The Employability Challenge
Establishing a shared culture of employability could help organisations source and select top talent for the future.
Navigating today’s hiring process to find potential
Are there roles in your organisation that don’t yet exist? How can you source and select candidates to best find potential when skill sets are changing? What matters most to you - hard skills or soft? According to the Great Insights 2022 study, conducted by the Great Place To Work Institute, employability is one of their primary concerns; the challenges of the last 3 years have left many organisations with skill gaps, talent shortages and a workforce who are reevaluating work-life balance in a post-pandemic market. But whilst the future of employability is wrapped up in a huge number of questions, there is also potential. By understanding the challenges that are affecting employability and deploying tools such as a hiring solution, you can start to rescope and future-proof your recruitment processes.
What is employability?
Employability is the set of skills and abilities that an individual has that enables them to acquire a role, progress and develop in the workplace. Together personal attributes, soft and hard skills and competencies are the key elements that employers are looking for when they seek to fulfil a role. To achieve success organisations are looking closely at how they source talent, where to identify candidate potential and how to reduce the time pressure of screening volumes of applicants to avoid screening out top talent too early.
Three stages of employability challenges
- Sourcing: The question of multiple vendors - Some organisations choose to outsource their recruitment processes vs using internal professionals. The challenge can be two-fold. On the one hand having multiple external agencies sourcing talent could in principle provide you with a greater pool of candidates. However, it can also attract competition, negatively impact your brand, and waste time if the same candidate is submitted from multiple agencies. Over 90% of the world’s HR professionals report feeling totally burned out from the recent demands put on them; which is why reducing time pressure whilst fulfilling roles confidently and soundly is important. Knowing your organisation, where the gaps exist and how business goals are likely to evolve can help you make a vendor decision that is right for you.
- Screening: Volumes of candidates – 2022 saw 59.5 million applications for jobs submitted; a 19% increase year-on-year. With an increase in job applications, the next challenge is how to screen volumes of candidates without overlooking or screening out top talent too early? Put simply, by embracing technology - 7 out of 10 recruitment professionals believe that investing in new HR technologies is the key to unlocking enhanced recruitment results over the next five years. Talent systems have developed considerably, tools such as Credly’s Talent Match can help you take a skills-based approach to sourcing candidates, whilst Pearson’s Role Assessment uses the job information to analyse candidate matches and create a tailored online assessment that can be sent to multiple individuals. With automated scoring you get the results you need to make an informed decision on whom to advance to the next stage from a wider pool.
- Selecting: Identifying candidate potential - There’s no avoiding the pace at which job titles are evolving, and along with them the skills required to succeed. Earlier this month LinkedIn highlighted the top 25 fastest-growing job titles from Data Science Manager to Machine Learning Engineer. Many roles didn’t exist ten years ago, others have developed as technology has advanced. But one thing that is consistent across the roles is the need for strong soft skills or what Pearson recently identified as Power Skills including communication, problem solving, collaboration and leadership.
For organisations the challenge is to identify these skill sets in candidates and predict future performance - candidate potential. Psychometric tools such as Raven’s Adaptive and Watson Glaser Critical Thinking are used across industries to gather insight into the potential of candidates as team members and future leaders. Research also shows that organisations can predict over 70% of performance by using the right tools!
Employability is a key area for organisations and individuals this year, as new jobs continue to develop, and softs skills become even more important. Establishing a shared culture of employability where both parties are invested in the future-of-work will be vital - organisations need a strategy which enables them to invest time, technology and ability into sourcing and selecting the best candidates for the role.
For more information on how to create a ‘shared culture of employability’ and navigate the challenges outlined above, download our whitepaper How to Put Employability at the Heart of Corporate Strategy.