Harpreet Singh Grover, Director, Aon CoCubes, and Indira Sovakar, SVP Human Resources, Genpact delivered an insightful take on how Talent Acquisition function is witnessing a tremendous shift from traditional strategies and paving the way for more disruptive and path-breaking technologies. Here are a few nuggets from the conversation that explored the future of Talent acquisition process: 

Changes from Talent hiring perspective with changing business needs.

“It is possible to build a billion-dollar company in three or four years and it’s possible for a billion-dollar company to go down to zero in a few years. And this is happening because the rate of change in industry has become faster due to technology” 

An organization needs to hire talent who are not averse to changes and can transform themselves according to the evolving business needs. The organization must also be cognizant of these small changes and be flexible enough to welcome new technologies. 

For example, now there are platforms available who have freelance workers and can be tapped into by companies depending on the projects they have. So, talent processes must be geared to deal with such workforce which can be non-homogenous and spread across the globe. 

Technological innovation has also brought a sea-change in Assessment tools. Performance management systems are undergoing major transformation, courtesy automation. 

On Manpower planning

With this changing business dynamics, the organizations like Genpact have also been under constant evolution to become more digital in approach. This transformation and innovation inherently require a fundamentally different way of looking at talent.

“The mega forces like technology disruption gig economy, millennial mindset etc. are causing fundamental shifts in the talent supply chain by making it more non-linear and on-demand,” said Indira Sovakar, SVP-HR at Genpact.

Traditionally organizations hired at the lower level and then subsequently had them re-skilled when they were thrusted with more ‘managerial’ roles as they progressed in their career. Now, with automation and digitization, the major shift which is being witnessed is that a large number of basic skills will be wiped out making many processes obsolete, and in turn, high-end skills which require tremendous micro-attention will be in demand. Hence, the entire gamut of talent acquisition is undergoing this massive change. And for them, the primary question is how do you attract such high-skilled individuals, and at the same time how do you automate processes/functions which are becoming redundant. Another challenge for the Talent Acquisition professionals is that how do you re-skill employees within the organization whose skillsets need to change dramatically to be able to sustain themselves in this ever-changing dynamic world. 

One way of looking at these challenges is to drive the competency framework of your organization to a new level and keep adding new attributes which are relevant to the business.

Talent-ready for the future

Experimenting with platforms enabled with Artificial Intelligence, bots, Analytics, Machine learning etc. is the way forward to redesign the hiring process. Depending on organization’s strategy and future plans, they need to know which talent they must keep, and which they won’t. Organizations need to invest their energies on how they are creating the brand on social media, the employer value proposition, culture which are reflected on social media channels when they source talent. The more digitized the approach, the better is the brand reflected to the external applicants.

Trust technology over people in the future?

If we look at evolution from the historical perspective, with industrial revolution to now, it’s a fact that technology implementation is not easy, yet everything will eventually be robotized/automated. The new tools available today are designed on the successful talent within the company and is subsequently standardized to hire across roles. Psychometric testing is based on culture and role-based testing is based on the domain-related skills.

How can Talent acquisition community keep up with future technologies? 

As technology is better equipped to do the recruitment, the recruiter’s role is changing. So, how fast is the transformation for a recruiter of the future and how will they do things differently?

The experts believe that this is the time to be in Talent Acquisition as you can deliver results with data. HR’s long ask of having a seat at the table (board room) can now be done with data. There is a huge opportunity to harness and the recruiter can do this by setting up the talent hiring process in line with metrics required to improve business judgment.  

The road ahead for TA

One thing to start doing: Get more digital savvy, be aware of the new tools of recruitment to upskill yourself and keep the candidate at the center. Leverage technological innovations to design exceptional candidate experience and data to make more insightful decisions

One thing to stop doing: With the enhanced business expectations, the TA function can no longer be an order taker and will need to overcome the resistance to change.

As the talent acquisition function support the business transformation agenda, the road ahead for clearly includes re-engineering the hiring process to make it more objective and thinking about the candidate as a customer.