If you can’t find new talent externally, consider using reskilling to build your new employees in-house.

“Adaption is better than specializes in one skill”

It doesn’t matter how talented your new hires are, or what stellar technology training they’ve received. Chances are within a few years those skills will be obsolete.

Technology evolves so quickly that it is no longer enough to hire for the skills needed today. To stay relevant, companies need to hire people who have the ability to constantly learn new skills that may not yet exist.

This focus on reskilling as a talent management strategy is already taking place, said Art Mazor, principal of Deloitte’s human capital management consulting practice, in Atlanta. “Most big companies today are focused on reskilling, and for good reason: The half-life of skills is two to five years,” he said. “That has huge implications for recruiting.”

With demand for talent at an all-time high, companies can’t expect to pluck these skills ready-made from the talent pool. They will have to create them in-house by providing employees with constant access to training, and incentives to continuously reskill.

Research from McKinsey found 82 percent of executives at large organizations believe retraining and reskilling must be at least half of the answer to addressing their skills gap, with 27 percent calling it a top five priority. And 74 percent of global recruiting firms say reskilling workers represents an effective strategy to combat the perennial skills shortage, according to Bullhorn’s 2019 “Staffing and Recruiting Trends” report.

“Reskilling is an important solution to the talent shortage,” said Vinda Souza, vice president of marketing for Bullhorn. She said that as long as there is low unemployment, companies need to consider what training they can provide to new and existing talent to constantly close new skill gaps.

To reskill someone, look for people with “adjacent skills,” said Jesper Bendtsen, head of recruiting for Thomson Reuters in Toronto. “Don’t just look for people who know blockchain or AI,” he said. “Look for people who work with related technologies that will lend themselves to your future needs.”

That talent pool may already be on staff. Bendtsen noted that employees who have been with the company for years may not have the exact skills you are looking for, but they know your culture, your customers and your way of doing business. “Start by looking internally at who might be interested and able to transition to a new role through retraining,” he said. An internal upskilling program can help companies close talent gaps while reinforcing their commitment to the existing workforce.

When recruiting externally, companies need to consider what skills they are looking for and how that impacts the recruiting process. New hires need to be willing and able to learn new skills and to tackle nebulous workplace challenges. Identifying these skills requires more thoughtful assessments of candidates’ soft skills and personality, not just their past history, Mazor said.

Some organizations are adding virtual reality, automated simulations and gaming tools to the recruiting process to observe how candidates handle unknown situations and learn new information to solve problems.

“These tools test their predisposition for handling challenges while creating a compelling candidate experience,” Mazor said.

Companies are also integrating hiring managers into this assessment process. At Thomson Reuters, for example, software engineers oversee candidates as they complete coding challenges, while asking questions about their process.

“The goal isn’t to see if they get the right answers, but to see how they tackle problems and use information,” Bendtsen said. “It’s an objective way to assess a candidate’s skills and ability to learn.”

This new approach to recruiting could make it easier for companies to look further afield for candidates who show an aptitude and interest in learning, even if they don’t follow a traditional academic or career path, said Tara Cassady, senior vice president at Cielo, a global recruitment process outsourcing provider in Milwaukee. “You want people who are curious, have an aptitude to troubleshoot, and who use technology to solve problems,” she said. These lifelong learners could just as easily come from tech schools, boot camps and online universities as from traditional college campuses.

Once they do find or retain these candidates, they are also investing more effort into retaining them, she said. From ensuring that interns have a clear path to employment, to making sure newly trained talent are given new assignments and competitive salaries, engagement and retention must be part of the reskilling trend, she said. “If you are going to invest in training talent, you don’t want to lose them to a competing firm.”

Cre: Workforce

Issues

Human resource management is an important functional activity that has a great impact on the success or failure of businesses, especially start-up businesses.

However, start-up businesses with limited resources, especially the limitation of financial resources, are not really interested in human resource management

In this article, the author will discuss some important issues that entrepreneurs should be noted during the start-up period.

1. Human resource management based on personal experience and subjectivity

In the early start-up years, business owners often focus on technology and market. Business owners in the start-up phase must simultaneously take care of multiple tasks from strategic issues to technology, market, finance, accounting, personnel, etc.

This process suitable for the requirements of fast, flexible, low-cost, appropriate handling of problems with organizational structure and uncompleted personnel.

