WINTER IS COMING: Are You Prepared for a Recruiting Transformation in 2019?

Pick any high-performing brand in your industry and it’s likely midway through a digital transformation initiative. If your company is also on that improvement path, you’re probably hearing buzzwords like “automate,” “streamline,” or “digitize.” These words essentially describe different ways to support one major goal: improvement — particularly, business process and bottom-line improvement.

Data suggest that such a transformation is a winning strategy. The proof? 94% of decision makers recently said they believed their departments’ digital transformation initiatives would provide significant returns on investment. Though most companies are in the early digital transformation adoption stages, such positive sentiment shows promise. However, can it be realized?  Research reveals 70% of these initiatives will not reach their stated goals which translates into $900 billion worth of spend yielding sub-par results. The gross mismanagement is due, in large part, to ineffective utilization of talent, techniques or technology.

In fact, new research on how company decision makers view their enterprise digital transformation progress, successes, and adoption challenges identified these top three barriers:

  • TALENT: ineffective in-house talent
  • TECHNIQUE: ineffective top-down communication
  • TECHNOLOGY: ineffective infrastructure

This post will focus solely on what is arguably the primary determinant of business and project success: hiring the right talent.

Digital Transformation Setbacks

It’s no surprise that unqualified in-house talent is derailing many digital transformation initiatives. In the meantime, across the board, companies are executing their digital transformation roadmaps while relying on outdated methods, with inadequate talent. Accordingly, it’s not just hiring managers who need to improve their recruiting processes — human resource departments themselves need a revamp.

If your corporate hiring process were a “Game of Thrones” episode, we’d see line of business managers warning their brands that “Winter is Coming.” Yes, as most companies scramble to overcome their digital skills gaps, 2019 is when things will get much worse for those companies relying on traditional recruiting strategies. They will start failing completely, as the non-traditional adopters position themselves for unprecedented successes.

The demand for more and more specialized creative and technical skills is causing a talent pinch for many businesses. Even if these companies realize the problem, they’re typically not trying to solve it. They keep trusting the in-house staff to attract, pre-screen, interview, negotiate with, and hire candidates. This methodology works best when there is a full labor pool to draw from. However, when there’s severe talent scarcity, it’s going to fail.

Recruiting Transformation Now

Successful digital transformations yield significant ROI. So, eliminating key barriers to these transformations must become a top business objective. It’s proven that a company’s recruiting process can be a major barrier to digital breakthroughs. So, to compete with your industry’s top brands, you must make talent acquisition a priority for your brand and department.

The first step to hiring the right talent is to assess your existing recruiting processes. This is exactly where Syntagma provides value. We ask clients the sorts of questions that force them to acknowledge and attack process snarls and kinks. Contact us for a sample of questions that help our clients better gauge their processes.

Our next post will include our 60-second recruiting process assessment tool. Along with a sampling of our typical questions, this video will prepare you for recruiting process improvement by 2019.

Next Steps