Emerging Trends You Need to Know About Talent

For the past year, I have been writing about how artificial intelligence (AI) and your workforce. In our insight, AI benefits your business and employees; we advance that choosing to ignore advanced technologies will intensify their negative impact in the future. AI can help your business and employees if implemented the right way. AI has implications both inside and outside of the company. Successfully achieving strategy requires increasing the value for shareholders while ensuring you have satisfied customers and workforce. Engaged employees serve customers better. Satisfied customers lead to better sales — reaping more value for the company and shareholders. Automating jobs:

provides a definite benefit to the company
creates a level of negativity among staff – mainly if colleagues will lose their jobs
lowers customer engagement – less personal services
generates an adverse reaction from the public

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner shares his views on what will transform the way employers hire, develop and retain talent. Let’s take a closer look.

There are really three themes that are worth calling out. AI and automation, the skills gap and the rise of independent work.” — Jeff Weiner

The potential for job losses due to advances in technology is not a new concern among the global workforce. However, over the past few years, fears of technology-driven job losses have emerged with advances in “smart automation” – the combination of artificial intelligence, robotics and other digital technologies. The impact of innovation is already visible in driverless cars and trucks, intelligent virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana and Japanese healthcare robots. However, there’s a twist coming. Add that to other trends such as the persistent skills mismatch and the rise of the “gig economy” and talent management professionals have a lot to think about. Those trends will transform the way employers hire, develop and retain talent.

Moreover, it is essential for all professionals and companies to prepare for the changes that are underway. Also, they need to incorporate the potential of the global workforce. We view that your talent stack — knowledge, skills, accomplishments and behavioural traits — will be captured on the blockchain. I have covered this trend extensively in our insights:

The future holds the promise of finding talent automatically. Here’s a deeper dive into each of the trends:

AI and Automation

Many people believe that artificial intelligence can automate millions of jobs – eventually. However, using merely the technology that exists today, over 50 percent of the activities in the U.S. economy are susceptible to automation.” — Paul Petrone, LinkedIn

Naturally, that percentage will only continue to increase as technologies advance. Middle-skill jobs in industries like manufacturing, hospitality, food services and retail trade are most prone to disruption. Recently, ShakeShack, a hamburger chain, announced it is going cashless and replacing cashiers with kiosks, a clear case of technology displacing workers.

HR Jobs at Risk

While technology will never be able to replace people in the workplace entirely, it will likely take over specific functions on talent acquisition and management teams. A survey from CareerBuilder showed that 72 percent of employers expect some roles within talent acquisition and human capital management to become automated entirely within the next ten years. The study shows that most of the automation is centred around messaging, benefits and compensation, but there’s room to increase efficiencies across a variety of essential functions.

When companies expand and add more and more employees, there’s a certain tipping point where things can no longer be managed efficiently and accurately by hand. Automation needs to be incorporated, so the HR team is free to focus on strategies versus tasks and focus on building relationships with employees and candidates.” — Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer, CareerBuilder

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Jobs Without Workers and Workers Without Jobs

The above phrase was coined by Rick Miner, a former Seneca College president, in 2009 when he took part in a federal labour market advisory panel. Almost a decade later his framing of the problem continues to ring true. Right now, in the U.S., more than six million jobs are unfilled – the highest number since the Department of Labor started tracking the statistic.

Moreover, 7.1 million people are unemployed in America, and 13.9 million are seeking more work, according to the most recent unemployment report. One primary reason is the skills mismatch. Mr. Weiner refers to the problem as a skills gap. I call it a skills mismatch as the available skills in the local market do not match with the skills employers need in that market.

The new jobs require more education, more specific skills than the professions of the past. Moreover, we are competing with China and Mexico. And, we lose low-skilled employment to those countries.” — Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets

The nature of those jobs is changing. So, the kind of training and education is changing. The labour market is changing faster than our ability to adapt to it. However, there is not just one skills mismatch. Instead, many skills mismatches exist across regions, for specific skills, and at points in time.

For example, today, the business strategy for nearly every company is shaped by data — however, businesses need data scientists to make sense of the information. Data analysis of business data can inform decisions around efficiency, inventory, production errors, customer loyalty and more. When it comes to hiring data scientists, organizations do not know what to ask for, so they ask for everything. They continue to think that years of experience matter rather than the talent stack of the data scientist.

