With the rise of the “gig economy” comes the realization that the world of talent as we know it is changing. Gone are the days when a company “owned” all of its employees. Now, most companies are lucky if just a small fraction of their workers are solely dedicated to them. With more and more talent taking to gig work to sustain a living, many companies are left trying to figure out how to sustain their talent pool.
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According to the Mercer report Delivering the Workforce for the Future: Open-Source Talent, “building a sustainable talent pipeline is more critical than ever in a rapidly changing world.” In order to face this new world of work head on, recruiters and hiring managers will also have to change the way they find top talent in order to meet these demands.
Adopting a Fluid Mind-Set
According to Mercer, “the war for talent assumes each company has exclusive ownership of top talent,” but we know that from the rise of the gig economy, not all workers are dedicated to just one employer. Mercer suggests that employers and hiring managers adopt a more “fluid” approach due to the changing demographics that make top talent increasingly scarce.
Adopting a fluid mind-set will help change employers’ and hiring managers’ perceptions about the need to “own” talent. And because of this, Mercer suggests that the focus of the recruiting function will also evolve from “acquisition” to “curation.”
When employers and hiring managers can face the fact that their workforce doesn’t work just solely for them, they’ll be able to attract more candidates. With a fluid mind-set comes a fluid pipeline: a talent pool made up of individuals who are open to working for your company and others.
Open-Source Talent
This fluid pipeline of the future will be built by organizations that embrace the principles of open-source talent: collaboration, sharing, and community-building. By adopting these principles, you’ll be able to:
- Build a more successful, broader, higher-quality talent pipeline—collaborating across employers in the recruiting process.
- Expand your existing talent base and leverage your own talent ecosystem by sharing employees more effectively within and across companies.
- Increase the effectiveness of your future talent base by becoming part of the communities where these employees exchange ideas, learn, and develop critical skills.
In part two of this article, we’ll discuss the four key areas that will attract digital talent, as uncovered by the Mercer report Delivering the Workforce for the Future: Open-Source Talent.
 Melissa Blazejak is an Editor for Recruiting Daily Advisor and L&D Daily Advisor. She has written articles for HR.BLR.com and HR Daily Advisor and has been at BLR since 2014. She graduated with a BA of Science, specializing in Communication, from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2008. Most recently, she graduated in 2014 with a MS of Educational Technology. Llamas are her spirit animal. |