The COVID-19 pandemic and sharp economic recession has produced dramatic crosscurrents in the labor market. It has brought mass unemployment at rates not seen since the Great Depression, with tens of millions of Americans out of work. Yet at the same time, portions of the economy have begun to recover or experience new demand, especially the providers of essential goods and services. Some companies, in fact, are not only hiring back laid-off workers, but expanding their organizations.

To say that hiring will just go back to the way it was, however, is ill-advised. The pandemic has brought new practices and expectations in labor, from the C-suite to the factory floor, further altered by the historic new wave of civil-rights protests. Workers have new demands, and employers will have to adjust.

In the short term, “our labor market may actually look unrecognizable, even when compared to the very recent past,” said Nick Baily, co-founder and CEO of From Day One, introducing the organization’s recent webinar, “Talent Outlook 2020: Defining the New Contours of the Labor Market.” “For recruiters,” Baily continued, “aligning best techniques, from algorithmic targeting to compelling job titles, will be essential to increasing the volume of quality candidates.”

Moderated by Lydia Dishman, reporter and editor at Fast Company, the panel discussed several ways business leaders can connect with the best candidates for prospective hiring in this rapidly evolving market. Here are a few key takeaways:

A New Normal Calls for New Workers

Whatever the new normal looks like, for some time the economy will be exceptionally fluid, and some companies are operating based on shifts in demand as well as anticipating a time when the economy emerges from the crisis.

Heidi Myers, director of global talent acquisitions at the Ball Corp., North America’s largest maker of recyclable aluminum cans, said that the company is putting the finishing touches on two new manufacturing plants. One of them, in Rome, Ga., will craft aluminum cups. Why? Originally, the cups had been designed for major live events. “Where there’s outings and large sporting events and stadium events, those should be the cups that you're going to be drinking your beverages and your beer out of,” she said. But now those cups are being marketed for use in the home, where people are doing more of their beverage consumption, also creating an precedented shortage of aluminum cans.

As a result, Ball’s priorities have shifted, and Myers called plants like that one “absolutely crucial” to the sustainability and growth of the corporation, where she said there’s an “all hands on deck” approach to find the workers and managers to operate these plants.

Other companies developing their post-pandemic strategies, particularly in tech fields, are seeking to hire data engineers and analysts. Dharmendra Sethi, SVP of talent acquisitions and management at GlobalLogic, a digital product engineering company, said such hiring is “a very key focus” for his company right now, and in the upper levels of its corporate structure.

Adopting Flexible Recruiting Strategies and Tools

Work-from-home arrangements, which suddenly became a massive experiment in response to the pandemic, are likely to endure in some fashion even after the crisis eases. “We’re trying to meet folks where they are,” said Hilary Darnell, director of talent management and acquisitions at Comcast. This means utilizing virtual interviews, for example. Once Comcast hires a new employee, “We’re actually shipping them all of their equipment that they need to their home prior to their first day,” Darnell said. “On their first day, everything is virtual.”

Larry McAlister, VP of global talent at NetApp, a data-management company, said digital hiring platforms are now equipped with “mind-blowing technology.” Among the services NetApp uses is Eightfold, which engages A.I. technology to match candidates with companies on the hunt for them, as well as predicting how a candidate can grow within a company through development.

“We all want to keep the human touch,” added Sethi, “but technology is coming and helping us be more efficient, and actually more productive because there is no concept of I’m stuck in the traffic and I can’t find your address.”

Onboarding Efficiency is Key in Recovery

With many companies eager to get their operations back on track, some will need to onboard many more people, often carrying out the process remotely. Greater efficiency in the hiring process can only help here.

“One of the things we’ve seen done effectively in order to help with this process is a simple thing you can do at the beginning, which is set expectations for the candidates,” said Leah Daniels, SVP of strategy at Appcast, which provides programmatic job-ad distribution. Telling candidates up front how long the onboarding will take, and whether they’ll have to pass a drug test and background check, for example, will not only keep candidates engaged but also increases the chances that the candidate will successfully navigate such potential obstacles. Overall, this helps the company “keep the candidate experience on the more positive side,” Daniels said.

“It’s such a simple thing to do, but something we all sort of miss in the process,” Daniels continued. “And the really good companies I’ve seen do it right on their career site, or their first page of their application process.”

Diversity and Inclusion Must Be Prioritized

Dishman shifted focus to the ways in which companies can prioritize diversity and inclusion because “here in the U.S., we have reached an inflection point,” she said, thanks to widespread protests against racial and economic inequality. “People are holding companies’ feet to the fire and saying, ‘What are you doing in terms of diversity, inclusion and equity?’”

