“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Steve Jobs

Today will be about HR. I recently went to Paris to attend a Corporate Research Forum conference: Recourcing – How HR’s Core Competence is Evolving where I was exploring how the talent attraction nowadays shifts from “recruiting and hiring” to “advertising and engaging”. We all hear it's an "employee market" out there and companies must prepare for it. But what does it really mean?

According to Anthony Robbins, who made some extensive research by questioning approximately 3 million people, we can identify 6 basic human needs, that we fulfill daily in different ways. These needs are the core reasons for each decision we make in life and the more aware of them we are the more resourceful decisions we can make and the easier it is for us to create an inner peace and sustainable state of happiness.

The 6 core needs are:

Needs of the Personality

- Certainty (we need to feel safe and in control)

- Uncertainty or Variety (we like being surprised by life, need the change and challenges)

- Significance (we need to feel special, like we matter to the world)

- Love and Connection (people are important for us as we need to be connected, we have a need of loving and being loved by others)

Needs of Spirit

- Growth (the need for constant emotional, intellectual and spiritual development)

- Contribution (we want to give to the world, leave our mark on others’ lives).

Companies these days do a lot in order to meet these basic needs of their employees. The big HR strategies are being created to make sure, that people feel safe in their work environments and have new things to deal with in order to not get burned out or bored. Awarding systems are reflecting sense of meaning and importance of the employees. Connecting people together, feeling “like a family” is what keeps them in their positions for a longer time.

The needs of spirit are also being more and more addressed by employers: extensive learning & development portfolios offer variety of ways to grow and improve and the activities like best practice sharing and volunteering (very popular especially in big UK corporations) are becoming number one priorities for candidates who search for a new job.

People want to work, where they can see the point of their contribution. They are no longer just earning money, they want their work to be meaningful with a clear purpose. That’s why Employer Branding activities are more and more required in big companies.

Nowadays companies build something called external talent pipelines, which is basically connecting with people via social media like LinkedIn or Glassdoor, contacting them on a regular basis (like once in half of a year) and just checking how their careers are going. They don’t offer any jobs, just stay in touch. It's a smart long term hiring strategy. You invest your time and interest in a person, you network with them and then, when the right time comes and you have a suitable position, you know exactly where to go to find a talent to fill it in. On the other side, the talent is already connected, already knows you and somehow can trust that this position is something they should be interested in. 

I believe this is where the recruiter's role will be shifting in the future, as even now, with today's research we're already aware, that the AI can better (and more objectively) assess a person during an interview than a person, which means that the future of a typical interviewing will actually belong to robots, not humans.

Connection is everything these days. The world is full of opportunities and the great way to benefit from them is staying connected and being open to new challenges. That's how we learn, aquire new skills and become better talents - the ones worth showing up in somebody's external pipeline.