Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

Trends Shaping Talent in 2023

Now that we’re into the second quarter of 2023, we can see that the talent acquisition (TA) world has a different tint. Despite the specter of recent layoffs and a looming recession, widespread skills shortages and a low overall labor force participation rate (LFPR, or the number of people in the workforce or actively looking for work) mean that organizations have had to deploy more innovative recruitment strategies.

These trends are reaching critical mass:

Internal Mobility

When it comes to lateral moves and internal opportunities, most organizations have always talked a good game. However, in practice, managers were more likely to hoard top talent. A poor infrastructure often restricted employee movement from one team to another, even if a manager was supportive. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders recognized the utility of redeploying workers from a slow area of the business into a more viable one. Since then, internal mobility has gained momentum.

This year is different due to the more widespread usage of technologies that drive internal mobility – namely, talent intelligence and predictive analytics. Rather than waiting for an individual employee to express interest in a given position, artificial intelligence allows leaders to proactively determine who within the existing workforce might have the right skill set to meet a current or near-future need or who could be easily trained to do so.

Executive Freelancers

The professional contract workforce has been growing for the last decade, but traditionally, freelancing was mostly limited to individual contributors in professions like writing, marketing and information technology. Because these workers usually completed work that could be more narrowly defined within the scope of a “project,” this made sense.

In 2023, however, pervasive contract work has expanded to other professions, including law and finance. We are increasingly seeing organizations using “interim” c-suite executives to take over for a leader who is on leave, to trial a new hire for fit, or to temporarily fill the position while they search for a permanent hire.

Unfortunately, it is still the case that organizations often treat contract workers as second-class citizens. But as they become a more significant percentage of the employee mix, TA leaders must leverage technology to nurture their relationships with this population and deliver the appropriate opportunities, training and communications.

For more trends, or to check out my recent webinar on talent intelligence, head on over to the SilkRoad blog.

The Future of Skills-Based Hiring

A few weeks ago, I attended a dinner where some colleagues emphatically insisted that the future of hiring could not and would not become skills-based until organizations stopped selecting people based on educational pedigree.

I pointed out that this is already happening. When I graduated from college in the late 1990s, you had to have a bachelor’s degree to get an entry-level professional position. It didn’t matter what skills you had. Today, depending on the role, if you can show skill competency, many organizations will overlook a lack of formal education.

The real question is: Have we moved the needle enough to combat ever-increasing global labor shortages? The answer may indeed be no, and that’s likely because there’s no sense of urgency. Many organizations still think the traditional mode of hiring – via resumes and follow-up, subjective interviewing – works just fine.

Let’s look at the problems with the status quo and how your organization can reap the rewards from a new approach to talent acquisition. Skills-based hiring will be the future, but there’s no time like the present to move in that direction.

The trouble with resume-based hiring

Resume-based hiring has a variety of flaws, namely that people are notoriously bad at self-assessment. A resume only captures a small amount of what a person has done and can do. And even if their skills are presented somewhat effectively, the hiring manager may be negatively influenced by factors like what font the candidate used and whether too many words are crammed onto the page.

Resumes (and LinkedIn profiles) also capture just one moment in time. This means that unless a hiring manager is reviewing information that was just sent to them by a candidate for a specific job, the hiring manager has no idea how current the information is.

Finally, resume-based hiring assumes that the organization wants to hire someone for a static role. The hiring manager wants to see straightforward evidence that the candidate has already performed this role because they aren’t expecting it to change much. But this is an outdated view of jobs. Today, employers must approach hiring with career flexibility in mind.

Organizations need to hire people with as deep of a skills bench as possible so that those employees can move fluidly through the organization as business requirements evolve. It's hard to assess how well someone will be able to do this from a resume.

But if an organization isn’t going to hire employees based on resumes and wants to get to the heart of the skills candidates possess today, how can this be achieved?

How to get started with skills-based hiring

I’ll readily admit that skills-based hiring is a difficult task without technology, and specifically, without artificial intelligence. But new talent intelligence platforms allow organizations to leverage career data points to paint a much broader picture of the skills a given individual might have. Talent intelligence tools also allow organizations to focus on the skills necessary for success within a particular career path, which might not always be what human hiring managers think they are.

