Talent acquisition for the future
IGOT recruited for my first formal job before I enrolled in college as a working student. In the 1960s, recruitment was simply a matter of “putting round pegs in round holes, and square pegs in square holes.” (To this day, I will never know if I was a round or square peg.) Almost 60 years later, psychometricians now use AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) algorithms to analyze test results and identify patterns that can predict job performance. These HR algorithms also help eliminate bias in the assessment process and promote diversity and inclusion.
The future workforce
Forward-looking CEOs and CHROs today are passionate about building the workforce of the future or futureproofing their current workforce.
The results of surveys from notable global institutions, particularly McKinsey Global Institute and Forbes Advisor, help us understand why many business organizations have intensified the competition for top talent. It was in the 1990s when businesses declared a “war for talent” that will likely continue into the future.
Now and in the future, economic development in a country will depend largely on the competitiveness of its talent. Switzerland and Singapore have practically no natural resources and have had to develop their human resources to be globally competitive. Unfortunately, in late 2023, the Philippines (rich in natural resources) ranked 84th out of 134 economies in the Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI). This index was developed by the reputable business school Insead or Institut Européen d’Administration des Affaires in collaboration with the Descartes Institute for the Future and the Human Capital Leadership Institute.
Education and training help create a globally competitive workforce. Survey respondents agree that “individuals with a college degree are more likely to be hired or contracted, more likely to receive retraining, and less likely to be displaced.”
Business organizations in several countries are using every possible connection with industry associations and academe, pay higher wages than competitors, often resort to “poaching” talent from other companies, and “broaden[ing] their talent sources to attract the talent they need.” The idea is to have the talent needed at all levels of the organization at the right time. But business organizations can only do so much in their effort to develop the future workforce.
All-of-society approach
In the Philippines, the ambitious task of creating a globally competitive Filipino workforce must use an all-of-society approach:
– Government must lead in “active” policy and strategy implementation.
Government has the primary responsibility of creating an environment where investments, domestic or foreign, could flourish and create more decent, highquality, remunerative jobs. McKinsey noted that other countries have shifted their policy from “passive” (unemployment compensation) to “active” (employment agencies such as job centers, recruitment centers, training and retraining centers). To ensure security of employment, the workers must be trained on the skills of the future; retirement funds and other benefits should be made portable to encourage workers’ mobility.
– Industry associations and organized labor must work together. First, both parties must disabuse their minds of the concept that their goals are diametrically opposed. If they are genuinely concerned about the rights, benefits and welfare of the workers, industry and organized labor must have a new modus vivendi. They must work together to address skills shortages and mismatches, retraining, reskilling and upskilling issues to avert the ill effects of automation and artificial intelligence in the workplace. Labor and industry associations should share the responsibility of helping workers displaced by automation through financial assistance, retraining and transition services.
– Government, industry and academia must collaborate beyond lip service. There must be real partnerships between the industry and the academe so that graduates can hit the ground running on Day One after recruitment. Except in rare cases today, the enterprises that need the skills of the academe’s graduates have practically no role in crafting the public/private education and training curricula. Pardon me if I am missing something, but in both chambers of Congress today, there are pending bills about enterprise-based education and training for prospective (not incumbent) workers, where the regulatory body, the industry associations, and the labor unions have roles, but the enterprise has no role at all. The bills will not encourage but add more regulatory pressures on the training and development of future talent.
Coping strategies
The survey respondents shared some of their organizations’ coping strategies:
– Retraining. Companies will tend to hire young applicants with basic general knowledge and good attitude (i.e., organizational citizenship behavior) and train them on skills strategic to the company (i.e., IT, AI, and programming skills, advanced literacy and numeracy, problem-solving, and decision-making). As new employees are being on-boarded and retrained, they are exposed to in-house knowledge, experience, and culture.
– Hiring skilled talent. This could be more expedient but possibly expensive. It is also possible that there is insufficient talent in the market, such as AI-educated or AI-trained experts. Although frowned upon as a practice, some companies tend to poach from competition. Offering a competitive package, a good culture and a great work environment can complement an attractive employee value proposition (EVP) that offers a unique employee experience (EX) in attracting skilled talent.
–Redeployment. Having a reliable skills inventory can help identify employees with specific skills or trainable ones. Internal hiring can work best by “unbundling” current tasks, “rebundling” them, and shifting some workers to jobs of higher importance. Moving people around after two or three years tends to improve career mobility in the organization and offer workers new jobs for rounding off or to gain broader perspectives.
– Contracting. In the Philippines, but even more so in other parts of the world, companies can use contractors, freelancers, temporary workers, project workers or gig workers. This is best done for non-core functions or functions that experts from outside the company can do better, especially when the company does not have such competencies in-house. Often, contractors’ workers who adopt the company’s culture and have shown both competence and the right attitude eventually get hired to fill regular jobs.
A reliable government labor market information (LMI) system, with data on the 50 million Filipino workers, could help the private sector in its talent strategies.
Automation is here. There’s no point wishing it weren’t. Not even the experts can tell the extent of the disruption that AI and ML can cause in the future of work. You cannot succeed in business or your career if the work environment is AI-driven and you don’t know what AI is and how to use it.
Oren Etzioni, American professor emeritus of computer science and founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said, “AI is a tool. The choice about how it gets deployed is ours.”
If AI is the future of work, future talent acquisition and development should be about AI.
Ernie Cecilia is the chairman of the Human Capital Committee and the Publication Committee of the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (AmCham); chairman of the Employers Confederation of the Philippines’ (ECOP’s) TWG on Labor and Social Policy Issues; and past president of the People Management Association of the Philippines (PMAP). He can be reached at erniececilia@gmail.com.