The battle for talent never ends!

We may never be quite satisfied by our existing talent although it is not a sentiment we may express aloud! We may swear that the best talent is yet to be found and may unconsciously seek it in every encounter. We believe that the best talent is out there and spend quite a bit of our energies worrying about the internal situation and probabilities.

Significant talent shortages are already being reported across many industries. Huge skills gaps still exist in certain industries despite widespread unemployment and employers are being inundated with unsuitable candidates while struggling to fill vacancies.

The level of unemployment may have boosted quantity, but employers are still struggling with quality and are yet facing an ongoing struggle to find the skills and experience they need to drive their businesses forward. Another concern is that is has got much harder to draw talented individuals out of certain jobs, as they may have considered the options and decided that the grass was greener on their own side of the fence in these volatile economic times.

Search for best talent

The search for the best talent has been practiced covertly for as long as companies may remember. Nobody acknowledges it but it is a survival tactic of the company, the business. As a pioneer head hunter with over three decades of consulting, search and placement in diverse fields, I have had hands- on experience of the demand for good talent and the dearth of this scarce commodity in the country.

Having combed the country to find the right candidates for demanding clients, I am on a very good footing when it comes to the real issue of why we are not producing talented individuals to fit the jobs that are around and are going to surface as the country proceeds on its development drive.

For companies to grow, they need a limitless supply of talented and capable managers with good leadership skills. The old HR Division had a set of rules coming down decades – a large corporate budget, huge work force, the traditional corporate hierarchy, predictable career growth with a steady climb lasting up to a comfortable retirement package. People were not comfortable with change, perhaps were frightened of change.

Company policies have changed with the realisation that their vision and mission statements mean nothing without capable people capable to carry them out. Loyalty and long serving employees are fewer and whilst loyalty may yet be assured, long service has changed drastically – and forever.

What happened to commitment?

There are no satisfied managers these days. They may appear passive, but are always ready to look at the options, no matter how senior they may be in their current positions. This has made life that much easier for the talent search companies who report that at least 50% of all those in higher management positions are open to change. The trend is stronger with younger managers who are more volatile and 60% more likely to change jobs.

With electronic means like the internet and the world turning into a global village, there is now greater transparency about job opportunities. Career sites and employment agencies abound. Talented individuals have realised that they have tremendous negotiating power to reach their levels of expectation. They are smart, they are adept at finding out where the best opportunities lie and switching jobs frequently.

Job hopping is no longer an uncomplimentary factor on the resume. It may in fact add value to the resume to have served multiple companies and gained a multitude of experiences in varied disciplines and atmospheres. Despite uncertain market conditions, key industry talent – particularly at a senior level – still expect certain benefits as part of their employment package. These benefits often help them make their minds up when they are choosing between a number of possible employers.

Employers have also learned to use benefits to differentiate themselves in the market and gain an edge over competitors, in order to appear an attractive employer although with all that is done, people do not seem to be committed to stay on too long in a job. What happened to commitment?

With every economic recession, commitment took a beating. As companies retrenched, staff moved on and as companies picked up, staff found better opportunities that were more challenging, at better pay. No longer were they satisfied to stay in jobs that had become boring for job security and the certainty of climbing the corporate ladder in the same firm steadily over several years. People now seek challenges. The mindset itself had changed and employers no longer hold the reins.

Global fight

The driving battle for talent is not only in apparent developed countries – its effects are replicated in many developing countries as well. A random check with many CEOs may reveal that organisations respond differently, depending on their level of maturity.

For example, progressive companies invest heavily in proactive strategies to ensure a pipeline of future leaders. They establish set leadership development patterns and plan succession with rigour. At the other end of the spectrum, others struggle to cope with the immediate tactical demands, doing what they can to retain the leaders they have, and hiring on demand.

Unfortunately, at this moment in time, there appears to be no fixed model or exercise that could reverse the mindset to make employees give control and responsibility back to the employer and here begins the battle for the best talent. Driving a hard deal to secure the best talent is a new business reality and it is an uncomfortable reality for employers, for companies undeniably need people, talented people who could face competition and bring results.

The battle for talent is increasingly being fought globally, with smaller countries like Sri Lanka emerging so quickly that there is an ever-increasing number of companies vying for even international talent. How do businesses join the battlefield and win?

Attracting and retaining best talent

To attract and retain the best talent, businesses today need to be exciting and challenging, organisations need to have a rather flat hierarchy as against the pyramid, performance needs to be directly tied to delivery of value. Five years appears to be a benchmark after which talented performers appear to seek more job excitement, workplace ambience, the type of colleagues they prefer to work with, challenging expectations with salaries and perks to match.

People seek vitality in their jobs. Companies have come to learn that talent sourcing, talent management and retaining talent is a crucial source of competitive advantage. They now need to strategise smartly to attract, develop and retain this scarce resource. They need to build performance initiatives into the jobs, create challenges, energise and align all their people towards the expected delivery targets. They need to build powerful and sophisticated approaches for talent management knowing well that it is one single component that managed well, would lead to dramatically improved corporate performance.

