What’s a sustainable business process in the aftermath of the pandemic? By now, you must be sick of articles beginning with ‘ever since the pandemic’. But it’s changed so much and it’s put so much into perspective that we’re way past ignoring the consequences. So here goes:
Even before it, professionals in the workforce started voicing concerns about the overall organizational health of the companies they worked for.
The Context
What the pandemic did was slow things down just enough so that these professionals could process and gather a critical understanding of the way their lives looked like. Unshockingly, they weren’t happy with the results of this mass introspection.
So much so that entire phenomena became viral, from quiet quitting to passion economy, to other creative ways of fundamentally understanding that our professional journeys are not a given, but a choice.
We’re going over these changes here, in plenty of detail.
The Outcome
This lifelong desire of the white collar worker to not be bound to a desk until retirement has completely reversed the dynamics of power between talent and recruiters.
What used to be a pretty straightforward and transactional relationship of essentially pairing skilled individuals with a job description that capitalizes on them for lucrative purposes is now an entirely different matter.
In this post materialistic world, where people generally prefer prioritizing their quality of life, their experiences and connections, and living more authentically in general, HR processes ought to be addressed.
Long story short, Millennials don’t love corporations, and GenZ are entirely uninterested in hustle culture.
The Road Ahead
Continuing with the existing HR paradigm would be like putting a bandaid over a massive internal hemorrhage – you’ll notice it’s ruinous way too late.
Now, while we’re not in the business of predicting the future, one certainty we operate on is that the existing issues will only continue to aggravate with time – the upcoming generations, the ones who are still in school, will be even more demanding and short tempered towards the existing modus operandi.
If nothing changes, this climate of unstable and shifting dynamics is bound to deepen the existing gap between what talent wants and what companies put on the table.
But we’re not past the point of no return. Essentially, many of the young professionals today have their passions and interests, and are willing to be part of teams where they can grow, specialize, respecialize or just practice what they love.
So it’s not a lack of willingness to work in absolute terms, but rather a mass disengagement towards how things are done in the corporate landscape today.
And while corporate processes are not known for their flexibility, this might just need to be addressed if we want to *still* have a workforce in 10 years from now.
People Centricity & Technology Go Hand In Hand
Now, there are generally 6 possible ways any company can deal with the upcoming changes of the workforce and talent challenges.
Out of these, the last one is our patented intersection of people centricity and digital tools to amplify genuine connectivity.
We also address this graph in detail here, should you want to explore the other options.
One of our main underlying premises is that this upcoming generation of talent is not professionally agnostic, it’s just trying to make the workplace a meaningful experience.
But in order to have this as part of a sustainable business process, companies should start with a good look at their own processes. The time of cold calling and cold emailing impersonal CV owners is long gone.
What companies should focus on is creating a meaningful experience for their collaborators throughout the entire talent lifecycle.
No more pre-screening thousands of CVs like crazy, no more impersonal LinkedIn job posts with the same job description as three other competitors in the industry, and no more superficial engagement.
The people have decided they want to be taken seriously in a mindful and genuine way. That they want to have the flexibility of internal mobility and dynamic career paths, that they want to be acknowledged for all of the qualities that a CV would never see.
Curious to see how you can make your company more future-ready by turning recruitment into a sustainable business process? We’re always here to talk.
