Recruiting Top Digital Talent For Your Digital Transformation Journey

Organizations embarking on a digital transformation journey often encounter several challenges when looking to recruit top digital talent. Although the importance of tech talent is well understood, most companies underestimate their role in facilitating the successful execution of digital transformation initiatives.

CHALLENGES CREATED BY DIGITAL DISRUPTION

Digital disruption creates several challenges for human resources organizations - challenges that become increasingly difficult to address due to rapidly occurring updates and the velocity of digital change. With access to automation and digital resources becoming more ubiquitous and location-independent, companies can no longer compete effectively by relying on technology alone. 

Virtually every business worldwide has embarked on a digital transformation journey and organizations no longer have the luxury of using technology as a differentiating feature.

THE ROLE OF TALENT IN ACCELERATING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

In the coming years, most large enterprises will invest millions (if not billions) of dollars in digitally transforming their businesses. Although true digital transformation may take years to achieve, having top talent can help accelerate the entire process. 

To cope with the introduction of new expectations, new frameworks and changing paradigms and ensure the success of business operations, companies must rely on digital talent acquisition and the differentiated skillsets that employees bring to the table. 

This means that human resources departments now carry the burden of ensuring the success of their respective companies as they digitally transform their infrastructure and processes to deliver better products and services to a demanding customer base.

RECRUITING IN THE DIGITAL ERA

Digital transformation requires executive buy-in, employee willingness or readiness, and organizational excellence. Although cross-functional teams drive innovation and spearhead their organization’s digital transformation agenda, they rely heavily on creative individuals with heterogeneous skillsets in different areas of expertise. In other words, digital transformation requires digital competence. However, recruiting and retaining multi-talented individuals, whose technical know-how covers the wide range of disciplines needed to drive digital transformation, is a challenging task. Since such individuals are already immersed in the digital landscape, it is virtually impossible to find and recruit them using traditional recruitment processes and channels.

IDENTIFYING THE TALENT NEEDED FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Before creating a recruitment strategy to acquire the talent needed to drive digital transformation strategies, HR must have a thorough understanding of the capabilities needed by a digital business. Although these capabilities vary by industry, target market, company size and geography, all digital businesses share common traits. They are agile, responsive, operate quickly and are hyper-focused on delivering exceptional customer experience. Also, they must be able to engage with a wide range of digital ecosystems and take advantage of emergent technologies and improvements on existing ones. All this requires an IT infrastructure that can: 

• Deliver exceptional customer experiences. 
• Collate, store and process huge amounts of data.
• Easily and seamlessly integrate with other platforms and technologies. 
• Continuously deliver new infrastructure environments in minutes while maintaining its core legacy IT systems. 

This is only possible through the collective skills of a talented multidisciplinary agile team. This means that businesses not only need to recruit employees with strong technical skills, said employees must also be able to function smoothly as part of a team. Some of the tech talent needed by companies as they embark on their digital transformation journeys include: 

• DevOps engineers. 
• Next-gen machine-learning engineers.
• Full-stack architects. 
• Product owners. 
• Scrum masters and agility coaches. 
• Experience designers and engineers.

FINDING AND HIRING TOP TALENT

Although most businesses are aware of the tech talent needed to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, they still need to find and recruit them. IT recruitment for most companies is a slow and largely inefficient process - one that is not suited for organizations undergoing an aggressive digital transformation. 

As the gap between demand and supply of talent for key technologies like Cybersecurity, UI/UX, Big data, Data science, Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, IoT and Social continues to widen, finding top talent has become a herculean task. In the current Industry 4.0 era, traditional HR recruitment processes and channel won’t cut it.

CONCLUSION

What is needed is an approach that leverages best practices for predictive talent acquisition and a winning staffing strategy. 

This requires extensive planning, the creation of innovative sourcing and recruiting strategies, the crafting of detailed job descriptions, development of customized training and knowledge transfer plans and an intuitive and effective onboarding strategy. 

Organizations looking to implement critical technology initiatives to drive their digital transformation agenda must leverage innovative and cutting-edge staffing solutions to source for top talent in emerging technologies. 

COGENT, an Information Technology (IT) Consulting firm, provides such staffing solutions to help business recruit and build multi-talented teams. We leverage databacked research, emergent technologies, business experience and domain knowledge to find and engage the top 5 percent digital talent. 

We are the trusted go-to partner for sourcing top talent that will help businesses achieve their digital transformation goals and stay ahead of the competition without incurring excessive costs. Whether you require talent for a DevOps position or need to build a team to develop and customize next-gen digital applications, we have the people, processes, and technology to meet your staffing needs.

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