That means, the company stands to score higher on return to share holders by at least 20% more than their industry peers. Taking a look at highly successful companies, managers would realise that those companies have tailored their profiles to make their companies attractive, leveraging the inherent strengths of their business to draw the attention of the type of people they are trying to attract.

Great leadership

What was traditionally the job of the HR manager is now an area all managers should be responsible for, starting from the CEO. A charismatic CEO dreaming up all kinds of exciting ventures might spread that vitality right through the organisation. We have all met such CEOs. Their very footsteps alert the company from the guard at the gate to the canteen keeper. The company vibrates with his or her electric personality!

The ‘nine to five’ work concept does not feature in these organisations and employees appear to love their jobs and adore their leader. Smart CEOs offer flexibility of work environments that accommodate family commitments, realising that more and more talented and delivery oriented performers seek a match between work life and family commitments.

Great leadership is absolutely important, but, there are other factors such as autonomy whilst allowing talent to flourish, profit and loss responsibility, cross functionality, the right corporate culture, an open and trusting environment. How would it be if you could work in an atmosphere that not only has goals and result expectations from you, but also a culture that inspires and challenges you? What would you feel about a company that knows you as an individual, not just as an index number on the payroll and if that leader constantly displays qualities of integrity, character and principles, who is passionate, shares his vision and inspires others to greatness?

Recruiting strategy

Tackling the problem internally, how do managers look for talent? I believe it is an ongoing process, not merely an exercise to be carried out when a vacancy arises. Companies should start using existing high performers indirectly as key recruiters, encourage them to always looking out for talent and introduce talent to their companies. Companies should use cooler economic periods to capture top notch talent which at other times might be hard to attract. Companies should establish practices, similar to marketing tactics, to recruit and invest in training, development, coaching and mentoring to polish raw talent into what it seeks from their people. Companies wishing to draw and retain top talent must pursue aggressive tactics not merely to hire, but to attract talent.

The recruiting strategy must be carefully thought out, taking into account the present and future needs, the actual value of its current workforce, how to inject dynamism into the organisation, better ways of challenging employees, opportunities to learn and develop, and career growth opportunities along with a fitting culture. The company could well own people with talent which poor leaders fail to recognise. Given the importance of coaching, feedback and mentoring, given the feeling that people are not merely staff but individuals with their own identities, there is nothing to stop an organisation from reaping talent and retaining it.

Finding what potential talented workers enjoy doing and shaping their careers and responsibilities in that direction is not a difficult strategy. Development of the individual is directly related to business performance and managers would do well to recognise the link between great development and business performance. Whilst acknowledging that everyone has different skills sets, companies must acknowledge all its players, seek out their talents, drive them towards higher expectations and reap sure success. They can expect huge success in their first year of effort by transforming average performers into high performers. Just as employees in an organisation are in contact with passive job seekers, so are recruiters. Companies should therefore work with professional recruiters to reach out to passive candidates for their difficult searches. It is a recruiter’s fulltime job to network and maintain relationships; it’s also a recruiter’s job to understand what hiring managers want in a candidate and what candidates want in a job. By establishing a relationship with a recruiter early on, companies enjoy peace of mind and a certain confidence when a difficult position is suddenly open.

Leadership development

Long-term talent planning also needs to be extended to leadership development, particularly in Sri Lanka and generally in Asia, where many believe specific leadership competencies are needed to drive business strategies. Such a perception begs other questions: what are these specific leadership competencies?

I believe that CEOs and leaders would have gained enough experience in leadership competencies on their way up the corporate ladder. Nevertheless, CEOs and leaders themselves should take every opportunity for of continuous learning to equip them better to take bold decisions. The organisations that win today’s recruiting war will be those that have set up well planned strategies for the future, using tactics that have worked well across many successful organisation.

Executive search companies are more interested in the battle for talent than others, perhaps because they are approached by companies with alarmingly high bench marks for candidates they seek to fill critical vacancies. With such tall orders, executive search companies have started to adopt ‘out of the box’ thinking and strategies to attract best performers. They no longer rely on conventional advertising, selecting from a long line of candidates or head hunting from the same sources.

They seek underlying talent at all levels, starting from entry levels, those with fresh perspectives, strengths that may not exactly be on the profile listing but could be valuable when it comes to facing challenges. They may not seek within the industry but comb the business domain for people who could ‘take the ball and run’. They built networks within and outside industries and some go even as far as building networks with key partners outside the country.

The game has changed with the world becoming a global village that has universal reach with a click of a button. Finding talent has become a specialised art where all players would be the artists. I believe that entering the battling for talent could be minimised if companies were to cleverly strategise their operations.



(The writer is MD/Principal Consultant of Executive Search Ltd./Appointments of International Management Specialists (AIMS), a well-known headhunting guru who is a pioneer in the field of executive search and headhunting with over three decades of experience in the business.)