Another example, right now Detroit-based car companies like Ford and GM are incorporating more and more software into their cars. Moreover, the talent base in Michigan is historically manufacturing-rich, creating a skills mismatch in Detroit for software engineers. At the same time, LinkedIn data shows there is a skills mismatch in Washington, D.C. for law enforcement professionals. In San Francisco, there’s a skills mismatch for recruiting professionals. Moreover, in Salt Lake City, the booming gaming ecosystem has led to a skills mismatch for game developers.

Worsening this problem is a lack of geographic mobility among workers. For example, people moving to another state in the US for work – is the lowest it has been since World War II.

Independent Workers

The third significant trend that will shape the global workforce is the rise of the independent worker, defined as freelancers, short-term contractors and gig economy workers. In the U.S. alone, there are 60 million self-employed workers, and that number should continue to increase. Why? There are three reasons, according to Mr. Weiner:

The rise of Millennials: Millennials are expected to comprise 75 percent of the global workforce by 2025, and the data shows Millennials are hungry for more autonomy “and a good side-hustle.” Moreover, both of those are possible via independent work.
The growth of online marketplaces: Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and Instacart – among thousands of others – require droves of independent workers. Today only 15 percent of self-employed workers leverage digital platforms to find work. This trend will continue to increase.
Cost efficiencies: It is often cheaper for companies to use a contract worker, as opposed to hiring someone full-time. That also leads to higher demand for contract workers.

All of this means fewer full-time, traditional employees and more independent workers potentially working for several companies at once. We believe this is an irreversible secular trend.

How to Prepare

How can individuals and organizations prepare for these sweeping changes?

The problem is everybody’s got a vested interested here. You’ve got to be very careful what you believe and who you believe Our data is horrible. The U.S. and most European countries do a much better job of tracking the job market. — Rick Miner

Theories abound, but we prefer to look at hard evidence. Currently, it is a hodgepodge of conflicting claims by employers and labour groups and much anecdotal evidence.

When I’m in a meeting where people start throwing around subjective opinions, one of the first things I’ll do is ask for the data. And this where we think LinkedIn can make a difference.” — Jeff Weiner

By having a digital representation of each professional, skill, job, school and organization in the world, on the blockchain or LinkedIn can provide the public data that professionals need to move their career or their organization forward.

Say, for example, that you are a mechanic in Boise, ID looking for work. Accessing public data, you can both identify and learn the skills you need to advance your career and find the best areas in the country to look for a job. When there is a match, the individual can then choose to share their data with the prospective employer or company.

Conversely, organizational leaders can identify the skills their organization has, teach the skills it needs and determine where best to recruit new talent. Perhaps you are like one of those car companies in Detroit moving to more of a tech focus; you can both teach your organization the skills you need and identify the best areas and schools from which to recruit talent.

The more significant point is that the world is changing, fast. Only by combining your instincts and talent insights can you and your organization best prepare for the world of work. The job market becomes increasingly noisy the next wave of recruiting lies in the use of data-driven insights to power talent decisions.Imagine a world where you have the data. You have the tools to anticipate what skills and talent you will need before you need them.

Talent Intelligence is a new way to harness data and insights to reinvent and improve every step of the recruitment process. Combining these insights with the right instincts delivers the winning talent strategy. It is no longer just knowing who’s done what or who lives where - that is the old game - but having insight at your fingertips into who’s already thought about working for your company, who’s passionate about your industry, who might work well with your teams and who is open to relocating.

Talent Intelligence will provide a competitive advantage at every step of the recruiting process, helping you hire the most passionate and qualified people in the shortest amount of time. With talent insights bring together all the data to massively automate and add intelligence to the way your company identifies and accesses talent, manages hiring expectations, and plans for what’s next.

Our strategic insights will allow you to answer tough questions about your future talent landscape and make better decisions. In this new world, we can tell you things like how to assess talent, how to predict competitive hiring threats, or how to find high performers.

Start with the critical roles; we provide insights on how to:

Link Talent to Value
identify the critical roles
understand the contribution of each position

This material provides you insight regarding what part of your workforce should be staff and what part you can outsource to the independent workforce.

Still curious to learn more?

Let us know! We are incredibly passionate about Behavioral DNA and the impact this scientific insight can have on business. We have seen it proved out across our customer base and used it to build our team of highly engaged —and engaging—experts. We provide our services worldwide. Contact us at successfinder@allenvisioninc.com — We would love to hear from you!