By Adrian Farthing, Enterprise Sales Manager at DaXtra Technologies
There is no doubt that businesses had to be agile in 2020. If you rewind to January last year, it was impossible to have predicted what the year had in store for us all, and the impact it would have on our companies and colleagues.
Carefully laid out strategies, revenue goals and marketing plans were all spun on their head from March 2020. Many businesses, perhaps yours included, found themselves moving all their services online and supporting customers from home.
The skills needed to make this shift looked very different from those which would be required for a ‘normal’ year. Aside from the obvious challenges 2020 posed, redeploying staff and reallocating skills was another difficulty to add to the mix.
Not all businesses managed it successfully and, of course, some sectors have been hit harder than others. However, those who analysed the skills of their current workforce and found a way to adapt quickly have enjoyed more success than those who didn’t respond or were too slow. Unfortunately, businesses who were slow to respond were likely to find themselves among those who needed to furlough staff or make them redundant.
Do you know the skills available in your business?
Does your business record the skill sets you have available across your workforce? If so, how? Is it based on their job descriptions? And how are you documenting it?
Most likely your talent pool has all its skills documented so you can search for new recruits by the required skill set. But what about your existing talent?
By recording your existing employees' skills, you can be far more responsive when it comes to redeploying staff and adapting to changing customer demands.
Who has redeployed staff successfully?
Think of all the businesses impacted by the events of 2020. Arguably we all were but in particular, high street retailers and consumer-facing companies needed to adapt quickly. With their doors closing and shutters firmly down, it was online or nothing.
Food-shopping and online grocery orders increased by 57% year on year. The skills required to cope with this rapid growth differed from those needed if the pace of growth been slower.
High street banks and financial companies needed to transition staff quickly from in-person to online service. Even consumer beauty brands had to adapt quickly. Cosmetics company L’Oreal saw their e-commerce sales double at the initial peak of the pandemic in April. By November 2020, their e-commerce sales had increased by a whopping 71% since March!
These success stories are not down to luck. The companies identified skills they had in the business and mapped them against what they needed to adapt.
How technology helps redeploy staff
Internal recruitment and talent teams are typically the go-to departments for sourcing new people and skillsets within the business. However, they often a) only look externally from the company and b) lack the tools to efficiently match people, and their skills and experience, with the new requirements.
Using DaXtra Search Nexus you can match people to either the vacancy or the skillsets required.
It allows you to source talent by searching across all your employees to identify skills and search within your existing talent pool.
With our AI and machine learning at work in the background, each candidate is intelligently ranked by the context of their experience and skills. The technology is built using natural language processing which uses the context of language – making it a far superior tool when it comes to cleaning up data and finding those star candidates even faster.
Recruiters at agencies are likely to know what the upcoming trends are. By looking at candidate data in their database they can find out if they need to source more candidates to fill up their talent pool in order to fit their clients’ needs.
For all recruiters, improving your talent pool will ensure you’re not competing with an identical talent pool held by your competitor. CV backlogs, incomplete data, spelling errors and duplicate records can all lead to a lack of visibility and poor quality data. Using DaXtra Capture ensures clean data enters your CRM or ATS. It acts as a cleansing bridge between the data source and your database. Essentially, you take control of your data, connecting all incoming CV sources across the entire business, so recruiters can find and match candidates as seamlessly as possible.
Finally, understanding the strength of your talent pool is key - are you engaged with them? Have you become a trusted advisor to those candidates? Make sure you have a diverse pool available when new jobs emerge to be prepared for the new jobs needed. Active sourcing – attracting and engaging top industry talent to build a talent pipeline ahead of time – is crucial. This talent pipeline can then be nurtured and tapped when vacancies arise.