McAlister said the A.I. technology integrated into new digital-hiring platforms helps companies to identify diverse candidates better and faster. “You can just press a button and say, ‘I only want female candidates for this job,’” McAlister said. “So the technology is there; the bigger lift is getting managers to hire the candidates.”

Because of similarity bias, in which people are apt to welcome individuals who look like them onto their teams, the preponderance of white males in management positions means there are still stubborn challenges to the hiring of women, people of color, and other often-marginalized candidates. Diversifying interview teams is key to a resolution, the panelists agreed, but problems arise, again, when there are too few minority team members to take on that time-consuming responsibility. Sethi suggested hiring a “trusted interviewer,” a non-biased individual or team, separate from the hiring manager, who can be trained on what the company is seeking, to carry the load.

A little more open-mindedness wouldn’t hurt either.

“It’s all about the decision makers and making sure that they can look at a diverse background and take the appropriate risk of somebody that might not meet the exact mold or doesn’t have the exact experience someone else has,” Darnell said. “It’s about the diverse background, and so I just think we need to be more creative and how we're looking at talent, how these transferable skills can be really applicable, and how it’s okay if they don’t come with all these boxes checked.”

Companies can target candidate pools from out of Historically Black Colleges and post-secondary schools that empower women, panelists said. Long-term, if companies create greater upward mobility for diverse workers, eventually giving them more hiring power, that can help solve the problem as well.

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partners who sponsored this webinar: Appcast, Eightfold, and Monster.

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.

Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections

It’s never been easier to put skills-based hiring into practice. The tools and the resources are there–and the potential benefits are abundant. And yet, some leaders and hiring managers are skeptical.“One of the major positives about the skills-based approach is that it adds more science and rigor to the hiring process,” said Christopher Rotolo, vice president of global talent at Mitek. Adding science, Rotolo says, adds objectivity, which can remove some of the bias and “increase the validity of the whole hiring process.”“The fact is that over 60% of people don’t have a college degree. But that hasn’t stopped employers from benchmarking candidates that way,” said moderator Lydia Dishman, senior editor for growth and engagement at Fast Company. Dishman moderated a panel of leaders during From Day One’s recent webinar about Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Uncommon Objections.Unconscious bias can easily creep into the hiring process when looking at a candidate’s resume, which can reveal indicators like elite educational opportunities, prestige, race, and even generational wealth, none of which are necessarily predictors of career success. Hiring almost exclusively on skill can help employers dial into what really matters.Rather than focusing on degrees, says Amanda Richardson, CEO and head of people at CoderPad, “You have to dissect the role into the skills that are needed, working with the hiring manager and people who are currently in the role. The most important part of the conversation is not just ‘What are the skills?’ but ‘What does good look like?’” This approach requires more in-depth conversations between hiring managers and department leaders to get a stronger sense of not only what success looks like, but how previous successes can be communicated during the interview process.“I find that taking a practical approach [means] literally saying, ‘What does a great answer sound like? Does this person really know what they're talking about?’” said Stacey Olive, VP of talent acquisition and employer branding for Medidata, Dassault Systemes.“Because there’s not an empirical objective test for everything, we really have to go based on our conversations with people.” This means hiring managers need to prepare upfront so they can infer if they’re hearing “flowery language” merely alluding to past success, or if a candidate actually has lived experience that will be beneficial to the role.Focusing on skills-based hiring isn’t just a great way to reduce unconscious bias, it can also make the hiring process quicker. “A little bit of upfront work on understanding and aligning on the skills and the level of the skills needed will actually make a much faster hiring experience,” Richardson said.Semoneel Bamboat, VP and global head of diversity, inclusion and talent acquisition at Capri Holdings, shares that while her organization has a rubric within which they score talent competencies on a scale of one to five, her team does not let the skill scoring fully dictate the conversation.