Executive search challenges for C-suite in the new normal
What’s keeping the C-suite awake at night?
When the COVID-19 (C-19) pandemic hit, we saw businesses scramble to move online overnight. As the demand for SaaS, Cyber and FinTech skyrocketed, these industries had no choice but to scale rapidly. As many businesses and employees adopted new technologies and adapted to new ways of working this dramatically altered the workplace as we know/knew it, creating different employee expectations for the new normal. Let Innovex walk you through the challenges C-suite executives are discussing or should be, in the virtual boardrooms to excel in a post-pandemic world as they face these new expectations.
Pandemic accelerated nascent trends to embrace digitisation
Pre-pandemic, eyebrows were already raised over the ‘skills gap’ in the increasingly digital world. COVID-19 has amplified this area of focus through the acceleration and further adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), big data, and cloud technology in order to ensure success in this climate. Digitisation is now more deeply ingrained into our workplace ecosystems, amplifying the pre-pandemic skills gap even more.
The advent of new technologies requires new/additional skills and therefore higher people costs. What was once a concern to consider pre-pandemic is now an imperative consideration leaving the C-suite two options, the first to explore the idea of recruiting from other sectors, especially those further along the road of innovation, or by using gig economy workers. The second option is to invest time and money in retraining and upskilling their current workforce.
Pandemic value reset: What are employees looking for?
As alluded to in the introduction, whilst companies and employees have navigated through the disruption of the pandemic our professional and personal lives have never been so intertwined, even our technology adoption and corporate culture became part of the home.
This unprecedented situation has perhaps unsurprisingly caused an evaluation of both the companies and employee value systems. As we emerge from the pandemic, still in the absence of data, certainty and precedence, companies and employees will seek out leaders that are bastions of company values, character and culture.
Return in the new normal: Why is talent acquisition the key to competitive advantage?
Now more than ever, C-suite executives are tasked with the daunting task of reimagining customer experiences and enhancing operational efficiency, across every part of their organisations, by leveraging data and AI to streamline business processes, including recruitment. However, it is much more involved than just the implementation of processes and tech platforms.
C-suite executives must also motivate behavioural change and foster a workforce that can embrace the potential of emerging technologies and platforms to bolster their organisation against the evolving external threats specific to its industry and create competitive advantage. Recruitment, talent acquisition and retention is central to this.
So what is the impact on C-suite? Do they need to evaluate their culture in light of new tech and upskilling? Do they need to look at work life balance more if employee values have changed? Is it how they reward their workforce?
HR leaders are flying ‘data’ blind
To entice the right talent, an essential step for HR leaders to take is to ensure they have a proper snapshot of salary benchmarking around the role and industry before the trigger is pulled for any retained search.
The importance of market intelligence was highlighted by Gartner in its recent strategic workforce planning report, “Winning the war for talent requires more strategy than ever, yet many HR leaders are still flying “data” blind. To win the war for talent, HR leaders must approach strategic workforce planning using analytics to make better decisions”.
At Innovex Global we often help businesses with salary benchmarking to set realistic requirements to entice the right people. Some clients have not reviewed this for over five years, simply using the salary of a person they are replacing or aligning it with an employee that has been in the business for ten years. HR leaders need to be reassessing their external executive search providers and their data on a yearly basis to verify they have the most up to date snapshots of market requirements to attract the right talent.
Recruitment strategies for the new normal
As executive search professionals sourcing talent across Cyber, SaaS and FinTech industries we have gained a huge amount of insight whilst helping clients navigate through to the new normal. Businesses that decided to continue to move forward with a flexible, innovative approach to scaling are the ones now seeing competitive advantage and will continue to thrive, because they challenged themselves to be different.
Three main trends in executive search in 2021
- Due to technology and innovation many roles are constantly evolving and have an increasingly short shelf life. This highlights a need to expand beyond existing sector-based talent pools, perhaps recruiting from industries that are more advanced in terms of technological innovation.
- Now we are seeing more companies offering a ‘work from anywhere’ (WFA) policy. This makes it possible to double that talent pool, bringing in the best talent, not just the best talent in the area.
- Additionally, C-suite executives need to consider the ‘employee value proposition’. Prospective employees are looking deeper into organisational ethics and their responses to the pandemic, how they have created social impact in the current normal, looking at how they helped their employees find comfortable work life balance, moving beyond ping pong, yoga and that free catered lunch. These trends are set to continue.
Is your company looking to gain competitive advantage through talent acquisition? At Innovex, we’re doing search differently by delivering faster, smarter results for a better price using the latest recruitment AI technology. Get in touch.
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