The Same Old New Hiring Challenges

Hiring the best talent has and will always be a challenge for any company, small, medium, or large. Organizations must have good talent to grow, beat the competition, and produce the best products and services. This will be the case no matter how much AI you weave into the mix. So, what’s the solution to the same old new hiring challenges?

The Same Only Different

While the need for top talent is universal, the ways we find and recruit that talent changes with the times and the available tools. Finding good talent is not just the job of HR, or the CEO, or a manager, it is everyone’s job at every level. Whether you’re a rocket scientist, a hotel housekeeper, an accountant, or a mechanic, think about who you want to work beside. You want to share your working hours with people with the same values of such things as honesty, pride in workmanship, and work ethic as examples. Therefore, each team member is responsible for helping maintain and bring good talent onboard while always keeping an eye out for maintaining diversity.

Hiring Begins at Home

This type of “Talent Awareness” is not going to happen on its own. One of the best places to begin ensuring that you don’t succumb to the current “talent acquisition panic” is with your own team members. Your organization’s culture needs to reflect the type of talent you want in your organization. There are many different avenues to educate current talent on this topic via a campaign encompassing posters, webinars, committees, brainstorming sessions, and the like. These types of campaigns can  also help build loyalty of current talent to help overcome the millennial mindset of job hopping.

Hiring Trends

Of course, “the rubber meets the road” with hiring efforts in HR. Markets, business, fashion, the stock market, culture, and other entities all experience trends. Hiring is no different. In ancient times, whoever showed up at the “job site” and picked up a stick and started digging or picked up a spear and threw it or started cleaning out the cave was the newest employee. In Medieval times, it was mostly families who had the ability to produce their own “home grown” talent. As times began to progress, other means came to light such as newspapers, bulletin boards, industry publications and the like.

Today, technology provides us with a plethora of ideas that only a few years ago would have been science fiction. The idea is to 1. Keep up with the fast-changing trends that technology brings and to 2. Combine technology, people, and techniques for the most creative recruiting and retention methods. As an example, recently an HR Executive colleague of mine was considering an applicant for an open position at the company. The applicant had already taken some assessments – another great modern hiring tool that technology has made affordable and easy to use. My colleague was browsing on LinkedIn and noticed that I am connected to this applicant. The HR executive called me and explained that s/he noticed the applicant and are connected, did I know the applicant, and could I give a reference if I did know the applicant? I did and I did. The applicant was hired, my colleague’s search was over, and my LinkedIn connection was on the job market for only an abbreviated time. Think of the ways combining technology, people, and techniques can help you get ahead in your hiring efforts.

Train Your Managers to Be Connectors  

Good managers are part of your hiring and retention program. Connector managers are even better. Connector managers are rare, but they are exactly what is needed both to cultivate your hiring culture as well as your “we’re a good place to work culture.” Just as any good coach, a connector manager understands when to push, when to pull, and when to connect their coaching participants or direct reports to needed resources.

What makes connector managers so valuable is that they are able to engage the trifecta of the employee, the team, and the organization. Using this strategy, everyone wins. This is the essence of what building a “we’re a good place to work culture” that attracts and retains top talent.

Who or What to Hire

The mix of people and technology is becoming more common as well as the type of worker we hire. The “gig economy” is another trend along with AI. Today and in the future, we will need to decide who or what to hire. Will it be a who, the gig worker, or the what, a robot? Bringing in robots can free up people from mundane and routine tasks allowing them time to concentrate on more complex or thinking tasks. Gig workers can help teams move through skill specific tasks to accomplish projects. All these hiring choices, a more permanent worker, a gig worker, or robot make hiring endeavors exciting and possibilities for the future unlimited.

So, while we have the same old hiring challenges, the new tools, combinations, and technology allow us to broaden our perspectives. The key is in planning our hiring strategies to meld with strategic planning. This may be a bit trickier, yet it can also allow us to be more flexible in a crisis.

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