This technology is especially good at uncovering skill adjacencies. Using skill adjacency, you can infer that a person who is good at skill A often excels at skill B. For example, we can infer that someone who is good at trigonometry is probably also good at geometry. Or we could guess that an experienced marketing professional could more quickly learn public relations.

The rise of the flexible career experience

 

For recruiters who are accustomed to resume-based hiring, this is a whole new world. For example, when a company is hiring for a customer service manager, a recruiter may search for candidates with resumes containing that exact title. Until recently, we simply have not had the tools to surface candidates who may have the right customer skills based on their life experiences instead of the positions they’ve held.

By focusing on workers’ capabilities rather than exact job titles, companies can build a broader pool of diverse, qualified candidates. This is an especially useful approach post-pandemic, given that most workers accumulated a wide variety of transferable skills inside and outside their main jobs in the areas of communication, problem solving, and adaptability. Skills like this support success in any role but may not be found on these candidates’ resumes, so it’s wise to have another way to account for and assess them.

In short, hiring based on educational pedigree and resumes is the past while hiring based on skills and potential is the future. And technology can go a long way to help us transform hiring practices – both culturally and operationally.

For the original article,  head over to the Ceridian website.

Announcing My New Book, DEEP TALENT (in Partnership with Eightfold AI)

The world is at a societal and technological inflection point. Business leaders cite talent recruitment and development as top challenges due to talent shortages, long hiring times, and high turnover. Meanwhile, key challenges for engagement and retention include managing employee expectations in line with post-pandemic norms.

We know from research and experience that nearly 50% of top talent leaves within two years, but also that most individuals would happily stay if given the right learning and growth opportunities. But as companies grow and gain thousands of employees, CEOs tend to lose track of their workforce’s abilities. They don’t know what skills employees have already acquired at work, what skills employees are well-equipped to master next, or how certain skills can be used to grow individual careers.

We talk often about the global skills gap, but what's really behind this? After all, the jobs are there and the people are there. It turns out there's not an HR or a workflow problem, but rather a matching problem between the best people and the most critical jobs you need to fill.

Having studied the talent gap for more than a decade, I was intrigued when I learned that there is technology available today that can solve this matching problem at scale. And that's why I was so excited to have the chance to write a book with Ashu and Kamal, who have a company, Eightfold, that makes one of the most promising talent intelligence platforms available today.

That book, DEEP TALENT: How to Transform Your Organization and Empower Your Employees Through AI, is now available everywhere books are sold. You'll leave us with an understanding of how to use talent intelligence and deep learning (AI) to assess skills adjacency (if you are good at skill A, you will also be good at skill B) to open non-traditional pathways for candidates who don’t have the experience doing the exact job needed but have every ounce of capability required. You'll also be able to determine your current organizational capabilities and future needs by taking into account a global dataset of standardized job descriptions and requirements.

Although the future is uncertain, we have reason to be optimistic, because talent intelligence has the potential to facilitate a meaningful career for everyone in the world. If we’re looking, talent intelligence will show us the work to take on next to feed our skills and passions and the careers we’ve always wanted but haven’t known how to find.

 

5 Boxes to Check for Your First-Time Manager Experience

The first time I was promoted into a managerial position, I closed the door of my fancy new office and held back tears born of fear and Impostor Syndrome. But here’s the thing. I could leave said office, walk down the hall, and get a pep talk from my boss.

In a distributed workforce where you rarely or never see your own manager or direct reports and are often doing the jobs of three people, you may be experiencing the toughest time in recent history for managers.

According to a Gallup survey, depression increased for managers in 2021 despite being unchanged for leaders and ICs, and one in three managers often or always feel burned out.

In my recent column for the Wall Street Journal’s Workplace Report, I spoke with Alyssa Lahar, chief human resources officer for ZoomInfo, a subscription-based database service. Lahar shared that managers often find themselves not at the bottom rung and but also not in positions of influence, which leads to a feeling of powerlessness. “Middle managers tend to be stretched the thinnest, and their work tends to be unseen,” she said.

Especially vulnerable are first-time middle managers, who too often are thrust into new roles without proper guidance, mentorship, or training. Without the in-person management experience to draw from, it’s even  more important that organizations use technology to fill the gaps.

