In search of gold, we are losing the diamond

After the pandemic, few skills are in full demand, especially IT skills in India. Digitalization was always one of the agenda in companies’ strategy documents, however it is accelerated because of the pandemic. It means that these skills became crucial in view of organizations fast tracking their digital agenda. 

Does this mean that the situation will remain the same after 3-5 years? Definitely not. Another issue is about the artificial scarcity created by the talent itself. Imagine, you have one offer in hand, and you have resigned from your current company. You are on a notice period. As you are not committed to the current organization now, you start further exploring opportunities in spite of having the offer in hand. You get another offer during the notice period. Now your current organization wishes to retain you and matches your salary with a second offer which is almost double of the current salary. As you have enough time in hand and you get another offer with a triple salary. Because of the notice period and your delayed joining, you start shopping. Ideally it is the only one talent, but because of the insane behaviour of the market and pressure from the business you get multiple offers. Ready-made skills are always attractive for certain periods. 

During the process other organizations could have seen other talent but the assumption is that having multiple offers means great talent. Instead of searching, the talent organizations are only focusing on particular people who are active on job portals and LinkedIn.  

Because of short term focus, organizations and candidates are missing the long-term actions. They want to save the present, but they lose the future. Organizations need to think of “the dual strategy” which means, you build a strategy not based on one outcome, but you also consider the future. For example, you don’t only focus on the short term (hiring the skills from the market) but also start to build up the current and future skills within an organization for the future. Of course, organizations should have done this at least a year back. 

While doing this, there should be some assumptions. Even in the past everybody knew that certain skills are in demand and will be in demand. This is the game of supply & demand but sometimes business leaders are so desperate for short term gain given the reason of cost competitiveness while missing the long-term actions. 

Two years back, the software engineer and IT skills were right sized and fired. The reason mentioned by those companies was performance but actually it was slimming the organizations. This resulted in the formation of unions in certain areas. There were complaints filed against those companies in the labour office and labour courts. Now same talent has become crucial for those organizations. All assumptions were fragile.

A well-known author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, “Anti Fragile” writes, “there are three distinctions when describing systems, organizations etc, i.e.  Fragile, Robust and Anti-Fragile. Fragile systems and organizations are vulnerable to all kinds of unforeseen events or pushes, like the situation we are seeing now. Robust ones can withstand them. Anti-fragile ones even benefit from potentially unforeseen events. The key is to build your system, organization or company as much as possible in a robust or even anti-fragile way.”

I understand the panic situation of those organizations because of the business pressures but they had a great opportunity in the past to build the robust talent management systems in their organizations. They are looking for the gold but lost the diamonds which could have been perhaps more beneficial. 

The problem is not with that talent who is shopping the job from one company to another company, the problem is with the organizations who are allowing them to do this. unfortunately. Building a robust organization and system is still far away.  

(Opinions are purely personal & does not represent my organizations, current or past) 

Author's book are available on Amazon, Flipkart, Pothi and BookGanga 

Make your hiring logical.

Sometimes, job postings surprise me. A small organization having its office in downtown city asks applications from candidates who are supermen from nice institute, having mind-blowing experience of handling everything. Of course, their salary package is not that mind-blowing. Sometimes their expectations are just unrealistic. I have seen the job post which asks 8 years of experience in certain technology and that technology is only 5 years old. Every company wants their candidate from reputed institute, working in reputed company either in MNC or Indian MNC. When I see these job postings and if I would have been the candidate, I am sure that there are little chances of my résumé shortlisted. There are few candidates who also don’t bother what’s written in the job advertisement; they apply for every position cluttering the inbox of recruiter. Recruiter gets confused whom to shortlist because s/he doesn’t get anybody who is qualified. 

As commonly cited statistic is that women only apply for jobs when they feel 100% qualified, while men are willing to apply when meeting just 60% of the qualifications—evidence of a confidence gap between the genders. But both men and women fall into the trap of taking job requirements too seriously. 

I frequently listen to talent acquisition specialists aka recruiters speaking about selling the job to the candidate. This is because their mailbox in cluttered with irrelevant resumes because of strange job posts and they get very few relevant candidates. It doesn’t mean that there is a dearth of relevant candidates.   

Most of the time such job posts are created by most junior recruiter in a team. Hiring manager will write everything, he dreams of having. They want readymade candidate who will start delivering from first day in the organization. Don’t know when those hiring managers started delivering when they joined the organization. 

Then there is a category of job postings (common in India) which only seek applications from certain institutes (like tier 1), specific gender (to improve the diversity targets given by their bosses) and certain companies like European or American companies. People in American companies think that working in American companies is very tough and employees working in Indian or other MNCs will not survive in “their” companies. And later think the same way. 

In short, they want the best, fast & cheap. This is the rule of three in the business world: whether you’re talking about a product, a service, or a person, you simply cannot have it all. But then what we do in such cases. As a professional we need to calibrate our expectations and you can do it by working on following tips.

Challenge the assumptions: Healthy and challenging discussion is always good. HR professional, talent acquisition specialist and hiring manager should come together. In-take meetings are crucial. TA specialist should ask lot of questions and challenge if manager has some different expectations. For example, most of the time, managers expect candidates from competition. By only hiring from competition, we are creating artificial dearth of candidates, secondly, we are discouraging the diversity and third creating the monopoly for the talent. Same is for candidates from specific college, specific region and genders. 

Recognize & overcome biases:  We have biases as explained above about companies, colleges, gender, community, cast and regions. We need to recognize that, yes, we are bias and then work on to overcome those biases. HR plays an important role here to help the manager by challenging his biases and supporting him to take the right decision. 

Hire for potential: Candidates should not be shortlisted based on their tenure, short or long, in the company. Selection should be based on what experience they gained, how they developed themselves, and what they contributed to the business. You should find out the reason of short or long duration. They may contribute in a short span in one company or multiple contribution in another company. See their growth and pattern of development instead of just experience.  

I know this is not rocket science, but you take a balanced view, you may get a result.