Catalyst | Digital
D
TALENT IN A
TIME OF CRISIS:
what we can all
learn from the
2020
PANDEMIC
The COVID-19 crisis has led to abrupt and
seismic changes to how we work. As we move
into a new post-pandemic climate, what have
we learned – and how could and should those
lessons inform talent acquisition in future?
Words: Clare Grist Taylor
Once upon a time, the talent acquisition (TA)
community was busy getting to grips with the
new world of digital that was unfolding before
its very eyes. It was a time of huge disruption
and change, from the rise of AI-based
recruitment to fundamental labour-market
changes, such as the shift to contingent and
freelance working. Add in evolving workforce
expectations, a host of new business models and a tricky digital skills gap,
and it’s not hard to see why the community was beginning to wonder just
how it was going to attract, acquire and deploy the kinds of skills needed
to underpin this new world of work.
And then came 2020. With the COVID-19 global pandemic shutting down
so much so abruptly, even challenge and change on the scale to which
we’d become accustomed might seem like an age of innocence. Necessity,
we have learned, is very much the mother of invention. Doing business
remotely has become our reality rather than an aspiration. Organisations
staffed with leaders sceptical about flexible working (and who had never
even heard of Zoom) have had to adjust overnight. Just getting on that
plane to fly across the Atlantic for a meeting no longer seems like a nobrainer.
And TA teams experimenting with digital recruitment practices
have had to shift online in short order.
Eventually, the pandemic will pass. Perhaps the more interesting questions
to ask now are not about how things have shifted in response to the crisis,
important though that is. Rather, we need to look ahead to a post-COVID
world. Has the crisis changed the way we recruit and work forever? What
will stick and what will be quietly sidelined as we start to open our offices?
Is our new digital reality here to stay, and what will that look like?
TA teams are already asking themselves these very questions. According
to research conducted at the peak of the pandemic by Aptitude on behalf
of Alexander Mann Solutions, recruiting the right skills from the highestquality
candidates remains the priority, pandemic or no pandemic.
Unsurprising perhaps, but it’s also clear that, as the economic impact of
COVID-19 bites hard, TA teams are going to have get even smarter to
compete, whether that’s in terms of strategic workforce planning or the
practicalities of attraction, hiring and onboarding. And all the while,
staying on top of the competitive market for those essential digital skills.
The combination of
digitisation and
extraordinary
circumstances has created
the prospect for real,
long-term change
Chris Bleakley, director of
resourcing, Nationwide
There’s plenty of evidence, though, that crisis brings opportunity as well
as challenge. In the wake of the 2007-8 financial crisis, a team of researchers
from Harvard Business School and the Kellogg School of Management
looked at the strategies and performance of some top US companies in
response to previous economic recessions. They describe the companies
that weathered the storms best as “progressive”, able to “deploy the
optimal combination of defence and offence”. So, while our natural
tendency might be to retrench, smart organisations balance the need for
efficiency or cost-cutting with continuing to build for the future. Is this
a model, we ask, for TA in a post-COVID world?
Remote, but not forgotten
Perhaps the most obvious and immediate impact of the pandemic
has been the seismic shift to remote and homeworking. Even the most
future-facing organisations could not have predicted the mass experiment
in flexible working occasioned by COVID-19. But it’s clear that
organisations that were already positioning themselves for more flexible
ways of working have been at an advantage when it came to what might
have been a difficult transition.
It’s not only the tech giants like Twitter – quick to blog about being
“uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from
home” – which deserve plaudits for what has been an extraordinary shift
in working practices.
Michael Fiddaman, talent acquisition lead at Royal London, believes that
already having in place a robust flexible working policy was a distinct
advantage; within six days, 98% of the company was working remotely.
It’s a very good example of how the crisis has accelerated wider business
change processes that were already underway. “We’ve all bought into the
need to operate as a sustainable, forward-facing, agile business, facilitated
by the right tools and processes. And here we are, walking the walk.”
It’s a story replicated across all sizes and types of organisations. Nicky
Hancock, managing director – Americas region for Alexander Mann
Solutions, is quick to applaud companies which have proven that remote
and flexible working really can work, even in the most unlikely context.
“Who would have thought that we’d see investment bankers trading
remotely – and successfully,” she says. “It may have been a change forced
on us, but, in many fields of work, we have, somehow, found a way.
It remains to be seen, of course, whether this poster child of the pandemic
will endure longer term. Hancock makes the point that it’s all very well
when everyone has no choice but to adapt and is “in the same boat”. Things
might look very different when offices start to re-open and the pressure
to return to business as usual might become overwhelming.
For many TA teams, and the people for whom they’re responsible, however,
there’s a real sense that COVID-19 has presented us with the opportunity to
capitalise on much-needed change when it comes to often entrenched
attitudes towards flexible working. It seems that, through necessity, we have
proven a point, creating a baseline and blueprint for flexible workplaces and
practices that are attractive for employers and employees alike.
