Among the great risks that the future holds for the company is the lack of trained professionals. Many jobs are rapidly becoming obsolete and the labour needs of the coming years must be anticipated. But what professionals will be needed in the future? When do you start investing in a discipline that can grow the company but is just beginning?

Although the future is full of questions, today’s trends already point the way. Incorporating new technical and emotional skills, adapting to liquid environments and engaging restless professionals are some examples. In the years to come, we must prepare ourselves. Are you ready?

10 steps to attract talent

If you find it hard to attract talent, review your strategy, and find out what it is you can improve. Next, we review 10 steps that any talent recruitment strategy should include:

• The first is a major challenge for the Human Resources departments: Self-analysis. Think for a moment: Is the company attractive to well-trained workers? What strategy does it use to attract them? What specific professionals do you need? Are there job specializations for this? What should the company improve to attract talent?
• Be visible in the same media in which talent is found. The company must be proactive in the channels in which move the professionals it is looking for, be they social networks, university channels, thematic portals, events…
• To be a coherent company. And what does that mean? To have well-defined values.
• To offer an intelligent selection process that values the people who present themselves and takes into account, in addition to their own needs. Candidates should feel heard and valued and be clear about what they will receive from the company.
• Make sure to offer a participatory, creative, and challenging work environment, with competitive emotional salaries.
• Treat the staff with flexibility. Do you make it easier for people on your team to change jobs? Any professional can develop another specialty in-house or change departments. Very often great talents are hidden that can contribute a lot to the company.
• Hire different profiles in gender, age, nationality, interests, ways of seeing the world… Among them there will always be one who is capable of seeing changes coming or of otherwise facing classical problems. It also creates a vibrant work environment. Don’t you find it interesting to generate good debates on company issues?
• To have predictive models that indicate those profiles that the company will need and which will develop in the future. Besides, these types of models also allow us to anticipate the flight of talents. They analyze the life cycle of employees, their demands, and the reasons for leaving. It is an excellent way to orient the company towards its continuous improvement to attract and maintain talent.
• Make change a constant in the company. How to do it? It is more necessary than ever to be informed of the transformations of the world in various fields: scientific, technological, business, and social; to talk to diverse people, to attend events of all kinds, and to be connected.
• And finally, something as obvious as working in the company being entertaining and exciting. Workers have to feel as much in love with the brand as customers. What strategies do you carry out to make them feel that, with their work, they contribute to making the brand bigger, stronger, and more attractive to the world?

Are you prepared to face the changes of a talent recruitment strategy and attract new professionals? These 10 steps are just the beginning.

People first | A project by Eurofirms

People First es un espacio de inspiración donde compartimos contenidos con un eje común: las personas. Desde distintas ópticas y sectores, abordamos varios temas, tendencias y noticias de interés humano.

La entrada 10 steps to attracting the talent of the future aparece primero en People first.

The corporate digitalization process needs global and scarce talent, for which it is competing. Companies must focus on attracting talent and be inspired by success stories such as Switzerland, winner of the Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2019.
All countries in the GTCI ‘top 10’ invest in creating and supporting bussines talent. How do they do it? With a globalized economy and a strong commitment to education and innovation.

Switzerland offers good job positions, continuous learning, and professional development, as does the Netherlands, with substantial investments in education. The United Kingdom continues to be a higher focus on attracting international talent. The index also highlights that “small, high-income economies, and also the United States, continues to attracting talent” and that “the talent gap is increasing between dissimilar economies”.

Switzerland, developed and stable

This country stands out specially in this Index, for its ability to maintain local talent, thanks to its stability and its excellent business and Labor Park. The country and its companies encourage talent, offer it with good conditions, open to diversity, and to attracting highly qualified labor and international talent. It enjoys a strong economy, a leading service sector, technology industry, and financial services. Big companies, as reported by Switzerland Global Enterprise such as Google, Roche, Novartis, Nestlé, Disney, or Microsoft, have their international business and investigation centers based here.

Training is another of its strengths, both in prestigious centers and in the official system of internships. It offers an education focused on economic and corporate needs, but also respect for democracy and for maintaining a good life quality for its citizens. The Index has also recognized its enterprising spirit and cultural influence.

Cities that attract talent

The GTCI also recognizes the talent cities, including some in Europe and North America, with Washington, DC, and Zurich heading the list.

The concept of the city is changing, from a commercial and service center to the capital of technological and business innovation, and it is becoming increasingly important in the global economy. The world’s greatest cities are competing with each other for international investment and talent. Several cities in India, Vietnam, and Chinese metropolises are in an excellent future position, as well as London, Paris, Amsterdam, and some in North America.

In the report Decoding Global Talent 2018, Barcelona appears as one of the most attractive cities to work in, along with London, New York, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Young talent values living and working in a secure and well-connected place, where they have a first line job to go to by bike, a good team, and a place to enjoy.

The more talent in a city, the more it attracts and drives the development of innovative businesses, education, technology, and services to match the new demands. Retaining and attracting talent has an impact on the growth and wealth of the city and the country that invests in it. And it can all start with the great work of a company.

People first | A project by Eurofirms

People First es un espacio de inspiración donde compartimos contenidos con un eje común: las personas. Desde distintas ópticas y sectores, abordamos varios temas, tendencias y noticias de interés humano.