“While we have numbers and rigor around it, nothing is set in stone,” she said. “The purpose of that really is so we can cast this wide net. We don’t want to be that specific, because we don’t want to then lose sight of someone that might not fit that exactly.” Skills-forward hiring should be used to identify previously untapped candidates, not a blanket way to eliminate unusual or creative choices that could be an interesting fit.Richardson adds that getting too technical in the taxonomy can overwhelm the conversation, especially as hiring managers try to parse the subtleties between junior and senior versions of the same role. “I've seen the situation where developers start arguing about the nuances of ‘What does it mean to be very proficient versus mildly proficient?’ And I think you can lose the forest for the trees pretty quickly.”Copying and pasting old job descriptions when looking to fill a role is no longer enough. Instead, there should be periodic check-ins to make sure descriptions are up-to-date as the nature of the work, and therefore the role, continues to evolve. Part of this can be solved by shortening and simplifying the job listing. “It tends to be a lengthy laundry list of desires and needs. Instead, employers should aim to distill it into ‘What is the required skill for success?’” Olive said.With an eye toward DEI, Bamboat’s organization uses short external job listings with neutral language, keeping the more elaborate and specific job description for internal use only among the hiring team. “We take a lot of the details out to be able to cast that wide net,” she said.“We never want to post the exact job and be very specific about those requirements, because we feel like we’re decreasing our talent pool.” Bamboat shared the well-known study that showed women tend to only apply for jobs where they feel they will fit every single benchmark. Shortening the list of requirements can make it more inclusive. Once candidates make it to the interview phase, the hiring manager can discuss the specific details from the full listing to gauge if it’s a fit.In conversation moderated by Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, the panelists discussed the topic “Skills-Based Hiring: Getting Started and Overcoming Common Objections” (photo by From Day One)Pamela Rodas, global senior director of talent acquisition at Telus International, hires for a company with more than 3,000 types of job profiles, all of which are changing rapidly as her organization embraces hybrid workplaces and remote opportunities. In turn, she and her team must change how they assess skills. For example, her newer sales development hires may not have been exposed to an in-person environment where they could hone their technique. Therefore, she finds herself hiring more for soft skills or what Dishman prefers to call power skills, especially as the post-pandemic corporate environment has higher than ever expectations. “All of our clients want to go faster. So forget about skills, do you know how to do the job and do it in less time?” Rodas said.Trying to identify those more amorphous qualities, like being a fast learner, in a candidate can be a challenge. Panelists offered two solutions. The first is reviewing case studies. “To identify these characteristics that lead to outstanding performance, you study what those outstanding performers do,” Rotolo said.The second, is conducting actual testing during the hiring process. “Work simulations can be helpful, whether that means programming together for two hours or sitting and doing a sales demo. What are those real-world experiences where you can actually test the proof points?” Richardson said. Just having a great conversation in an interview is not necessarily enough.But the interview process can still be helpful if you are asking the right questions. “The research still says that behaviorally based questions are the most valid. And there’s really two types: ‘Tell me about a time when’’ past experiences, or situational questions,” Rotolo said.Rodas believes it’s also important to have an honest conversation about the nature of the role and pay attention to the applicant’s response. “The recruiter can [now] spend more time with the candidate talking about how they would endure the type of workload we’re going to put on them. In any type of business today, that’s worth 10 times more,” she said.This also means asking the right questions internally too, to ensure there is no unconscious bias at play and that a candidate’s competency is still at the forefront. “We have an opportunity now to ask [hiring managers], ‘What's the basis of your decision?’” Olive said. “You have to understand and politely point out where you think you see bias happening.”Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond

