Unorthodox hires and how they may impact recruitment strategy

How is recruitment shaped by the emerging social trends and how does it marry into trends reshaping the HR practice? Recruitment is the first point of contact for organizations and people. Your recruitment strategy shapes how, when, and why of getting the right people doing the right jobs. This article is not a rehashing or resourcing strategy, it will look at the major trends that have driven organizational practices and introduce an element of how to different recruitment patterns will have an impact on the changing nature of how people get into the workplace.

First, what is the unorthodox hire? When we draw up manpower plans, we conventionally look at the skill and talent pool in our different industries and match that up to our organizational strategy. For instance, as

a manufacturing firm, you will evaluate your full-time equivalency to technical, non-technical skills set and do projections of the kind of skills versus the technology coming on stream to support your business strategy for the coming year or three years future forecast.

Conventional hiring dictates you follow the principle of reviewing whether your talent pool will follow a buy or build strategy. Go into the market pay top shilling for experienced hires in your industry or task yourself with growing new talent into a talent pipeline, which then forms your talent management strategy. There has been a drastic shift in recruitment strategies to include contractual labor, outsourcHow can you cast your net wider to look at recruitment beyond convention to find unique skill sets that also take advantage of social changes brought on by changing socioeconomic trends?

ing for services or skills, Flexi and telecommuting policies, diversity, multi-skilled and multicultural teams.

How can you cast your net wider to look at recruitment beyond convention to find unique skill sets that also take advantage of social changes brought on by changing socio-economic trends?

One trend that may influence unorthodox hiring is the changing nature of the business which means businesses may in times of downturn retrench or have voluntary retirement. This has driven up the number of new ventures that emerge within and across industries. How does this influence your recruitment strategy you ask? One problem that emerges is how to identify opportunities and meeting points of hiring back to the workplace what I would define as long-term unemployed. You have experienced hires who may not be getting the right opportunities due to the bias we have for you have to be somewhere to get back into the workplace. What does a long term unemployed person bring to the table? A lot of insight into what may have led to failure and new thinking, a personal desire to find purpose again in the formal workplace.

For each successful venture, there are tales of unsuccessful ventures and a talent pool and skill set that we sometimes ignore when drawing up recruitment plans. How do you deal with Entrepreneurs who may want to get back into formal settings or want to reengage with your organization? What is the advantage of considering this talent pool? With the pressure for intrapreneurship ( where a business consistently works on services and products as entrepreneurial ventures), you will benefit from hiring from a talent pool which knows the impact and has the skills needed to innovate products, can redesign your products and services, bring product/ service to market with an entrepreneurial flair. This unique talent pool has the expertise of challenges of project planning, how to cost and self-manage, and how to run end to end with a business mindset and you benefit from their foray into a business of their own.

Another factor that may drive an unorthodox hire is the straitjacket. We often find ourselves while drawing up skills and talent fit is the need to hire a 100 percent perfect fit. This is driven by the expansion of marketable skills

in the workplace. For instance, the emerging need for data scientists is driven by a need for data-driven solutions. In this scenario, would you rather wait to get a perfect data scientist or hire and develop a math and statistics major who can do business modeling and upskill for data science?

We find that often that we have underemployed talent that has a diverse skill set – looking at other aspects of individuals who sit across us from interview desks may lead to diverse talent skills e.g. a French-speaking literature graduate may be what you need for your marketing department to lead your entry into Francophone markets, rather than trying to hire a marketing major who speaks basic French. You can take a long term view and bridge for marketing with in-house and formal training for the basics of work with a strong marketing team.

How are we taking advantage of the demographic dividend in unorthodox hiring? In the book Youth and Unemployment in Kenya, an underlying theme that comes out is the consistent undercurrent that training institutions are not matching industry standards. However you find that anecdotally a lot of companies may not be investing in bridging the gap between what students learn which is the theory of practice yet we discarded apprentice and training programs as too expensive, we want a ready person who can plug and play. As HR practitioners are we ready to play the long game of developing and coaching new talent as a recruitment strategy? When is the last time you were able to follow through from conception to tracking graduate management training and robust internship program?

The last unorthodox hire we look at is the rising trend of the freelancer and attendant gig economy. Do you have a way of tapping into part-time gig workers who may join your organization on a full-time basis especially for some skills sets that you may want to retain and also some who may want a more intrinsic motivation of belonging? In conclusion, are we, as HR practitioners ready to think differently about unorthodox hiring and how they impact our recruitment strategies given the rapid changes happening within our economy?

By: A.W. Kibanya Email: awkibanya@gmail.com