By Liz DeVito
When a meteorite blazed through the morning skies of central Russia in mid-February and exploded, sending shock waves through the small Ural village of Chelyabinsk, the news media described it as a rare event. And it was. Fast forward one month and just about every government in the world is looking at the potential for a "rare event" to visit their borders, and wringing their hands over how to prepare for it.
When the U.S. Congress asked NASA what they should do if such a meteorite were headed its way, NASA said they should pray. Sounds flip, but the point the space scientists were making is that the country's leaders had not spent the necessary years preparing to ward off a disaster that would, once detected, happen in three weeks.
Such is the stuff of nightmares, and such is the case with human capital strategy. CEOs were warned nearly twenty years ago about this particular meteorite, the war for talent, and now it's virtually three weeks away.
McKinsey & Company published its seminal study on the war for talent in 1997, sounding alarms throughout the business community. What had heretofore been perceived as an unlimited resource, i.e., the pipeline of baby boomer labor, was suddenly brought into full demographic context. Clearly, The talent pipeline was going to dry up and the tap that was filling it, Generation X, was not big enough to replace what was draining out of it.
The alarm bells faded, however, as executives grappled with a new disruption to their business called the World Wide Web. In 1997, the dot-com bubble was in its infancy with all the chaos and sleepless nights that a toddler creates.
Baby boomers were only in their forties, after all, but the Internet was a clear and present danger that threatened to cannibalize, if not totally disintermediate, existing business models. The war for talent receded to the lower echelons of the CEO agenda. Meanwhile, the world was changing on a fundamental level and the war for talent can no longer be characterized as purely demographics-driven.
The 2008 financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession revealed deep structural changes in economies worldwide. Markets began to witness an increasing incidence of skills mismatch, the phenomenon in which employers cannot fill jobs despite high unemployment because they need people with different skills.
As it turns out, the transition from a service to a knowledge economy is having more of an impact on the war for talent than any demographic trend. Five years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis, business leaders have adjusted to the "new normal" of sluggish economic growth and relentless uncertainty about the future.
In this environment, the war for talent has reached a level of complexity where the competition for skilled workers requires new strategies and tactics. It's not just about replacing aging workers, anymore.
It's about getting the right people in the right place at the right time. Clients are looking for consultants who can help them win the new war for talent by fine-tuning their radar, developing the proper defense tactics, and cultivating a culture of change and agility that can handle incoming meteorites.
Liz DeVito is Associate Director, HR Consulting for Kennedy Consulting & Research Advisory.
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