In the early industrial age, companies had a hierarchy built around manufacturing and machinery. But now workplaces are organized much differently. Their new priority? The talent. We’ve entered an era where the shortage of workers, obsolescence of skills, and new levels of employee agency will present employers with historic challenges. Most companies are not ready.The new Intelligence Age is a time when skills, employee creativity, information and AI will define our companies. In a recent From Day One webinar about “The Long-Term Shortage of Talent in the Post-Industrial Age: How Companies Can Respond,” speakers explored three strategies for success: rethinking the organization as dynamic rather than static, rethinking management with human-centered leadership, and rethinking HR as no longer an expense center, but rather a function like R&D that must build and invest in the company's people.All told, this means we need to redesign our companies around the person and shift to a new model for work. The time to act is now, experts say.The Changing Power Structure in the Labor MarketThe renowned Josh Bersin, founder & CEO of The Josh Bersin Company, says that with Baby Boomers retiring and declining fertility rates, there will be smaller generations coming forward to replace them. Employers will have a high demand for skilled workers but a much smaller talent pool, he says.“If you look at the supply and demand of workers and the labor force, it’s absolutely different from what we’ve seen in the past,” said Sania Khan, chief economist and head of market insights at Eightfold, an AI-driven talent intelligence platform.This could signal tough times ahead, especially in an age where companies are defined more and more by people and ideas than by machinery and products. “Scarcity of talent is one of the biggest challenges out there for companies,” said moderator Steve Koepp, From Day One’s chief content officer and co-Founder.Bersin notes that his company is getting consistent feedback from employers post-pandemic that they are having trouble sourcing new talent and with the retention of what is “a highly empowered workforce. We have employees saying, ‘I'm going to quietly quit. I'm going to work my wage. I'm going to do what I need to do. I don’t care what you say. You don’t like hybrid work? Tough luck, I’ll go find a job where I can work remotely.”Bersin predicts this is a long-term trend, and companies need to get smarter about finding and keeping their people. This is especially true in industries like healthcare, which is facing a major labor shortage despite a recent BLS report predicting 54% of new jobs will be in healthcare due in part to that same aging population that is decreasing the workforce.A Renewed Focus on Employees and ProductivityWith technology changing rapidly and more and more roles relying on it, companies will need to prioritize upskilling and reskilling opportunities to keep their workforce up-to-date and competitive. “Companies will need to focus on their employees,” Khan said, noting that companies that don’t prioritize training are already experiencing higher employee turnover.Another way to curb turnover is to take a hard look at workplace policies and make sure they are serving employees personally to make the organization more attractive, whether that is through flexible hours, hybrid options, and even AI assistance, Khan says.Bersin’s organization just finished a report on the prevalence of the four-day workweek or work time reduction. “This is becoming a big deal because employees want flexibility. We’re finding that this idea creates job productivity, and forces companies to redesign jobs,” Bersin said. “There are things that we’re going to do that seem unnatural now to deal with this labor shortage. In the future they will be commonplace. That’s just one example.”The recent webinar featured Josh Bersin of the Josh Bersin Company and Sania Khan of Eightfold (photo by From Day One)This changing definition of productivity, a focus on “revenue per employee” rather than hours worked, will also serve working parents well, Khan says, as they manage to get more work done in a shorter period.“Hiring more people isn’t necessarily more productive,” Khan said. Companies will start to measure their success by how efficiently they are utilizing their human resources to generate revenue, a focus on output rather than the size of the team. “The companies that are really good at productivity are good at human resources. They’re good at training, facilitating workshops, redesigning jobs, flattening the corporate hierarchy, changing the role of leaders, and democratizing career development,” Bersin said. “These things that might have felt like ‘nice-to-haves’ ten years ago are becoming critical to becoming productive in this new economy.”Reimagining a Skills-based HierarchyIn the information age, employment has been less about job titles and more about the work, Bersin says, with employees taking on tasks and using their skills for objectives far beyond their stated job description in order to accomplish the mission of the day, week, or month. “These rigid job descriptions, titles, and hierarchies are getting in the way of reorganizing and redesigning the company to be more efficient,” Bersin said. He anticipates an existential change in which the titles of managers and corner office perks will be deprioritized in order to get the work done.In turn, companies will be looking less at what skills prospective employees currently have and instead look at adjacent skills that show an employee has the potential to be upskilled to be the right fit, Khan says. A focus on skills, says Bersin, can also pave the way for automation. Employees can be allowed to utilize the top of their skill set if their lower-level, less skilled tasks can be automated.“If you look at the needs of an organization, you can put employees in specific, goal-centric projects,” Khan said. “Instead of just having you siloed to one department, you can now move around to where you’re needed based on your skills.” This would also allow employees to be well-versed in the whole enterprise, rather than just one area, so both the individual and the organization benefit. And tools like Eightfold can use machine learning to help companies analyze what skill areas are lacking and fill those gaps with talent.How Leaders Can Adapt to the New Workforce“Leaders have to understand this labor shortage existentially and operate in a company where transformation and growth isn’t an episodic thing–it's never-ending,” Bersin said. “The new model of leadership is, ‘can you build a company that can move people around, that can develop people, that can hold people accountable, but also give them the opportunity to move when you need them into a new place?’ Those are different kinds of leadership skills.”And with the hierarchy flattening, workers need to be prepared to sometimes be leaders and other times be more subordinate depending on the current project. “We have to democratize the concept of leadership.” Those with flexibility and an appetite for innovation will be most attractive to potential employers, Khan adds.And in a talent-driven company, HR will become more and more essential, and will be called on to understand a wide variety of skills, roles, and changing corporate models to operate within skills-based planning, Bersin says. Gone are the days where HR will be associated with conflict resolution and complaints. Instead, HR is becoming a forward-thinking, technology, and data-driven career path.Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Eightfold, for sponsoring this webinar. You can read more from Josh Bersin on the post-industrial age here.Katie Chambers is a freelance writer and award-winning communications executive with a lifelong commitment to supporting artists and advocating for inclusion. Her work has been seen in HuffPost, Honeysuckle Magazine, and several printed essay collections, among others, and she has appeared on Cheddar News, iWomanTV, and CBS New York.

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