There has never been a successful company without a team of people working together to turn a certain vision into reality. A teamwork environment promotes an atmosphere that fosters collaboration and loyalty and helps people grow together. But in order to establish such surroundings, you have to bring talented people on board and grow your team as your company starts chasing even bigger goals. While this sounds like an easy job, it is one of the biggest challenges that businesses around the world will be facing this year.
I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies. – Lawrence Bossidy, GE
Yes, effectively hiring and developing people is a job that defines the core of any successful business. If you fail to create a balanced group of winners, your venture will most likely fail in the near future or get “removed” from the market by larger competitors. Hiring good employees is important no matter what kind of work you’re in. Furthermore, as you grow and customers become more demanding, your human resources need to expand to handle all the inquiries and challenges.
But recruitment is a challenging endeavor
Let us make this simple to understand; there is no way to grow without recruiting new talent. This process includes searching for the right candidates, interviewing them and later bringing selected individuals on board. But recruiting the right people for your team is a difficult job for many reasons. To give you just a few examples:
- There is a lack of qualified candidates on the market, especially developers. Looking at the US alone, an estimated 1 million computer programming-related jobs in the US are expected to be unfilled. Many tech companies are now turning to non-traditional applicants and internal education to fill these gaps.
- You have to focus on expanding your reach in order to target the right candidates, which is expensive and time-consuming. People are now using different social and professional platforms hence you need to build a presence on all of them.
- Attracting the right job candidates is very difficult since most experienced individuals are already employed or switching to remote freelancing. Soon, 40% of the workforce will be comprised of millennials and guess what? 47% of freelancers are millennials (Website Planet).
- You have to start building talent pools proactively, otherwise, you need to work with HR entities that are expensive and will not focus solely on your company’s needs.
If you think you can solve your problems by working with a good recruitment agency, you are wrong. You will most likely waste different financial and time resources just to get a list of average candidates. Yes, a recruitment agency has access to a talent pool, but they do not understand your culture or your vision. All they understand is your necessity for candidates – the same necessity that most of their clients have. You may try to do it alone, but there is a good chance that your business, like many other businesses out there, does not have an efficient talent sourcing strategy in place. Without it, your HR professionals will spend countless hours and invest a lot of effort trying to scout the right professionals just to achieve poor results.
Good recruitment can either make or break your business. Being effective as a recruiter can streamline your procedures and make your search for viable candidates more efficient. In order to achieve this goal, you need to define and implement an effective employer branding and hiring plan, promote your values and tell a compelling story about your company, its culture and other team members. This will get candidates excited about your brand and allow you to avoid certain stressful steps of traditional recruitment. Yes, it is not easy to tell a story, but if you stay silent and let your competitors speak, you will fail to grow your team and your reputation will be damaged.
Shortage of talented team members
The shortage of talent is becoming a significant problem across the globe, especially when it comes to developers. Furthermore, as newer generations keep changing their professional preferences and aspirations, demand for senior employees will grow while most of them will be getting ready to retire. According to Haploos, demand for employees aged 35-45 will increase by 25% but the supply will only increase by 15%. This is already a problem but talent shortage roots are much deeper than this. Let’s look at a few trending facts:
- not enough people are getting the right education and training,
- millennials are massively starting to freelance and explore remote working models,
- senior professionals are using their experience to launch their own businesses,
- talented developers are looking for major working opportunities at popular corporate brands,
- companies like Twitter are recruiting students through internships and removing them from the employment market, etc.
And the list goes on. In a nutshell, we can say that it has never been more difficult to fill your vacancies. On top of it, recruiting people is not something you do once, it is an ongoing process. To offer you a different perspective on that statement, while growth demands people, 46% of new employees will fail within the first 18 months of employment.
While we can come up with different theories, the truth is that entrepreneurs often end up hiring the wrong candidates. Quite frequently they also think they need to hire a professional in a specific field and waste their resources on expanding their search for a certain role. Sure, sometimes you need a specialist, but this is very rare. What you need are talent and potential. In order to be effective as a recruiter, you should focus on finding intelligent candidates with the ability to acquire new skills and grow professionally. In the evolving markets, people that are just great at specific things will turn out to be a bad investment in the long run. Eric Schmidt explained this very well in How Good Works stating that, “favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech.
The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it’s a given the role for which you’re hiring is going to change. Yesterday’s widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn’t have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.”If you want to achieve great things with your company, you need great people on board.
Competing with inspiring brands
Growing your business is not just dependent on recruitment, it is also dependent on the image of your company and the vision that you are trying to sell to your potential team members. People use to look for best career opportunities and a rich paycheck but millennials and all the other urban generations are looking for a purpose, for a company that inspires them and enables them to be part of some change in this world.
“The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.” – Kobe Bryant
Companies can stand out and inspire others in different ways – from working on revolutionary products to employment diversity and corporate social responsibility. What makes this challenging for companies is the importance of such values in the decade ahead of us. All these principles and approaches were always valuable but they are becoming fundamental necessities as the market moves forward. If a business can become recognized for specific values, some people will voluntarily quit their existing job and pursue employment opportunities at that company. Some people will even start studying at a specific academic institution with a goal of one day working for a brand that motivates them to become better. All this creates a big ecosystem of expectations. Customers are taking into consideration many brand values when making purchasing decisions and employees often look at customer satisfaction as an indicator of quality of a specific business and its products or services.
Education is the key to progress
Being competitive in the market also means being able to always improve your business and help your team members achieve their full potential. Furthermore, employees are looking for much more than a salary today. They are looking for great company culture and the ability to work with other talented individuals in a thriving environment. Companies often lose top talent due to a lack of educational offerings. Education is important for two key reasons:
1) It helps you improve your team and make your employees happier, which means you may experience less turnover and even see higher profits.
2) It creates an educational offering that will attract new talent to your company. Everyone is looking for improvement and growth opportunities.
If you want to attract and retain the most promising talent, you’re likely already aware that offering benefits as part of a compensation package is a necessity. What is more, you can also always hire young and promising candidates, invest in their education, let them grow within your company and end up with a roaster full of superstars that understand your dream and want to help you turn your ideas into reality.
Hiring on-demand
Maybe you are a business interested in growing your existing team with developers and avoiding problems related to hiring. While this was a problem a few years ago and a huge challenge for companies that usually ended up hiring wrong candidates, today the solution exists and it is called outstaffing. Unlike outsourcing and other hiring methods where you pay third party solution providers to develop your product without any control over the costs or the team working on your vision, outstaffing is different. It allows you to find experienced developers in developed markets who will join your existing roaster and work directly with you under your management. You will save time and money, accelerate your business growth, and create a thriving culture within your company.
If you are interested in growing your team with outstaffing and bringing talented individuals on board that can help you achieve your goals in 2020, make sure to send us a message and we will schedule a free call to learn more about your needs and help you find the right partners for your business. Send us a message: info@shoreteams.com
People are driven by purpose and desire to influence others and make impactful changes. In order to achieve great things in life, whether it is business or your personal ventures, we always need the support of great people to cross many barriers on our journey. Building a strong team is fundamental for our success and the impact that we are trying to make in this world. As Mother Teresa once stated, “none of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful.” Everything is possible as long as we believe in our vision and manage to inspire others to join us, grow with us and tackle big challenges.
