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Stay competitive by tapping a global workforce

Companies that are not developing a global workforce through remote working and skills-based hiring will soon lag behind competitors, writes Humberto Moreira.

7 min read

LeadershipWorkforce

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As companies look to meet new and challenging talent demands, they are no longer allowing traditional job requirements to narrow their pool of applicants. More organizations are leveraging remote work, and companies ranging from start-ups to stalwarts like Google and IBM have begun removing degree requirements from job postings. “Competence over credentials” (BCG’s term for this trend) has a nice ring to it, but there are specific reasons why this has become a necessary strategy.

IT and development teams are tasked with doing more with fewer resources. New technologies require highly specialized knowledge, and leaders need help to fill the necessary roles. Even in an environment with an apparent abundance of candidates, the specificity of particular requirements can make them difficult to fill. With the current pace of innovation, these roles may not even be needed in another six months as the tech landscape shifts and the organization shifts priorities to the next new opportunity.

If you’re only looking for full-time, in-office hires and are only considering candidates from prestigious four-year universities, you’re drastically limiting your options. Case in point for engineers: many of the top in their field gained their experience through less traditional paths, some substantially value the flexibility provided by project-based work versus a full-time commitment, and 99% live more than an hour from your headquarters. Studies point to freelancers reaching a tipping point of outnumbering full-time workers in the next few years. Are you ready for that future?

As the digital economy continues to scale, transacting across the globe and growing customers in new regions is creating a borderless business world. In order to stay competitive, companies from the tech industry to the tech teams driving innovation within any industry will need to find new ways to thrive, find top talent and optimize collaboration. Here are three ways companies are broadening their talent pool in the future of work and what every business leader can learn from them.

Leveraging a global workforce

The pandemic showed that companies need to have the proper redundancies in place to build resilience to both local and global effects. The global pandemic also revealed that many jobs can and should be done remotely.

Adopting a remote-first approach opens your organization to a global talent pool rather than limiting it to the areas surrounding your physical offices. Unfortunately, most companies have shifted to a hybrid work model rather than fully adopting remote work and a global workforce. According to McKinsey, 89% of tech employees have the option to work remotely – 52% full-time and 37% part-time. While hybrid work is an attractive employee benefit, it still limits the talent pool to a single location. Hybrid work can hurt the organization as a whole by creating fractured team dynamics between remote and in-office employees and can negatively impact employee morale with arbitrary policies.

Financial technology company Affirm is one organization benefiting from a global workforce. By adopting a remote-first approach and tailoring benefits to an international remote workforce, they have attracted tech talent from all over the world.

Creating a remote-first culture allows organizations to attract global talent and ensure remote workers will thrive. Global workforces also offer benefits of scale, response time and service levels.

Hiring for skills over degrees

In the constantly shifting tech landscape, degrees have become much less relevant. There is a more significant requirement for skills that are too new to be fully integrated into university curriculums. Candidates who have increasingly switched careers over time can actually demonstrate a more intelligent understanding of emerging trends.

Organizations today are increasingly removing degree requirements from job postings and becoming more open to candidates “skilled through alternative routes” (STAR). At Google, job postings requiring a bachelor’s degree decreased from 93% in 2017 to 77% in 2021. IBM requires college degrees for only 31% of its software developer and engineer roles.

Other tech giants have also recognized the demand for new proficiencies and the need to reskill a global workforce. Google partnered with online learning providers to launch its Grow with Google initiative and included a specific program to provide digital upskilling in Africa. Microsoft has worked to provide free access to content in LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and the GitHub Learning Lab. When combined with an increase in online coding boot camps, there is a growing pool of STAR talent.

The key to broadening your talent pool past traditional degrees is better candidate evaluation. Our team, for example, has expanded our validation process for developers to include soft skills and technical skills. We also track their progression in these skills to make better-informed estimates of how successful they’ll be in taking on new challenges.

Creating fractional and contract-based work arrangements

With new technologies requiring specialized knowledge to implement, many projects aren’t viable for companies. Either the opportunity requires a fast project timeline that leaves no time to build the necessary team, or a project is too small to warrant full-time hires. Fractional and contract-based work arrangements allow you to hire expert talent for a specific need quickly.

More top talent are gravitating toward contract positions over full-time roles. The freedom to choose specific projects and combine multiple different projects into a consistent income stream allows them more control over their career trajectory. They are able to gain valuable experience and choose projects that further their knowledge in specific areas, rather than getting tied to one company that may only sometimes have a need for their specialized skillset.

Fractional workforces not only help organizations fill talent gaps, but they also provide flexibility and cost efficiency to allow the organization to rapidly respond to new opportunities and technology without an extensive upfront investment. According to Constellation Research, fractional workforces are 30% more productive compared to traditional teams.

Cornell ILR’s Criminal Justice and Employment Initiative (CJEI) is one example of an organization using fractional work to fill an immediate talent need. Despite the tech resources available at Cornell, they lacked the specific expertise needed to get their digital hiring tool, Restorative Record, built and integrated quickly. Instead of hiring an entire enterprise app development team, they contracted a fractional development team and completed the project in only two months.

It is also worth considering the benefits of how blended teams can create complementary opportunities. The rich organizational knowledge of longstanding employees and the fresh ideas and skillsets of fractional workers can offer unique perspectives to a project. Ultimately, everyone involved can emerge from the project with a greater degree of learning, collaboration and mutual development.

A global talent pool with diverse backgrounds and skill sets is now open to all organizations. However, not all organizations are willing to make the changes necessary to take advantage. Truly broadening your talent pool requires rethinking how you evaluate potential employees, organize development teams and manage your workforce.

Companies that understand the benefits of these changes but aren’t able to make them as quickly as they like should consider outsourcing specific projects to a company that can take full advantage of the future of work. Whether it is through outsourcing or organizational change, finding ways to benefit from a more cost-effective and talented global workforce will open you up to new opportunities for innovation and growth.

Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.

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