Lasting change is about building on the behavioural change we’ve
witnessed, according to Chris Bleakley, director of resourcing at
Nationwide: “The level of empathy and trust we’ve seen from leaders has
been a key element of successful COVID-19 remote working,” he says.
“A focus on discretionary effort – cutting employees some slack when it
comes to their personal contexts, managing childcare, looking after
themselves – has led to happy, trusted and productive employees.”
The crisis has
accelerated a shift away
from more transactional
job advertising to valuesbased
storytelling
Michael Fiddaman,
talent acquisition lead,
Royal London
Of Nationwide’s 18,000-strong workforce, 12,000 members of staff have
been working remotely during the crisis and productivity has gone up,
not down. He points out that “changes like having contact-centre staff
working from home might have taken years to achieve – if ever – under
normal circumstances. The combination of digitisation and extraordinary
circumstances has created the prospect for real, long-term change.”
Most importantly, it seems to be a change embraced by the majority.
Nationwide’s sentiment-tracking surveys show that 87% of the workforce
has welcomed the opportunity to work more flexibly. Would people like
to be back in the office one-to-two days a week? Yes, please; we’d all really
like to see our colleagues again. But five days? Perhaps not. Bleakley neatly
sums up what many of us instinctively feel about the situation in which
we find ourselves: “Post-COVID, social contact will still be important, but
that doesn’t mean we all need to be in the office all the time.”
Putting the virtue into
virtual recruitment
While the Aptitude survey data show that
some companies have put recruitment on
hold, for 62%, recruitment has continued.
According to Laurie Padua, managing
director at Alexander Mann Solutions’
Consulting Division, organisations have
broadly fallen into two camps. The first has
called a halt to recruitment for now,
focusing instead on the wellbeing of
existing staff and deploying them to
support their ability to carry on operating.
In the other camp, firms have continued to
recruit, in some sectors needing more
people than ever. And that has meant, of
course, the need to recruit without the
face-to-face interaction usually associated
with the average hiring decision. For
Padua, it has “also thrown into relief the
importance of the underpinning
technology, whether that’s virtual interviewing, signing employment
contracts digitally or remote onboarding.”
Of course, TA teams were busy digitising their operations long before the
pandemic hit. Digital tools such as online recruitment portals or
AI-driven candidate profiling are nothing new. What has been a change
is carrying out the whole recruitment process remotely – with all that
implies. Alexander Mann Solutions has even developed virtual careers
events for new graduates, as well as virtual internship programmes, an
initiative also positive for encouraging a more diverse range of participants.
The biggest single operational change for many has been the move to
video-based assessment. For some hiring managers, this has been a steep
learning curve, from getting to grips with the technology to trusting their
hiring decisions without the familiar cues provided by being in the same
room as candidates. At Royal London, hiring managers have often buddied
up with their peers to support each other as they navigate this new world.
It has also highlighted crucial emotional intelligence capabilities such as
adaptability, self-management and empathy.
Despite the challenges, it seems that the virtual assessment genie is well
and truly out of the bottle, with many organisations already looking
forward to its post-COVID use, sometimes mandated, often in hybrid
form, alongside traditional face-to-face interviews. Padua strikes one
note of caution, though, predicting that, in a post-pandemic shake down,
organisations may want to build on the progress made using commercially
available video-conferencing software by replacing it with more bespoke,
security-assured tech to ensure long-term sustainability.
It’s also thrown into
relief the importance
of the underpinning
tech, whether that’s
virtual interviewing,
signing employment
contracts digitally or
remote onboarding
Laurie Padua, managing director,
Alexander Mann Solutions’
Consulting Division
While it’s all systems go for virtual assessment, another aspect of remote
recruitment seems to have proved more troublesome: onboarding. This
is a perfect example of the balance we’re going to need to strike in future,
deploying technology where it’s proven to have worked so well in a crisis,
while accepting that, in an ideal world, there are some things that still
need good old-fashioned human interaction.
Brand has also loomed large. The crisis has accelerated a shift already
underway in terms of messaging; what Fiddaman calls “a ‘humanising’,
a moving away from more transactional job advertising to values-based
storytelling”. The pandemic has provided an opportunity to restate the
organisation’s core values in response to the crisis and how they’ve
adapted. Candidate feedback has been “encouraging”.
Nationwide is also highlighting its brand story. “Early on, we decided that
no redundancies would take effect this year. Add to that our trusted,
socially responsible brand, and being able to offer more flexibility, and
that’s a very strong employee value proposition,” says Bleakley.
Strategic
workforce
planning
triumphant
We can all rehearse the
arguments around the need
for flexible workforce
planning, whether that’s
leveraging the skills offered
by a contingent workforce,
recruiting for skills rather
than job roles or making the
maximum use of the skills
already available to us. But
we also know that more
traditional organisational
structures and priorities
have not always been
conducive to flexibility.
