THE NEED TO BE AGILE...

It seems at times that I can barely turn a page of the business press, browse social media, or even sit and have a coffee these days without the word Brexit being mentioned. Pre-Brexit, post-Brexit, Brexit-proofing you name it, we are being bombarded by Brexitism at present. Don’t get me started on Article 50!

But what does Brexit actually mean for your business and in particular for your resourcing and talent strategies?

Well, Brexit is just the latest in a line of exogenous shocks to the UK and global economy that has wreaked turmoil across financial markets since the credit crunch of 2007. We bounced out of the Dot-com bubble bursting into the joys of the second Great Recession. That had its foundations almost 10 years ago but yet we are still feeling the impact of policy decisions, corporate behaviour and financial market woes a decade later. What was meant to be a short-term crisis has ended up defining a generation.

Volatility has crept back in to the markets of the world, Uncertainty and Complexity lurk as shadows on every street corner causing whispers of heightened Ambiguity in a world craving a sense of normality, security and predictability. 

This concept of VUCA can feel new and unfamiliar for some, but it is in fact a decades old idea based around building in resilience and agility to an organisation. The acronym was coined by military strategists but has now become common-speak in the post-Brexit world of business.

So, someone has created a handy acronym for ‘it is hitting the fan’ I hear you say. They won’t be the first or the last. But it is more than the acronym and more than stating the obvious. 

The market has irrevocably changed. Much that once was is lost. We are no longer experiencing a short-term fad or trend. We are evolving into a permanent state of flux. This, as you can appreciate, is playing havoc with geo-political, social, economic and financial strategies for governments, businesses and people alike.

In a business sense, building in capability, resilience and agility to planning strategies is nothing revolutionary. Building them in to your People and Talent Attraction & Retention strategies potentially is.

Recruiters, by their very nature have always had to be adaptive to the ever-changing market trends. The best in brand have always displayed an agility to front-run demands, proactively talent pipeling and ensuring value creation for clients where other corporates have failed. But if constant change is the new normal, how do businesses need to respond to the ever-changing face of the recruitment market?

They need to become agile.

Learning to move at pace, embracing new technologies, new ways of working, breaking the mold of traditional reactive recruitment strategies designed to put round pegs in round holes. We are in a market where the pegs are viral, changing shape constantly and to complicate matters more, so are the holes we are trying to put them in. If ever there was a time to re-evaluate how your organisation identifies, attracts, recruits and retains talent now is it.

Investing in upskilling talent acquisition teams, building relationships with specialist trusted advisers capable of vocalising and differentiating your brand proposition in an increasingly competitive and fast-paced talent market are essential. Referral programmes, apprenticeships, development programmes, new selling and sourcing strategies must be embraced.

VUCA can be overcome by innovation, by embracing change. You must build in extra capacity to facilitate the unforecastable. You must learn to accept failure as a natural path to finding success and not be scared to walk forwards or backwards down the path. Scalability (upwards and downwards) is essential to ride the peaks and troughs of the choppy market waters and building in this resilience strategy is critical.

In a world where we try to predict everything from the results on the Grand National to the weather and our personal shopping habits, unpredictability flies in the face of ‘big data’ and predictive analytics. But not for too much longer. Businesses are embracing data, embracing analytics, in particular the large Retail sector clients we work with and we are seeing the impact of this across the recruitment market: a rising demand for Business Intelligence, Data Insight, Data Scientists and a blurring or lines between functions such as Finance, IT and Commercial as ‘big data’ takes centre stage in decision making and business growth. With the increasing demands placed on business that such analytics and insight requires is your business and talent function truly prepared for the current war on talent?

Have you embraced an agile mindset, focused on capacity, resilience, adaptability, scalability, innovation and transformation?

Do you have the relationships with trusted recruitment partners in place to supplement and support your historic attraction and retention strategies to esnure you attract the very best agile talent on the market?

If not, now is the time to change.

Now is the time to consider a business like Resourcery Group.


For more Thought Leadership and insight into the wonderfully opaque world of Qualified Finance recruitment, why not pick up the phone and speak to one of the leading professional recruitment and career consultancy businesses in the region, Resourcery Group. With a combined 30 years’ experience and extensive network of contacts, we are confident we can add value to your career management, job search and the efficacy of your recruitment processes. Servicing the North West qualified finance recruitment market, we are interim and permanent specialists who provide a genuinely open and honest service to those willing to keep an open mind. Why not find out for yourselves at www.resourcerygroup.com or by calling 0151 345 9040.