Specifically, they should identify a solution that immerses new managers in the organization’s approach to leadership, performance, engagement and productivity.

Not only should the technology be customizable for the unique needs of the individual manager, but it should also have the capability to flex with evolving business requirements. If you are smartly rethinking your first-time manager offering, here are five elements to consider including.

• Retention: Providing detailed information on new role expectations and team contributions, reducing the uncertainty, frustration, and burnout that leads to attrition.
• Knowledge Transfer: Communicating with key stakeholders to ensure continuous project management and workflow.
• Recruitment: Making the hiring process as seamless as possible so that managers can quickly select and onboard new talent for vacant roles.
• Talent Management: Facilitating consistent and timely performance evaluations for and engagement with direct reports.
• Internal Mobility: Clarifying manager career paths and opportunities for internal movement and transition.

Don't Be a Victim of the Great Resignation

By now, you’ve likely heard the term “the great resignation.” Anthony Klotz, a professor at Texas A&M University, coined the term in a May Bloomberg article to refer to the great numbers of workers expected to exit the workforce after the pandemic.

Klotz does his own research, but a recent Microsoft study, the 2021 Work Trend Index, mirrored his findings. Microsoft surveyed more than 30,000 people in 31 countries and analyzed trillions of productivity and labor signals across LinkedIn and Microsoft 365 to forecast the pending workforce departures.

According to Microsoft, over 40 percent of the global workforce are considering leaving their employer this year, 46 percent are planning to make a major pivot or transition, and only 38 percent of employees are thriving in their careers right now. The situation is worse for women. McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2020 study found that one in three working mothers have considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers because of COVID-19.

The Microsoft and McKinsey data suggest that the pandemic led employees to question their priorities and either transition to work they found more meaningful or decrease the focus on their job generally. But while this was certainly a factor, new data from Stanford University illustrated that how companies treated their employees also played a significant role.

According to Stanford, the pandemic had a cascading effect on organizations with unsupportive cultures. Companies that had historically laid people off, decreased compensation, held back promotions, or sacrificed psychological safety to preserve the bottom line engaged in more of these behaviors during COVID-19. Stressed-out employees who might have been disgruntled before were downright disgusted. And now they’re ready to quit.

Interestingly, food service, hospitality and retail – some of the sectors hardest hit by the pandemic – are experiencing the most resignations. A “We Quit” sign left on the door of a Nebraska Burger King restaurant after the entire staff walked out really said it all.

As reported by the Washington Post in June, 649,000 retail workers put in their notice in April, the industry’s largest one-month exodus since the Labor Department began tracking this data more than 20 years ago.

The so-called “great resignation” will collide with other demographic factors impacting who is available to work and where – including baby boomer retirement, a small population of midlife employees, and a young worker population plagued by stalled education and career growth. If this doesn’t point to a coming labor shortage, I don’t know what does.

If you’re an HR professional or manager, is there anything you can do to avoid becoming a victim? The answer is yes, and it starts with self-awareness of common employer blind spots.

Want to learn more? Catch the replay of my webinar on HR blind spots with SilkRoad!

 

A Futurist's View of the Post-Pandemic Workforce

Given that I wrote a book about the rapid transformation of work as we knew it back in 2018, people often ask me what has surprised me about how human capital is evolving today. As a Workforce Institute Board Member, I’d like to share my topline thoughts, some of which have been derived as the result of quantitative research, and others which came about through engagement with organizations and futurist groups such as the Association of Professional Futurists (APF), the Future Today Institute, the Grey Swan Guild, and the foresight certification program I recently completed with the University of Houston.

The Acceleration of What We Saw Coming

Pandemic or no pandemic, several workforce-related trends were inevitable, including the rise of the gig economy, the contract workforce, internal talent marketplaces, and talent assembly – in which teams are constructed from different types of workers to solve specific problems in hot areas of the business.

We also surmised that organizations would begin to look closely at how human capital quantitatively drives businessvalue; the use of Big Data, analytics, and executive dashboards to determine what is and isn’t working in talent acquisition, learning, scheduling, and performance; the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to combat unconscious bias and measure productivity; and the focus on data quality, integration, and governance.

