The Agile Workforce

Small-and-mid market firms have been leveraging contingent workforce for their unmet talent needs for quite long. They have their preferred staffing suppliers who are solely responsible for providing them contingent workers, whenever they are in need. While these organizations were operating happily in their own small world, the onslaught of digital technologies combined with talent shortage and economic uncertainty, shook their world. Now, there is no more abundant talent, their revered staffing agencies are failing to provide them with relevant talent and expenses are piling up in not so great economic conditions. Hence, these firms are looking for external help This external help is coming in two forms – Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and freelancing platforms. These two set of talent providers are vying for the growing pie of the market by catering to the demands of small-and-mid sized buyers. These demands include the need to reengage talent to save time and money by avoi...

Recruiters around the world are facing difficulties in hiring millennial population. This is due to multiple reasons. The top most reason being the drastically different preferences of the millennial generation compared to earlier generations. Compared to earlier generations who were attracted more towards the compensation offered by the job, millennials want continuous engagement, meaningful work, skill set enhancement and flexibility. Slowly and steadily recruiters have understood these requirements of the millennial generations and are continuously trying to improve their “Employee Value Proposition (EVP)” to attract the millennial population. In this process of candidate reach out, they face one another big challenge. While the millennial population is addicted to their smartphones, they do not respond to recruiter calls for screening or interview purposes. Latest studies on millennial content consumption behavior, have highlighted that, this population set is not intere...

The current transformation in the way we work leading to requirement of new skill sets can be compared to the skill set change required from manufacturing to services economy. While that change occurred over decades, the current one is playing out in years, if not months. Many organizations are undertaking reskilling programs to update the skill set of their incumbent workers. However, most of them are failing to achieve positive outcomes. This means all the dollars being spent on reskilling going to waste along with loss of productivity and increasing spend on hiring external workers. The biggest problem with these failed efforts is the big bang nature of these undertakings. Instead of taking a focused employee specific approach to reskilling, enterprises are trying to force same set of training to each employee. This approach is bound to fail as different employees have different needs and can excel in different ways Organizations need to understand that they need to customi...

In the last post on reskilling, we discussed why upskilling and reskilling are becoming key to company’s sustainable growth. In this post, we will discuss some of the reasons why both workers and companies (trying to reskill their workforce) are not able to achieve the desired objectives. When we talk about workers, who need to upskill and reskill themselves, these include workers with moderate skill level with lower than median salaries. From job family perspective, these mainly include manufacturing, construction and retail workers. Now, there are multiple reasons why these workers are not able to reskill themselves. The first and foremost being the lack of awareness about what skill sets they can gain to move into new jobs. In addition to this, they also lack any knowledge, whatsoever, of the career trajectory that they can have by learning new skill sets. Coming to the workers who are aware of the skill set requirements and are willing to put effort to learn the same, t...

Technology is disrupting how we work and live. Several transactional and repetitive tasks are increasingly being supported by robots and algorithms, and in some cases, they are being automated completely. The advent of new age technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, big data, blockchain, and Internet of Things is resulting in massive changes in business models across different industries and subsequently, is giving rise to a variety of new jobs. The combination of above two developments clearly signify that global and regional labor markets are expected to undergo major transformation in the coming years. For businesses to respond to this dynamic talent environment which requires significantly different skill sets to the ones currently present in the market, there is a need for drastic rethinking of the way enterprises has gone about hiring for new skill sets. The below table from World Economic Forum shows how the skills demand is expected to c...