It seems, though, that this is another area where the pandemic might
have acted as a catalyst. Alexander Mann Solutions’ Hancock has noticed
that, where external hiring has either stopped or slowed down, this has
sometimes meant more focus on developing and re-deploying skills
internally. “Just take the example of one of our clients, a major American
bank,” she says. “It committed to no lay-offs this year early on in the crisis,
but it has also re-deployed and mobilised 3,000 of its employees to support
areas within the business with high demand. We’ve been talking about
skills not roles forever – and here’s an example of it in action.”
With the economic effects of the pandemic likely to be felt for some time,
this optimisation of skills deployment may become a crucial factor as
organisations look to agility as a way to weather the economic storm. It’s
not without its challenges – the need to identify skills, people’s motivations
and also sell it as a positive – but coronavirus is, once again, showing what
can be done when the chips are down.
Organisations will certainly need to muster all the flexibility they can to
attract those elusive digital skills. This is an area of the market where
demand remains high and competition fierce. Facilitating homeworking
and online recruitment is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to
how digitisation has supported many a business through lockdown,
accelerating, yet again, company-wide digital transformation. The
dynamic is about nothing less than how to upskill and reskill workforces
to deliver completely new ways of doing business.
When it comes to those skills, though, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, writing
in Harvard Business Review, reminds us again that economic crisis can
provide opportunity as well as challenge. With downsizing a reality, as
companies revisit their global strategies and as individuals recalculate
their personal priorities around work, “the pool of available talent is
suddenly both changing and expanding”. Just as a fledgling Hewlett
Packard took advantage of de-mobbed US military engineers in the
post-war world of the 1940s, successful post-COVID organisations will
need to leverage every ounce of vision and agility to resist the temptation
to retrench completely. Strategic investment in skills will be a crucial
factor in sustainability.
For Fernández-Aráoz, this long-term thinking involves determined and
targeted efforts, not only to source the best external candidates, but to
retain and develop skills in-house. “This is also the time to carefully
review your existing key players, stay closer to them than ever, assess
their skills and knowledge,” he says.
TA teams are only too aware that this kind of strategic workforce planning
is crucial for the talent challenges companies are bound to face.
For Hancock, talent is talent, no matter where it comes from, and
regardless of type of contract or working arrangements: “Organisations
which come out of this crisis using and building on what they’ve learned
will have a real competitive advantage in the market. The reality of the
skills gap is still there. They’ve got to be creative about how and where
they can attract people and what the deal will be in our new normal.”
Bleakley wants Nationwide’s learnings around flexible working to help
it widen the net, both geographically, and by considering people who may
not want to be office-based 9-to-5-ers, but still have the talent required.
As an example, he cites the ‘outside-the-box’ thinking already adopted
for Nationwide’s new internal IT team, selecting a city-centre location
optimised for attracting the right people and anticipating a more drop-in,
collaborative style of office design as a physical manifestation of a more
nimble working practice.
The barriers are down,
but only for a limited time.
TA needs to press home
this advantage right now
Nicky Hancock, managing director,
Alexander Mann Solutions Americas
Towards a new future?
The words that come up most often when talking about how the coronavirus
crisis has affected TA are ‘catalyst’ and ‘acceleration’.
Technologies and new ways of working have already changed forever the
world of work, the jobs available and the skills needed to do them. Global
management consulting firm McKinsey & Company has been tracking
these trends closely and, like others, believes the pandemic has only made
the need to address the skills gap more urgent. As workers navigate this
new world, employers must learn how to match these workers to new
roles and activities. It’s a challenge that’s going to need talent strategies
that develop “employees’ critical digital and cognitive capabilities, their
social and emotional skills, and their adaptability and resilience”, all
capabilities that have more than proven their worth during the pandemic.
For the McKinsey team, this is not time for holding back; rather, it’s a
time for companies to “double down on their learning budgets and commit
to reskilling”, both to weather the immediate storm and to build resilience
for future disruption: “Companies can’t be resilient if their workforces
aren’t. Building your reskilling muscle now is the first step to ensuring
that your organisation’s recovery business model is a success.”
It’s a call to arms not lost on the TA community. TA teams, already on a
digitisation journey, want to use the adaptability and innovation we’ve
seen in recent months as a springboard for more lasting change.
As the world of work anticipates the future, organisations everywhere
are engaging in business-wide reviews of what a post-pandemic world
might mean for their markets, their businesses and the skills they need.
Padua believes that the crisis has led to a “fundamental shift in attitudes”
that has accelerated thinking and initiatives already underway – and
created a time of true opportunity for talent acquisition. Hancock agrees:
“The barriers are down, but only for a limited time. TA needs to press
home this advantage right now.”
Perhaps the last word might go to Bleakley, who wants to guard against
“knee-jerk battlefield decisions” that might undo so much of the good
he’s seen during the crisis: “The real change that has happened as a result
of COVID-19 might have come from a negative place; the trick now is to
flip that into more positive practice for the future.”