Major shifts are occurring in the way companies hire, train, develop, and retain their talent. The Burning Glass Institute, a labor market analytics firm, analyzed more than 50 million online job postings over the last five years and noted a decline in degree requirements.
With rapid advancement in technology, skills-based hiring and development practices are on the rise. Leading organizations are changing their practices to become more skills-focused to respond to rapidly changing business needs, increase diversity, and reduce inequality while filling roles at a faster and more efficient pace. However, before you can look at what skills to focus on in the hiring process, you must first take inventory of the skills your employees already have.
How well do you know your workforce?
Beyond the college degree, organizations should focus on the hard and soft skills required for current and future jobs and adapt a modern, more comprehensive approach to identifying talent. Do you know what skills are present and potentially underutilized in your organization today? Are they matched with the needs of the business? Do you know what skills are needed for future growth? Do they exist internally, or do they need to be sourced externally? Do you have access to data that allows you to identify employees that have demonstrated desire to grow their skills and contribute in new ways? It comes down to one question, how well do you know your workforce? Once you can identify the skillsets you have, you’ll need to look for trends and the gaps that need to be filled.
"Skills-based hiring and development practices are on the rise."
Surface skill trends and gaps
Access to employee data enables leaders to make better people decisions. For example, as CHROs lead their organizations forward, analytics are gaining higher priority to drive better business outcomes. Solutions like Workday provide finger-tip access to all workforce data, making it easier to understand current workforce skills across the organization and to better optimize available talent. With insights into the skills landscape, organizations can understand emergent talent, new skills added to the organization, training needs for growth and development, and where they need to hire.
Skills-based recruiting
Bringing together skills data from a variety of sources – the company’s human resources (HR) system, skills assessments, job profiles, HR transactions such as job movements, resumes, labor market data, onboarding materials, performance reviews, and learning can help discover talent that can be used or developed. A skills-based recruiting approach also enables strategic transformation for HR from a “filling requisitions” approach to identifying skills and talent that best align with the company’s most in-demand jobs.
It is no longer enough to just recruit for current needs. It is important to take a long-range view of the skills needed to ensure business success in the future. HR organizations should work closely with their business partners to anticipate what skills will be needed to support future business initiatives and align hiring and development practices accordingly. None of these changes to your talent model will come easy without access to data that can inform planning and strategizing with this end goal in mind.
"It's no longer enough to just recruit for current needs."
Putting a skills-based hiring and internal mobility strategy in place
To meet the challenge, many companies and institutions have made ERP modernization part of a broader transformation strategy. Siloed systems and disconnected data make it difficult to adapt to changing business demands. A talent strategy that is based on skills and automation and analytics to guide decisions increases flexibility and ability to respond to whatever the future brings.
To help businesses transition to a skills-based talent strategy, Workday is offering its customers free courses through the Rework America Alliance that can be leveraged by hiring managers, recruiters, HR leadership and anyone else who interfaces with talent acquisition or talent management. Shifting to a skills-based strategy is on the rise, so learning more about the concepts or processes behind the shift is essential.