But in return, in the start-up phase, the enterprise management capacity of the business owner is considered as a too tight shirt compared with the goal and development ambition of the business owner himself. Therefore, a lot of business problems arise and it’s hard to breakthrough or have a systematic solution because business owners face difficulties in making decisions.

The most remarkable thing here is that very few business owner recognize the limitations of them-self and take action to solve it like learning, hiring expert, etc.

If the business owner overcomes himself to learning and has a reasonable solution to complement his own limitations on human resource management, the success probability of the business will be much higher. Because after all, all the causes of business failure also come from the lack of qualified personnel to run and drive businesses with lead to unadaptable to market changes.

2. Unclear in roles and weak in manage conflicts between co-founders

Many people choose to start a business together. Group start-ups help business owners deploy ideas, promote each other’s strengths, mobilize resources and share risks. According to “Startup Insider”, most successful private enterprises have a starting point from a start-up group.

But everything has the other side of the coin. Risk comes from conflicts between co-founders because of differences in views, disputes about benefits and failure to manage changes in decision-making methods appropriate to development period.

In the beginning, when things were difficult, co-founders were quite united and bite the bullet together; but when the business is prosperous, having good financial results is also the time when conflicts arise. Many co-founders have to part ways in the early years because of personal conflict in executive management.

This problem comes from the basic reason is that the management system is not running well. Co-founders not assigned roles and clear agreement with each other to management. The management process does not change from “instinct” to the “system”.

This issue requires co-founders to agree with each other right from the beginning days when starting a business about management method to prepare for future periods. Because when businesses go into orbit, the company needs to have a leader who has ability and capable of making decisions.

3. Lack of solutions to retain talents

The reason usually given is that the start-up period is lack of resources, especially with finance, so it’s difficult to attract talents. Therefore, enterprises tend to hire and use manpower with low salary, and with capacity sometimes not meet the requirements.

This is a big mistake for ambitious start-ups want to have fast growth due to innovation, and want to attract investors.

Attracting talents is one key point for a successful start-up. There are two elements that impact the ability to attract talents:

• Owner do not have capacity to use talents:

When working with an expert employee, owner easily loses their vision and cannot control the talent. Moreover, lack of HR management skill can also make personnel to discouraged with their job and soon will lead to giving up.

• The attractiveness of the start-up idea:

When the start-up idea is clear and has a high potential to succeed, this is the key to attract talents. In opposite, if you are not sure about your vision and future, candidates will feel not stable and hard to attract talents to become your companion.

There are diversity solutions for this issue, most start-up use company’s stock to attract talent employee to join them in running business. With creative or technology start-up, the company’s value after 5 years may multiply a thousand or million times the present value.

Another regular solution is to hire or collaboration with experts. This will help start-up to use the expert skills and knowledge with a very low fee. Vision and passion of startups also receive assistance and support from experts.

4. Lack of invest in system and building corporate culture

Due to the size of small businesses, many businesses do not focus on recruiting specialized personnel to manage human resources; as well as lack of attention to standardization of processes and human resource management systems.

Inadequately focused activities include recruitment, assessment regulations, application of KPI systems, wages and benefits, labour regulations and corporate culture … Due to lack of systematic, works are handled much according to the affair and affection.

In particular, common problems arise in terms of employment contracts, job vacancies, intellectual property violations, loss of business secrets due to employee quit. On the other hand, company culture is also a strong weapon to keep talents by your side.

5. Loss the control of the business due to lack of understanding of corporate governance

Enterprises in the start-up period have a large growth and high investment demand. The main capital mobilization solution of enterprises in the start-up phase is by calls for funding to increase capital and expand owners.

However, many business owners refuse to develop and accept strategic investors because of the risk of losing control of the business. In contrast, many business owners chose wrong strategic investors, so they quickly have to transfer control of their own business, losing their “spiritual children”.

The solution is that business owners need to consult from legal, human resource experts, and study about corporate governance.

There are many possible solutions. First of all, you need to choose the right investor.

The right strategic investor often does not require control of business management because they respect the holder of the business idea and believe that only when this person continues to run the business than the business can succeed.

And finally, there are many forms of investment contracts to attract more shareholders to contribute to capital. Shareholders enjoy preferential dividends, but still, can maintain voting and veto rights.

Cre: vceo.vn