The Talent Dilemma - Jay Millen
As you might imagine in my work across a wide spectrum of industries, leadership teams, and organizational scale I often get asked “what are you seeing and hearing about talent that we should be aware of ?”
Ten years ago those question centered on topics such as emerging leadership development, the need for industry specific knowledge, and executive leadership gaps in the market. While all of these remain important an almost universal concern for senior executive teams I work with is the availability of the operating workforce and incoming technical talent to actually execute on the businesses key value propositions and daily tasks. From HVAC installation or electrical tradecraft in residential services to equipment operators in advanced manufacturing the skilled trades as we often refer to them are in a demographic cliff fall. Similarly, despite the recent downturn in advanced technology platform based businesses the shortage of skilled workers with coding, development, and IT systems operations and maintenance remains a pronounced issue.
Over a series of the next three discussions, we are going to explore attracting, developing, and retaining the 21st century workforce in a fierce war for talent at all levels.
The first conversation on attracting talent will cover changing your mindset on recruiting and your company position in the market place to “win” the talent intake battle. There are some things you can change and some that are “fixed issues” such as geographic location and essential work of a specific job. That said, we will look at some creative ways to go from being a talent victim to a talent leader.
The second conversation on developing talent will challenge the way you onboard, train, and evaluate new team members and existing team members you are assessing for advanced roles and leadership.
The third conversation will focus on retaining talent. It is far more expensive to replace a seasoned team member and takes longer than ever before. AS of Q4 US labor department reporting even with the cooling off in the tech sector we had 10.5 million job openings with 6.1 million new hires and 5.9 separations for a net add of 200,000 + net new open positions.
When we finish these three discussions my objective is for everyone to be able to take away at least one new idea or tool in each of these three critical areas of the talent cycle. These actionable ideas will hopefully give you better traction in the talent market place, and a longer tenure for your team members once you get them aboard.
I hope you will join me for these conversations over the next few weeks and if you have additional insights or comments you can always reached me via linkedIn.
Tags: Leadership Business Benefit Board of Directors Value Creator
