Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough, so they don't want to. Richard Branson, Founder Virgin Group.

Organizations need to be ready with a great talent pool from where they can fetch the best-suited talent at times of need in the future. This pool must be kept updated with the recent trends in technology and technical know-how, and they must serve as the best solution as per the requirements.

Becoming future-ready requires organizations to maintain 3 essential workforce elements.

• Nurturing, upgrading, and maintaining the talent pool they have,
• Acquiring the right talent and their retention for their short-term and long-term needs,
• Fulfilling the expectations of their talents.

Overlooking expectations results in losing skilled talent. Businesses must look for the competitive advantage they can create.

Billions of people aren't getting the appropriate opportunities they should globally due to their short-term thinking and instant gratification needs. A consortium of organizations and individuals known as 'The Future of Talent Institute' explores emerging issues in talent management, staffing, recruiting, and employee and leadership development.

Transpiring trends in diversity and remote hiring are pacing us toward trending areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Analytics, Big Data, Internet of things (IoT).

Identifying Talent: A Burning Issue

"Acquiring the right talent is the most important key to growth. Hiring was and still is the most important thing we do. Marc Benioff, Founder, Chairman, and Co-CFO of Salesforce.

In his book, "Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives and Winners around the world," Tyler Cowen says talent is remarkably important. Allocating the right talent to the right job saves time, enhances productivity, and helps reduce cost and perform the work perfectly.

Tyler Cowen says that when we don't match the appropriate talent to a task, it results in lower per capita income. He further adds understanding the context that one is operating helps one to find the right match.

He foresees 3 major areas of crypto, computational biology, and effective altruism, where massive talent will be attracted in the future. He envisions a future where a day might come when someone wishes to send money to Mexico or another country. They might send crypto rather than rushing to Western Union for a fund transfer. Therefore, building a workforce for the tech-savvy economy will require talent to work digitally and efficiently in the future.

Hybrid is the Future:

Hybrid workplaces are here to stay after the pandemic. Employees have more choices, while organizations have reduced commercial office spaces. Here's an infographic to depict the predictions.

For example, Apple and Amazon have a 3-2 plan where employees are required to work from the office 3 days a week and from home 2 days a week. Google also followed suit, where employees can entirely WFH for 4 weeks a year.

Following the Trends:

Alan Lambert, an international strategic HR change leader, talks about focusing on the future rather than the past to develop talent. He believes that we all can develop ourselves, embrace uncertainties, overcome challenges and obstacles, improve from constructive criticism, and get inspired by others' success.

He questions the significance of experience being asked in the hiring process and how this past affects one's ability to perform today. It puts lots of pressure on millennials, while people with more years of experience stay adrift on past successes.

He gives more weightage to skills and competence to perform than past experiences. As 90% of skills come from exposure and only 10% of skills are acquired. One of the most important questions to ask as a leader is: what can I use now? What's relevant today?

Divergent Approach:

Tech and talent are the core pillars of any business. For different levels of hiring, a divergent approach needs to be followed. The hiring process of the CFO of a large organization is different from that of a sports team captain or a project manager. To hire a CFO or a sports captain, team and organizational consensus and trust are necessary, while this may not be necessary for a project manager or other roles.

Skills are far more important than credentials. Many people are highly skilled yet lack credentials, and many are overrated in credentials while they lack the actual skills to perform. In the labor market or other smaller jobs, high-risk takers, more productive people, are preferred, who add greater value.

Developing Talent:

"Human resources isn't a thing we do. It's the thing that runs our business." ~ Steve Wynn, CEO of Wynn Resorts Limited

Talent can be developed over time. Major skills can be acquired, most of them after schooling, from work experience, when one works at the ground level. That's why we all need to explore and try our hands on different skills.

Credentials alone are not sufficient. Organizations must award their employees the opportunity to up-skill themselves and arm them with resources for the benefit of both the company and the individual. Growing skills is like becoming your upgraded version with each new experience. If you come out as the same person from any job as you were before, you have yet to grow and up-skilled yourself.

Role of Masterminds:

Mastermind, a concept of like-minded people working together for a common goal, plays a vital role in shaping and skilling someone and getting great results. In today's digital world, we can see many such mastermind groups working together and bringing great thinkovation, be it a start-up, inventing a new product, discovering great business ideas, or the tech, ed-tech, or fintech booming industries.

Attending events and social interactive networking platforms help people absorb higher energy from top talent and magnetize inspiration to move ahead in their career path.

As people are highly influenced by who they surround themselves with, having the right company of talented individuals can influence them to uplift their goals. They will learn not only the technical know-how but also the soft skills and charisma these top talented people embody.

Conclusion

Look for what can be done instead of what it is! This can change one's perspective and bridge the gap of ambiguity while developing talent potential. A positive mental attitude will enable people and organizations to re-skill over and over again.

Forward-thinking is looking at numerous possibilities in the current and future scenario and leaving the past behind. A continuous improvement according to the time, tide and trend is what's demanded from the organizations and their future talent/workforce to stay ahead to beat the competition.

For more insightful articles, visit the Cogent Infotech website.