Reimagining recruitment and talent mobility to prepare for the future of skills

In this interview, UNLEASH sat down with Emily He, Oracle’s senior vice president of the human capital management cloud business group, to discuss how the multinational organization is reimagining talent mobility and recruitment in order to drive and sustain business resilience.

• 70% of employers reported that they are having trouble filling roles because of the skills gaps in the labor force.
• A year of lockdowns and staying at home is causing employees to seek new opportunities.
• The remote world isn’t going anywhere so virtual hiring and on-boarding strategies must keep up.

While many countries and companies are edging towards some kind of normality, we still live and work in very unusual and uncertain times.

It’s still unclear when people will return to the office, when industries will recover — and if they are going to recover. It is therefore crucial that hiring managers and recruitment teams remain nimble and ready to adjust hiring strategies at speed and scale.

Agility needs to be at the very heart of every organization’s talent strategy. While this is no easy task, developments in talent mobility and recruitment tech are paving the way forward and offering a solution to succeed in today’s unpredictable environment.

Here are some of the themes that emerged from our interview:

Talent mobility could be your biggest retention tool

After over a year of lockdowns and staying at home, people around the world are feeling an increased need to learn and grow.

This, combined with higher levels of job anxiety, means turnover rates are increasing as people take the leap out of companies in search of new opportunities.

Unless organizations step up their talent mobility options, they run a serious risk of losing talent as they seek fulfillment elsewhere.

To address this challenge, Oracle introduced a new product called ‘Opportunity Marketplace,’ which is an internal gigs marketplace for employees to find internal job postings as well as volunteer opportunities and other new projects they can get involved with.

“Giving them [employees] the opportunity to participate in other projects from other departments is a great way to facilitate that sense of learning and internal mobility,” Emily tells UNLEASH.

Remote recruitment isn’t going away

The past 12 months have witnessed the greatest large-scale remote recruitment experiment in history, with almost all companies worldwide being forced to engage in some kind of virtual recruitment.

However, despite the urgent need for digital, hiring processes haven’t necessarily adapted and companies and candidates are beginning to feel the strain.

How do you source candidates? How do you manage the hiring process? How do you onboard new employees virtually and make that an engaging experience where they feel the employer brand from day one? These are just a few of the questions Oracle’s hearing from its customers.

In response to these questions, Oracle has developed a fully virtual candidate experience, which includes everything from having a digital assistant to guide candidates through the recruiting process all the way to the onboarding experience.

“Virtual is not going to go away, even after the pandemic and it really needs to be integrated as part of the hiring and onboarding process,” says Emily.

Skills are the future

Post-pandemic we will see a shift from employers recruiting based on degrees, education, and experience to a focus on skills. “Organizations are at the beginning of understanding how you create a taxonomy around skills and how you understand people’s skills and make them transferrable across industries,” He tells UNLEASH.

It is imperative that recruitment and HR teams get a grasp on technology and so they can put together a library of skills and gain a deep understanding of what they are recruiting for, whilst also helping existing employees identify the skills they need to cultivate to help them upskill.

“Only if you focus on skills can you recruit the right candidates and retain and up-skill existing talent,” Emily says.

For more on talent mobility, recruitment and the future of skills, watch our on-demand webinar, Talent Mobility and Recruiting in the Era of Change.

Check out another conversation with Emily and Yessi on ‘Diversity and Inclusion: Creating a Sense of Belonging and Purpose’.