The shift in the flow of work due to new players like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon entering the online collaboration market was expected, as was theincreasing popularity of curated learning content by in-house subject matter experts, personalized course recommendations, and targeted certifications and microcredentialing. Given the technology available today, there is no reason individuals shouldn’t upskill and reskill using all the resources at their disposal, and at their own pace and convenience.

What Has Surprised Me

There have been a few head scratchers along the way. The first involves digital transformation. It is a bit disappointing how, during the pandemic, some organizations have simply slapped in-office processes up online. That was fine for the first six months of the crisis, but now it’s time to move on. One size doesn’t fit all. We must permanently adapt certain processes to be antifragile and an effective mix of high tech, high touch.

Also, with respect to digital transformation, it surprises me that no one is talking about what we’ll do when we are entirely dependent on technology and it breaks, what happens when it gets seriously hacked, what happens when we have bandwidth challenges and access inequity, what happens when there are too many systems and usability and adoption falter, and what data and privacy concerns will arise with increased employee monitoring. In my opinion, these are issues that every company should be closely tracking.

While the labor shortages occurring as a result of demographic shifts like baby boomer retirement and smaller generational cohorts like X and Z were anticipated, organizational attitudes toward post-pandemic employee retention are not. Many companies are currently issuing decrees about exactly when people should return to the office and how and when they should work. After a successful 18-month trial of much greater flexibility, this is not going to fly with top (and increasingly rare) talent, and I fear a “great resignation” is about to take place.

Finally, I’m perplexed that more leaders aren’t acknowledging that they were caught completely off guard by the pandemic and are now engaging in strategic foresight to be adequately prepared for what’s certain to be future disruptions.

While we can’t predict the future, we have a responsibility to look around corners as best we can and plan for a variety of potential scenarios. I look forward to continuing to be part of this process!

This post was originally published on the Workforce Institute blog.

Career Durability: Ensure You Have a Job As Long As You Want One

You might remember that last fall, I helped DeVry University with a survey about workplace sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when employees should be feeling recognized and celebrated, nearly one in four employed Americans said they believed that American workers are not valued. And, more than a third of survey respondents claimed that based on their employer’s actions since the start of the pandemic, they feel disposable.

Were these feelings valid? Could employers actually take or leave employees, not caring if they were successful or unsuccessful, contributing or not contributing, employed with the company or leaving to go somewhere else?

The workforce is changing in major ways. The pandemic sped up a movement from strict scheduling to flexible “work on your own time” engagements. Prior to COVID-19, we were already seeing smart machines and automation as part of daily work, and the tremendous growth of the gig economy.

Taken together, these trends show that the old ways of sustaining a career no longer work. In past decades, you could go to college or a trade school, get a degree, and use the skills associated with that degree to work for one – or maybe a few – organizations over the course of your working life.

That is no longer the case. Jobs – and the skills required for those jobs – are changing rapidly.

In these times, nothing is certain except change, and this is unnerving. In fact, Ceridian’s 2021 Pulse of Talent report, which surveyed more than 5,000 people across five regions, found that 66% of individuals are taking job security into account more now than before the pandemic.

Career durability is a ticket to long-term security

To avoid feeling – and indeed being – disposable, today’s employees need to be the leaders of their own careers. They must build what we call career durability.

Career durability involves acquiring the skills, mindset, and knowledge to be an engaged and productive member of the workforce – continuously. On LinkedIn, I explained career durability as including these five areas:

• Hard skills: skills that allow you to complete tasks in a specific job.
• Soft skills: skills for collaborating effectively with others.
• Applied technology skills: skills that allow you to leverage available technology to do your job better.
• Institutional knowledge: job or industry expertise gained through experience.
• Growth mindset: being willing to improve, learn, and reconsider existing ways of doing things.

For more where this came from, read the full article at the Ceridian Dayforce Wallet blog.

Entrepreneurial Accounting: How's Your Reconciliation?

As a business owner who does a fair amount of her own accounting, I come up against reconciliation frequently. And, as a business and workplace adviser to others, I recognize its importance. Reconciliation is part of the ongoing accounting mix that leverages two or more financial records to make sure numbers match.