La entrada Switzerland, the most talented country aparece primero en People first.

For you, training is key to the development of Employee Branding and that is why you launched the platform www.sinvueltadetuerca.com. What assessment do you make of this initiative that already has 2 years and what acceptance has it had among workers?

Social networks sin vuelta de tuerca is an initiative launched by the Communication, Human Resources and Social Networks areas, and is aimed at developing the social / digital skills of the entire IKEA team. The objective of this platform is to broaden the organization’s digital vision, enhance internal links and strengthen IKEA’s position as an employer brand. The objective of this platform is to broaden the organization’s digital vision, enhance internal links and strengthen IKEA’s position as an employer brand. Sin Vuelta de Tuerca it not only includes a series of recommendations that build a user manual for IKEA employees who want to link to the brand on social networks, but it is also an e-learning platform to contribute to the digital maturity of the workforce. Although we have been working on the project for more than 2 years, it was launched a few months ago, so personally, the assessment I make has a lot to do with my involvement in the project: I think the fact that co-workers have participated In the development of the platform, it ensures that it is designed by and for IKEA employees. Fortunately, almost 90% of the team are proud to be part of this brand, and this feeling of belonging has a lot to do with our willingness to link to IKEA on our social profiles. Many of us demanded from the company a clear framework in which to move on social networks and I think that Sin Vuelta de Tuerca it has turned this demand into an opportunity, contributing to the digital training of workers in the process of IKEA’s digital transformation in Spain.

Do you have KPI’s to measure the results of this initiative? What are the next steps after launching it?

Sin Vuelta de Tuerca it is not intended to be a static project but rather a living one, because one of the great advantages of internal digital tools is that they allow us to measure, continue to improve, and adapt projects to the needs of workers. For this reason, we have used a platform that allows the traceability of all courses to be measured and the user experience to be monitored. There are several KPI’s that we have marked: from the number of registered users or visits to the web, to the number of approved courses and average grades, through to the final satisfaction of the workers according to the number of evaluations or recommendations to other colleagues. Of course, we will also measure whether the platform has generated a greater social presence of IKEA workers on social networks. Our ambition is to get IKEA represented by the people who make it possible every day.

But the truth is that we are still in the launch phase of the platform and it is early to draw conclusions. On the following steps, in addition to continuing to promote the platform in stores, we would like to share this project, as good practice, with organizations that want to take advantage of the opportunity offered by the digital environment and wish to launch a similar initiative for linking and social activation.

You comment that it is a platform created by and for workers. How have the company’s workers been involved in the development of the platform? What tools or meeting points have you used?

As I was saying, the definition and development of the project has had the participation of workers since its inception and responds to a clear demand from employees who wanted to link to the brand on social networks, but who also had doubts about how to do it. For this reason, the working group began this journey with many questions and, above all, listening to each and every one of the answers: a survey or digital barometer was carried out to measure digital maturity and use of social networks within IKEA and two workshops were launched with employees with different levels of digital maturity and active in internal and external social networks, who were called “digital champions”.In these workshops our day-to-day at IKEA was analyzed, from the point of view of digital accessibility and convenience, and we built together what, after more than a year of work, various consultations through our internal social network as a forum and a phase end of testing with that same group of “champions”, ended up becoming Social Networks Sin Vuelta de Tuerca. Currently, our forum is an open group on our social network, Yammer, the channel enabled to continue collecting doubts, suggestions or possible incidents.

Last year, Eurofirms carried out the X-ray of Employee Branding in companies in Spain and one of the results was that 78% of companies are present on social networks, but only 20% invest in training. What is the main reason why you would recommend companies to invest in training their teams?

The way we companies have to communicate with our clients, suppliers and candidates has changed. There are numerous studies that reveal that employees are perceived as the most reliable and credible source when it comes to talking about any issue of the company itself and it is useless to have employees who are willing to do it, but who do not have the necessary tools and training. As I mentioned, with Sin Vuelta de Tuerca we also have the objective of inspiring other companies and, in fact, many of the contents of this platform are public for this reason: we want to share knowledge and learning with anyone who may be interesting.

What strategies or initiatives do you carry out from the Human Resources area so that the workers share their day-to-day life at IKEA and publish on social networks, following the company’s values?

In this sense, we feel very lucky because before the Sin Vuelta de Tuerca platform, we already had many employees who wanted to link to the brand on social networks, but had doubts about how to do it. It was just then that this initiative emerged. The demand from employees was clear, they wanted to increase their level of digital knowledge and now they have at their disposal a platform where they can learn to build a solid and coherent digital identity that defines them positively and differentiates them. In addition, for a time now, we use social elements in our internal communication campaigns, referring employees to the company’s external social networks as the main source of information, so that we involve workers and invite them to interact openly with the official profiles of IKEA Spain. Once this is achieved, it will be the decision of each one to enjoy in this digital environment the values ​​and interests they have in common with the company. For us, the strategy only resides in providing all the ingredients so that this happens organically.

People first | A project by Eurofirms

People First es un espacio de inspiración donde compartimos contenidos con un eje común: las personas. Desde distintas ópticas y sectores, abordamos varios temas, tendencias y noticias de interés humano.

La entrada Enrique López (IKEA): “Employees are the most reliable and credible source when it comes to talking about the company itself” aparece primero en People first.