Tackle hiring in Digital Enterprise

By: Pankaj Upadhyay, Associate Vice President - Solution Group, Maveric Systems

Most organizations today are siloed around different functions or geographies. But the gadget savvy millennials expect a fully customized and integrated experience. Achieving excellence in just one channel is no longer sufficient for an enterprise, for example, retail customers expect the same frictionless experience in a retail store as they do when shopping online, and vice versa. This has forced the enterprises to fundamentally think differently about the way they organize, operate and maintain their data and systems. Also, operational productivity is a huge concern for any enterprise in today’s environment. These internal and external factors together are pushing all enterprises to think Digital. And, do organizations have a choice to exclude themselves from being a part of this digital wave? The answer is NO. With the world outside the enterprise moving at a faster pace than within the organization, it is a case of Bernoulli's Principle coming into play wherein the fast changing world sucks the enterprise up into the whirl of change. No matter how big or small the organization is, irrespective of the sector, Digital transformation is inevitable.

So what exactly does it mean to be Digital? Often a company with an e-commerce website is mistaken to be a ‘digital’ company. However, as put by Gartner analysts, ‘A digital business is not the decade-old concept of e-business in a new wrapper. It is a radically different and more disruptive change.’

A digital enterprise is about integrating its 4Ps, namely, People, Processes, Product and Partners. It’s about making information mobile i.e. the right data (company data, customer data, supplier data etc.) to the right worker at the right time. Knowledge workers will use portable mobile devices, either smartphones, tablets or wearables and apply analytical techniques to make better and real-time business decisions to drive efficiency and productivity.

One of the most important pre-requisites, thus, for an enterprise stepping towards Digital is to build digital skills across the enterprise starting right from marketing and sales, operations and the whole value chain. Companies are facing global talent shortages at the moment. Finding and attracting the right digital talent can be a difficult task, the real challenge not being technological, but cultural and competence-related.

Some of the key challenges when it comes to hiring digital talent are:

-Enterprise faces the difficulty of housing all the necessary technology skills under one roof.
-Millennials are a matter of concern as surveys show that nearly one in five millennials in the modern workplace are perceived to be lacking in analytical skills.
-The shelf life of a software engineer today is no more than 12-15 years.
-The proliferation of digital tools and technologies across functions means that the business associate now has to learn sufficient technical skills, while the technical engineer should be ready to speak the business language.

Digital Enterprises need an evolved professional who not only has agile and flexible talent to collaborate and co-create, but is also equally comfortable with business and technology. Hence, they have no option but to revamp their recruiting and training strategy. Some approaches that are essential and can work to overcome the above mentioned challenges are:

1. Digitization & Gamification of the recruitment process will encourage digital-savvy talent to engage.
2.   Hire for digital skills, not for industry experience. Look outside their own industry towards those who have already taken a lead in developing similar talent.
3.  Targeted company acquisitions will help access skilled hires in key digital technology areas.
4.  Incubating startups allows companies to tap into a stock of new ideas and talent.
5.  Organizing or attending hackathons will give an opportunity to connect with digital talent.
6.  Virtual talent pools i.e. ‘Expert Networks’ connect the disconnected and geographically spread talent with clients.
7.   Gig recruitment model wherein enterprise invests in hiring freelance, part-time, contingent, virtual employees with specialized skills for a period of time.

Finally, once a new employee has been selected and on-boarded, enterprise must protect and cultivate its digital talent. Protect them from Business As Usual. Enterprises should no longer rely on traditional HR models. Digital talent must be nurtured differently, with its own working patterns, sandbox, and tools. Enterprise should consider reversing the traditional mentoring rapport and let the new digital employees share their skills and ways of doing things with the rest of the organization.

The process of becoming a digital organization is a marathon, not a sprint, and hence enterprise should follow the negative-split strategy i.e., the crawl-walk-runapproach. Be Flexible; if the enterprise is not flexible and does not adapt quickly to external forces and the feedback received, it’s going to crack with the first turbulence that hits it.