In other words, it helps owners and accountants demonstrate that the money going out of an account is equal to the amount spent, and that the amount coming in is equal to the amount earned. Account reconciliation provides a mechanism for accurate balancing at the end of each recording period. If you don't do it properly, you will move forward with compounding inaccuracies and will risk your business' overall integrity.

When I started my business in 2004, the new Sarbanes Oxley Act had greatly tightened the reins on reporting reliability. Although the law had the biggest impact on large corporations, it encouraged me to establish strong accounting practices. I'll admit that I struggled with account reconciliation. An ongoing problem involved client payments that arrived significantly after I declared the income. But fortunately, I never experienced strange inconsistencies I couldn't explain.

Over the last 14 years, I've witnessed and personally experienced the following reconciliation pitfalls I hope other business owners can avoid.

Reconciliation Pitfall #1: The Dreaded Spreadsheet

As someone who studies and applies future of work technology, I'm embarrassed to admit that I left my spreadsheets kicking and screaming. I was comfortable with them and grossly underestimated the manual processes involved with reconciliation. I regularly spent hours trying to get to the heart of a single discrepancy and even then, sometimes couldn't overcome the danger of human error. Today, we have the advantage of much more accurate cloud-based solutions to access real-time financial data from any device at any time and track the flow/monitor the status of each reconciliation. Just make sure you certify and secure your chosen system.

Reconciliation Pitfall #2: Non-Standard Processes

I can't tell you how many times I fell prey to this one. I'd do reconciliation one way, my business manager would have another approach, and then our accountant would come in and use a third technique. As you can imagine, this lack of standardization was problematic. To avoid this pitfall, sit down with all relevant parties and draft your organization's reconciliation policies. Store them in an online system connected to your financial data, make sure anyone new coming into the organization understands them and knows where to find them and emphasize their importance.

For more where this came from, check out the American Express Business site.

Key Findings from the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey (Part II)

Last week, I shared some compelling results from the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Future of Jobs Survey. To recap, this research set out to represent the current strategies, projections and estimates of global business, with a focus on large multinational companies and more localized companies of significance due to their employee or revenue size.

Let’s examine some additional highlights from the report:

• Emerging in-demand roles: Among the range of established roles that are set to experience increasing demand in the period up to 2022 are Data Analysts and Scientists, Software and Applications Developers, and Ecommerce and Social Media Specialists, roles that are significantly based on and enhanced by the use of technology. Also expected to grow are roles that leverage distinctively ‘human' skills, such as Customer Service Workers, Sales and Marketing Professionals, Training and Development, People and Culture, and Organizational Development Specialists. There will also be a variety of roles related to understanding and leveraging the latest emerging technologies: AI and Machine Learning Specialists, Big Data Specialists, Process Automation Experts, Information Security Analysts, User Experience and Human-Machine Interaction Designers, Robotics Engineers, and Blockchain.

• Growing skills instability: Given the wave of new technologies and trends disrupting business models and the changing division of labor between workers and machines transforming current job profiles, the vast majority of employers surveyed for this report expect that, by 2022, the skills required to perform most jobs will have shifted Global average skills stability—the proportion of core skills required to perform a job that will remain the same—is expected to be about 58%, meaning an average shift of 42% in required workforce skills over the 2018–2022 period.
• A reskilling imperative: By 2022, no less than 54% of all employees will require significant re- and upskilling. Of these, about 35% are expected to require additional training of up to six months, 9% will require reskilling lasting six to 12 months, while 10% will require additional skills training of more than a year. Skills continuing to grow in prominence by 2022 include analytical thinking and innovation as well as active learning and learning strategies. Sharply increasing importance of skills such as technology design and programming highlights the growing demand for various forms of technology competency identified by employers surveyed for this report. Proficiency in new technologies is only one part of the 2022 skills equation, however, as ‘human’ skills such as creativity, originality and initiative, critical thinking, persuasion and negotiation will likewise retain or increase their value, as will attention to detail, resilience, flexibility and complex problem-solving.
• Current strategies for addressing skills gaps: Companies highlight three future strategies to manage the skills gaps widened by the adoption of new technologies. They expect to hire wholly new permanent staff already possessing skills relevant to new technologies; seek to automate the work tasks concerned completely; and retrain existing employees. The likelihood of hiring new permanent staff with relevant skills is nearly twice the likelihood of strategic redundancies of staff lagging behind in new skills adoption. However, nearly a quarter of companies are undecided or unlikely to pursue the retraining of existing employees, and two-thirds expect workers to adapt and pick up skills in the course of their changing jobs. Between one-half and two-thirds are likely to turn to external contractors, temporary staff and freelancers to address their skills gaps.
• Insufficient reskilling and upskilling: Employers indicate that they are set to prioritize and focus their re- and upskilling efforts on employees currently performing high-value roles as a way of strengthening their enterprise’s strategic capacity, with 54% and 53% of companies, respectively, stating they intend to target employees in key roles and in frontline roles which will be using relevant new technologies. In addition, 41% of employers are set to focus their reskilling provision on high-performing employees while a much smaller proportion of 33% stated that they would prioritize at-risk employees in roles expected to be most affected by technological disruption.

