Many writers and thinkers from Issac Asimov to Benjamin Disraeli to Heraclitus (Ancient Greece’s first hiring manager - no, not really) have had a thing or two to say about how change is the only real constant in life. But in business, that can create big headaches. Sometimes, just when you thought you had a process perfected, some change sets your organization on its ear and sends you back to the drawing board.

That tends to make some of the folks in management terrified of resistant to change. Just consider the hiring process. The talent force is in the beginnings of a major paradigm shift, yet many HR departments are hesitant to develop new hiring strategies. Unfortunately, that resistance has the potential to scare away lots of top talent and leave some organizations in ruins. Like Ancient Greece, hence the Heraclitus connection. Get it?

On Employee Evolution Ryan Paugh describes a recent seminar he facilitated. He was initially concerned about the changes being proposed in the seminar. Some of the managers in attendance “had been working for the company for over ten years; they didn’t want to change” even though “the company was going to evolve whether they liked it or not.” However, they all entered into a mature dialogue and were able to implement some successful new strategies. Ryan argues that the acceptance is a big step because organizations increasingly face “a generation of young workers attempting to challenge the status quo of corporate life.” Those changes are going to be implemented from the bottom up, but not without support from HR and executives alike.

Think about how much (and how quickly) the business world has changed over the last decade. As technology develops with increasing rapidity, many organizations are finding themselves in need of talent they couldn’t even have previously imagined. Debbie Lousberg, of Smart Career Moves, claims that “fifty percent of all the jobs we’ll have in the next 6 years haven’t even been created yet,” mainly because “80% of all products and services we are currently using will be obsolete in five years.”

Smart businesses will adapt their day-to-day operations to those changes, but even smarter businesses will adapt their hiring procedures to fill the needs created by those changes. They’ll not only look for different candidates, but they will also look for candidates differently. A post on Systematic HR makes the point that

“the quickly shifting preferences of the new generations of workers and the shifting needs of the baby boomers makes this [recruiting/hiring] more complex than just understanding where the good people are.”

Starting now, attracting and acquiring quality talent will mean developing dynamic new strategies for understanding Quiet Working Professionals, sourcing candidates ahead of demand, and accurately matching, scoring, and ranking against your job opportunities. Will your organization be ready for the coming changes?

Share This