Talent supply chain resilience in changing times

The roles of CHROs, business leaders, and partners have become pivotal in managing talent priorities – while at the same time managing business continuity. 2020 has ushered in an unprecedented fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic – to both our professional and personal lives. Indeed, the last few months have been difficult, to say the least, and it has posed an unprecedented humanitarian challenge that has allowed us to rediscover simple things in life, known as ‘new normal’.

We may argue that the best companies have evolved their Human Capital Management (HCM) strategies towards attaining new mixes of ‘work-life balance’ better than others. That said, even without the radically drastic outcomes of the pandemic, attracting great talent and retaining them has always been a jungle out there. Demand for skillful supply management and qualified professionals with interdisciplinary skills have always seemed to have outstripped supply.

As businesses steadily reopen shops across industries, one thing is clear – the recruitment model of the past centered around admin efficiency and transactional relationships is no longer relevant in the new arena.

Pivotal priorities for talent continuity and resilience

With today’s consumer-minded job seekers, your success entirely depends on how soon you adapt to measurable recruitment marketing techniques, to reach, attract, and retain the talent, whoever they are, wherever they are, by bringing them into the center stage. You may have read many inspiring stories, how businesses have been adapting during these desperate times. And that’s the keyword right there – ‘adaptability’. When you have the means to deal with a crisis, adaptability becomes easier.

As per the data from Mercer’s 2020 Global Talent Trends Study, successful companies will be those which place a mix of:

• Empathy at the heart of their business goals – given thriving and engaged employees are more likely to twice as productive
• Economic decisions that align with the empathetic outlook – given future demand will be stimulated by upskilling existing workforces for sustainable retention

The scale and speed of the pandemic have proven that businesses must act swiftly in managing their talent priorities – widening beyond the traditional scope of attracting, motivating, retaining, and skilling – with a greater human connection. This is because managing talent in times of crisis invariably comes with unpredictabilities in operations ad culture, yet the ongoing adjustments and lasting impacts can be controlled.

Embedding adaptive leadership

Unanticipated HCM challenges are calling for leaders to reposition their focus on creating resilience and embedding leadership development early on for a win-win future. The same Mercer report mentioned above revealed that thriving employees are 7x more likely to work at a company that can trustfully prepare them for the future, and 2x more likely for a company that is transparent about which jobs will undergo change. In fact, reskilling as the top talent capability to deliver ROI is the no. 1 factor working for thriving employees.

To create a unified sense of community, at the same time growth in business outcomes, leaderships are finding it important to focus on:

• Engaging talent on the same turf: Communication is the cornerstone of a successful relationship – professional or otherwise, creating the need for giving the independence to employees in shaping their career path
• Digitizing recruitment speed and quality: Embedding metrics with digital technologies for gauging performance and recruiting speed gives greater ability to control hiring destiny and turnover.
• Continuous, relational advancements: A candidate-centric recruitment and engagement model encompassing advanced HCM solutions such as SAP’s SuccessFactors must continuously be tweaked towards the right direction, right from the first day

Undoubtedly, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, talent leaders are facing difficult workforce-related scenarios, but your talent-centric approach will help your line managers, to meet the growing business demand. Of course, the success of any such transformations entirely depends on the depth and direction of your talent strategy /roadmap.

And, trust me It’s never too late to reset your talent strategy on the mend.

• COVID-19
• HCM
• pandemic
• resilience
• talent strategy
• Talent supply chain