Overall, said the World Economic Forum, the report’s findings suggest the need for a comprehensive ‘augmentation strategy’, an approach where businesses look to utilize the automation of some job tasks to complement and enhance their human workforces’ comparative strengths and ultimately to enable and empower employees to extend to their full potential. However, to unlock this positive vision, workers will need to have the appropriate skills enabling them to thrive in the workplace of the future and the ability to continue to retrain throughout their lives. Crafting a sound in-company lifelong learning system, investing in human capital and collaborating with other stakeholders on workforce strategy should thus be key business imperatives.  A mindset of agile learning will also be needed on the part of workers as they shift from the routines and limits of today’s jobs to new, previously unimagined futures.

Want to learn more about how you can prepare for the future of work? Check out the new book, Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future.

 

Why You Probably Need More Training, Not Less

In my work as a business and workforce consultant, I’ve observed that in times of change and uncertainty, some organizations stop spending money – and especially money that goes to employee training and development. However, given the future work trends of cross-functional teaming, workforce-wide digital fluency, and an emphasis on uniquely human skills, this may be a short-sighted approach. Let’s look at these one by one.

Cross-Functional Teaming

I’ve noticed that employees are starting to move around organizations with greater speed, and so they may need to know more skills than were required in the past. Even if they received a solid university education, employees might well be moved to a role in which nothing they learned in their degree program applies. For instance, it’s not unusual for someone trained in finance to end up in marketing, and vice versa. And, even those schooled and working in marketing often find it beneficial to have cross-functional expertise in finance.

My hunch is that employer training might not be able to keep up with the reskilling and upskilling requirements of cross functional teams, and this is why there are gaps. And, in the Career Advisory Board’s 2018 survey, Talent Activation, the Employee Experience, and Skill Development, 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement: In my organization as a whole, I am concerned about employee skills gaps.

In the study, the greatest skills gaps were observed in the areas of technology/digital fluency (cited by 62 percent of respondents), communication (56 percent), business acumen (48 percent), diversity and cultural awareness (46 percent), and customer service (42 percent), and skills gaps affect employees at all levels. And, when asked about barriers to closing skills gaps, our respondents cited a too-small training budget most frequently.

If anything, it’s my opinion that cross-functional teaming requires larger training budgets, not smaller ones.

Workforce-Wide Digital Fluency

In the Career Advisory Board’s 2017 Job Preparedness Indicator survey, we defined an applied technology skill as a skill that is needed by employees to leverage the right technology to do their jobs. It’s another way to talk about digital fluency, and the research indicated that a majority of employers is now looking for these skills in new and existing employees.

Training existing employees in applied technology skills is a major challenge, in part because current professionals did not receive this type of instruction via traditional education paths. In response, many survey respondents are ensuring that their workforces continuously train and retrain on applied technology skills through the development of internal courses (40 percent), internal trainings (38 percent), tuition reimbursement (35 percent), and external trainings (31 percent). Only one-fourth said their organizations are taking no actions to develop this skillset.

As discussed above, however, developing skillsets can be expensive – especially when one round of training isn’t enough. So, in my recommendation, employers should have a specific and ongoing budget set aside for applied technology skills alone – in addition to other training requirements.

For more where this came from, check out the DeVry WORKS website.