This is the time when you should consider how to hire people and get the best folks on your team. In short, the U.S. is positioned to have tremendous growth in the coming years. Of course, this is an opportunity for the disruptors and market leaders. And you should look at it as a chance for you as well.
Sure, there’s a lot of screaming headlines about technology taking jobs. As a leader, you have to avoid the noise and stick to improving your bottom line. In the coming years, to the risk-takers and disruptors go the spoils. AI will undoubtedly help. But so will top talent. So you need to prepare for hiring the best.
Enterprises still need top talent, now more so than ever because technology integrates into every part of your business or organization. AI, for example, is vastly changing everything, including marketing. As a social entrepreneur, I want to share some ideas on how to hire people that’s worked for my companies.
1. Don’t Hire for Talent
For decades, managers hired people because of their past performance and talent. And while that worked for the industrial age, it doesn’t work for the digital age. Experience and knowledge no longer serve as the only requirements for getting new talent. In short, technology has disrupted everything. And it’s moving and evolving at an unprecedented rate. That means that what someone knows at the start of the year could easily be obsolete by the end of that year. So, talent and experience are well and good, but you need to pay attention to other skills.
2. Curiosity is a Top Skill for New Talent
Again, experience and talent in a particular field or job are not indicative of future performance. So that can’t be your top reason for hiring people. Instead, you want to hire people in the digital world—even those who may lack experience—because they have an insatiable curiosity. The reality is that you need people on your team who are inquisitive. Meaning, you want to hire people who love to learn. As technology gets more integrated into every aspect of our lives, you need to hire people who want to learn it. The days for dragging people along to update their skills are long over.
3. Onboarding People Who Train Themselves
As we know, more and more of the responsibility for professional development has fallen on the workers. For instance, as freelancers continue to grow, the responsibility for updating skills falls on them and not the business. Sure, if you have new platforms that you’re integrating into your company or nonprofit, you need to train your teams. However, hiring managers need to look at people who continually update their skills. For example, Udemy, Coursera, and Lynda allow people to spend time updating skills. If you see those certifications and classes on resumes, that’s an indication of top talent.
4. Hiring People For VUCA Environment
The acronym, VUCA, is a term created by the military. What it means is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Today’s business environment fits those descriptors. In other words, because of technology and artificial intelligence, event horizons no longer take years, but now short months. So, there’s a lot of complexity and even uncertainty. For instance, we don’t know when a new platform will arrive or updates happen that significantly improve the output of our teams. Again, today’s talent must know how to operate in a VUCA environment. And that means they have to have exceptional soft skills.
5. Recruiting People with Strong Soft Skills
As was mentioned earlier, technical expertise is not necessarily the lead driver for hiring talent. For example, you might employ a surgeon because of their skill and experience. However, if the surgeon doesn’t learn how to operate with technology, you’ll have made a bad hire in a few years. Thus, soft skills are what you need. In the surgeon’s case, you need someone who wants to continue to learn and is curious. But you also need other skills for top talent. Those soft skills include adaptability, team builders and supporters, and communicators.
These are the top skills because the digital age requires people to pivot, work collaboratively in their teams and within their cultures, and communicate effectively using all the platforms they’ll need to use in the modern workplace. So when you look for how to hire people to your team, sure, take a look at the resume. But what you’re looking for in the best hires are those skills that don’t necessarily come from technical expertise. Instead, they get developed by a person who wants to learn and improve both as a person and professional.
© 2021 Wayne Elsey. All Rights Reserved.