Part 1 of an ongoing series inspired by What’s Next for You: The Eightfold Path to Transforming the Way We Hire and Manage Talent
Maybe we need a #hashtag movement for employees and job candidates. Not because of sexism, ageism, or racism, as serious as those issues are, but because businesses need the same sort of wake-up call for how poorly they treat both candidates and employees. Poor treatment happens even at progressive companies, whether intentionally or not.
As discussed in the foreword for What’s Next for You, the current system is broken. It treats both candidates and employees unfairly – along with recruiters, hiring managers, and HR staff. This system also costs both individual businesses and the overall economy incredibly large amounts of money each year.
How significant are these losses? According to Gartner, the talent crisis is the #1 risk for businesses. That’s ahead of climate change, political risk, and financial instability, to name a few risks that one might expect to top the list.
At an exceptionally high 4.7%, the unfilled job rate corresponds to $272.6 billion in lost opportunity from open jobs posted on Glassdoor alone in 2017. Tech sector losses run to $20.1 billion.
Far too few organizations recognize the need or the urgency to address this challenge. And yet, there’s dramatic amounts of money to be made and saved. All that it takes is a smarter approach to finding and nurturing talent.
As the introduction to What’s Next for You makes clear, talent professionals understand this situation all too well because the imbalances in most organizations’ hiring practices directly affect their ability to do their jobs. No one wants to be cold and abrupt with candidates or ignore existing employees with potential to grow. However, current talent management practices lead directly to significant pitfalls that cost businesses billions of dollars each year:
- Resumes are too easy to game for online job postings, and online job descriptions rarely match the actual needs of the position – leading to underperforming, unhappy employees and frustrated recruiters and hiring managers
- Hiring practices trap people by asking them to repeat the same jobs for different employers, rather than spotting candidates with the potential to grow – which in turn results in job-hopping and poor talent retention
- Biased hiring continues to exclude talent for non-productive reasons – even for well-intentioned organizations since almost every individual has at least some internal bias of which they are unaware.
One of the reasons we wrote this book is to help organizations understand that “business as usual” isn’t good enough anymore. These hard-dollar losses are real, even if companies don’t track them with the same zeal that they review sales projections or inventory levels.
Even more importantly, an AI-based talent intelligence fix delivers almost immediate benefits – a stronger, happier workforce; increased diversity and inclusion; lower hiring and retention costs; and less leakage of intellectual capital. A relatively small expenditure delivers a rapid and ongoing return on investment.
Of course, corporate leaders need to understand this situation before they’ll take steps to correct it. That’s what our book presents – the business case for change, how this unexpected crisis crept up on management, and how a talent intelligence approach helps deliver the solution.
What’s Next for You: The Eightfold Path to Transforming the Way We Hire and Manage Talent, by Eightfold’s Ashutosh Garg and Kamal Ahluwalia, is on sale now at Amazon and Barnes and Noble