According to the latest survey from the World Economic Forum, 8 in 10 CEOs of global enterprises share the concern about the availability of candidates with the skills to match their hiring needs. The current response has been a ‘War on Talent.’ This war has led to ever-escalating hiring and recruiting costs, creating, as the authors Seth Harris & Jake Schwartz term it, a tragedy of the commons: employers searching for job-ready talent and willing to offer more and more for it, providing the talent the power to switch jobs at ease for higher sums. There is, however, increasing evidence that a de-escalation of the War is occurring across the world thanks to public and private initiatives. In Singapore, since 2015, the government has provided grants to qualifying firms to help pay for the training of existing employees to expand their skills for the jobs of tomorrow.
Privately, companies like Liberty Mutual, which retrained its mainframe operators to become Javascript developers, are showing that investing in your own employees can make you a talent magnet, in addition to eliminating equity gaps by opening your talent pool to previously underrepresented groups. The questions for TA leaders that this article asks are: how do you strike the correct balance between your hiring budget and your spending per employee? Which layer of investment will yield the greatest returns for your company’s business success in the near and long term?
Check out the full article here: Why Competing For New Talent Is a Mistake
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