Non-Traditional Approaches to Fill Talent Gaps
Proven approaches to help you fill employee gaps and drive success.
The world is changing at a breathtaking pace, making it challenging for even the most deep-pocketed organizations to keep up. As an association or not-for-profit leader, you operate with an added level of complexity. Your governance responsibilities, limited financial resources and low-risk environment can make this rapidly shifting landscape seem overwhelming.
It’s never been more important to have the right team in place, and it’s never been more challenging.
To thrive in this new reality, your association must become more agile and proactive by rethinking current processes, frameworks and organizational structures. This starts with your people. Does your team have the passion, skills, commitment and ability to innovate as required in these changing times?
Finding the right talent can be difficult under the best of circumstances, never mind when unemployment rates are low and competition for talent is intense.
Here are three proven approaches to help you fill employee gaps and drive success:
- Ramp up culture, revamp benefit offerings
Your mission is vital, but it’s only one part of the equation to attract and retain the best talent. You also need a strong combination of compensation, benefits, professional development, and schedule and location flexibility.
The skilled Generation X (ages 40 through 50+) and millennial (in their mid-20s through 30s) professionals that you’re competing for expect a culture and benefits package that maximize and reward their ability to make an impact. If your culture and benefits package allow them to advance the mission of the organization, as well as their personal career growth, you’ll see higher job satisfaction and engagement and lower turnover.
- Flexible and remote work options, creating a culture that supports those options and integrating additional benefits are key to creating an inviting culture for today’s job seekers.
- Broaden your talent search
Why limit your talent pool? In today’s competitive environment you can take advantage of technology to consider candidates from across Canada and around the world.
Tools such as web conferencing, Skype and virtual teaming allow you to think and work globally. With the right strategies in place, you can overcome time-zone limitations and achieve increased productivity and worker availability — not to mention job satisfaction. The option of remote work — including a hybrid of face time and technological connection from the employee’s locale — is appealing to many candidates and can serve as a differentiator that allows you to compete on factors other than salary.
As an added benefit, attracting international candidates may also contribute to your diversity and inclusion goals.
- Look to the cloud
Talent gaps aren’t only about people, they’re also about technology. Cloud-based technology solutions allow you to automate tasks and processes, better utilize your current workforce and improve productivity, employee engagement and job satisfaction.
Chances are, you employ people who spend hours a day on routine, repetitive tasks, rather than value-added activities. Cloud-based technologies will streamline, automate and integrate multiple processes and procedures for greater efficiency — from routine tasks such as expense and time tracking to more complex deliverables, such as project management, membership engagement and team collaboration.
In addition to increased accuracy, consistency and speed, cloud applications can deliver the cost savings and flexibility that enable you to fully understand and address your talent gaps.
As the pace of change accelerates and the competition for talent heats up, your association or not-for-profit needs to be more innovative and agile than ever before. It’s time to veer away from the way things have always been done and find a new path forward to fill the talent gap.
