Digital Professionals: How to recruit them according to McKinsey

The War for Talent: it was given dead, but according to McKinsey it’s alive and kicking. In the era of Industry 4.0, the War for Talent has turned into a global battle to attract the best digital professionals.

In the article “The new tech talent you need to succeed in digital“, the well-known consulting firm describes this scenario in detail. Over the next few years, we will face aggressive recruiting campaigns from global companies, with the aim of attracting (and stealing) the best digital talent.

Why are these professionals so important? It is estimated that globally the demand for digital skills will be at least four times higher than what’s available (even + 50-60% in the case of big data experts).

The difficulty in recruiting for these candidates is obvious: attracting these professionals is not easy, finding them takes a lot of time and keeping them is even more complicated.

The Backbone for the Future of Recruiting

Many companies are at a crossroad. The digital challenge has already begun and will traverse all sectors. It is expected that investments in digitalisation of businesses will be in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars (also shown by the Industry 4.0 plan of the Italian government).

But to take full advantage of this opportunity, you need the right talent.

Some authoritative studies estimate that attracting the best digital professionals to your company can save up to 20-30% on the investment. But not only, value-add employees (so-called top performers) can have a productivity level of 3 to 10 times more than the average (Source: Steven McConnel, “The Origins of 10X – How valid is underlying research?”, 2001).

What would a company do if it had such talent?

This is not a small matter, and companies will soon be facing this crossroads: on the one hand, those who are already designing modern recruiting systems can attract and retain the best talent; on the other, those who can’t or won’t, will miss the digitization train, running the risk of annulling their investments.

What are the digital professions of the future?

What are the skills needed to usher many businesses into the future? McKinsey has drawn up a list of the most sought-after digital roles in the War for Talent:

• Experience designer
• Experience Front-End and Mobile Engineers
• Scrum master and Agility coach
• Product owner
• Full-stack architect
• Next-gen machine-learning engineer
• DevOps Engineer

The four recruiting strategies of the future, from McKinsey

In this article, McKinsey recommends some strategies (field tests) for focusing on innovating your recruitment strategies and attracting the best digital talent.

1. Focus on Employer Branding

The factors that make a difference in attracting digital talent to the company are many, but today many businesses have a two-dimensional vision and believe that the economic element is the only important one. Remuneration is certainly one of the factors that weigh the most, but several studies have shown that it is not the key to attracting digital talent. Alongside decent remuneration, a clear Employee Value Proposition has a great deal of impact.

For example, General Electric has set up a Talent Acquisition strategy, communicating its vision to become one of the top 10 software companies in the world by 2020. The effects were really interesting: many candidates started accepting positions even in the presence of lower wages, just to get involved in an organisation capable of communicating a clear vision and achieving it in time.

2. Recruit a leader and recruit an entire team of digital professionals

In several areas, there are well-known leaders (“influencers”) able to attract many others (“followers”). Successfully recruiting a recognised leader can help to attract potential followers into the network (anchor-hires).
For example, an American company recruited three different influencers into the innovation team, the result was that the company managed to attract more than 30 digital talent “followers” from companies such as Facebook and Google, reducing recruitment needs by three times.

3. Do social recruiting in your community

In 99% of cases the digital talent you want to attract are not looking for work, so posting job ads on a job board won’t make a difference. It is much more effective to find them within the digital communities that they frequent every day such as Hacker News, Github, Stackoverflow and Reddit, as well as open source directory of programmers. Of course, to be credible within these communities a recruiter will have to acquire technical skills, in order to speak the same complex language as the candidate. One useful way to overcome this problem might be, according to McKinsey, to create a mixed team of the recruiter and digital specialists in the company who are co-responsible for social recruiting in these communities.

For example, an international bank looking for digital professionals has unconventionally used platforms such as Github, Aevy and LinkedIn to identify the digital sites and communities with a higher concentration of digital talent. They then built mixed teams of recruiters and external digital influencers (with whom talent wanted to talk and work together) who participated in these communities, organised conferences and a hackathon to get in touch with them. The results? The bank has hired 50 digital professionals in six months, with a 50% increase in results compared to previous (already aggressive) recruitment campaigns.

4. Acquire a startup to get the know-how

Does your business need digital talent in a short time? Why not get a startup so you can integrate specific skills and know-how? This technique is called “acquire-hire”.

What’s the best way to manage an acquire-hire campaign? One of the big risks is the integration between the company’s current employees and those coming from startup. To handle this problem McKinsey proposes to create mixed teams that rotate with new startup colleagues on defined projects (divided by ordinary activities) so as to initiate progressive integration between the two groups while simultaneously limiting differences and friction on a larger scale.

A North American bank tested this approach, reducing the integration period between the two groups from six to three (-50%). `proof of the effectiveness of this new recruiting method.
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These advanced Talent Acquisition strategies need a strategic vision of future-oriented recruiting and not just contingent needs. To attract digital professionals it is important to think “3 steps ahead” over the competitors, just like the experienced chess player.

To do this, it is important to set up a structured system for acquiring and sorting applications that will allow you to organise your candidate profiles and find them in a short time.

A Recruiting Software like In-recruiting provides advanced capabilities to meet these needs, and support innovative recruitment systems such as those designated by McKinsey. In this way, a company can attract more candidates in less time, and at a lower cost.

SOURCE: McKinsey “The new tech talent you need to succeed in digital”