Essential soft skills required in the era of globalization and digitalization

Technological innovation does not only require technical abilities. The employees enrolled in the energy division should continuously strengthen their soft skills to flourish in the era of automation. In today’s energy aspect, the attitude towards automation could be observed in a number of ways. But according to the 2018 Global Energy Talent Index, the overwhelming predilection is a positive one. In fact, more than 75% of oil and gas professionals admit. This means a sector priming itself for change. But how can corporations and applicants assure they don’t get left behind? We have suggested the top soft skills you will need to flourish in the age of automation.

Problem-solving

It’s no secret that automation considerably speeds up more prolix procedures. To really benefit, you have to understand how this fits into the broader issues you’re working to solve. For example, in data analytics automation manages the manual task of providing raw data but eventually, its understanding and delivering the insights that advance productivity. In the era of automation, the value just doesn’t twist in the data you collect. It’s in the form you use it to accomplish your end purpose. For the energy area, the onus is now on strengthening problem-solving approaches to help businesses tackle these concerns. The oil and gas recruitment companies can be useful ally here as they are better in solving back end and other relatable issues and allow the industry to focus on what they do the best.

Intuition and logic

A machine can better deliver repeatable, rote tasks. But what happens when something goes awry? Where imagining on the fly is required, humans yet have an upper hand.

Same as the pilot’s main role is to observe the autopilot, they’re still required to step in if there’s a dilemma. Then there’s an advantage of holding rare expertise and experience and the fact that seldom it’s more cost-effective to expand a human role with robots than fully automate it. It’s more frequently specific duties rather than entire jobs that are automated. Robots require a human touch.

Communication

Communication is integral to the smooth working of a project and becomes even more vital when something doesn’t go according to the plan. Take the automotive division as an instance that has automated its manufacturing ways for years. Different production lines are broken down into shorter, repeatable tasks. However, mistakes can still befall. If employees miss flagging these issues to each other, they slide through the cracks and lead to dilemmas in the final merchandise. For the oil and gas sector, AI does a fabulous job of furthering up processes. But with so many flying parts on a given outline, all team segments need to keep each other updated in order for it to run smoothly.

Adaptability

The tides are most certainly growing and it’s those that display a readiness to adapt that will succeed. New technologies will demand constant learning. For companies, there must be an ongoing attempt to recognize those in the greatest demand and execute relevant training methods around them. Equally, more than 70 percent of oil and gas recruitmentagencies view training and development openings as the best approach to attract talent. This highlights the added reason for businesses to be proactive in this domain. For candidates, it’s also worth regarding that you don’t have to mature into a top data scientist or cyber-security specialist overnight. Nevertheless, it clearly helps to preserve an understanding of how these topics can influence your role so you can stay forward of the curve.

Leadership

According to the Harvard Business Review, nearly 50 years of meta-analytic studies consider emotional characteristics twice as valuable as IQ to be a powerful leader. These characteristics incorporate emotional stability, extroversion, and concern. This proves it’s in the very most human aspects of our personalities that we hold the capacity to lead. Machines can compute quicker than the human brain, but can they perceive a circumstance and know the right words or phrases to motivate a team? These softer skills go a long way towards isolating man from machine.

5 Ways to narrow down the candidate pool to make an appropriate hire

When recruiting, getting a lot of candidates isn’t forever a good thing. Some job seekers just draft resumes off for positions they’re not fully qualified for and desire for the best. The recruiting firms then have to go through them all to discover the handful that has what it demands to do the job. In an ideal world, professionals with the appropriate background would be the sole ones who would apply. While that can seem like enthusiastic thinking, there are a few measures you can take to draw talented candidates with just the right talents and experience and quickly and efficiently find the most suitable one for the job.

Start with a fair job description

Writing clear and brief job descriptions is the safest way to discourage unqualified candidates from applying. Short, obscure job postings leave enough up to interpretation and can readily lead the wrong applicant to consider they’re appropriate for the job. Be transparent about the particular skills, years of experience, and learning you require in your future employee. And past that, draft the long-term goals you need the hire to fulfill. This method will not only deter people who don’t have the right qualifications from applying. It will further make professionals who are suited to think long and hard about the challenges the position presents.

Phone screen before in-person discussions

In-person conversations are a huge task for both the candidate and the hiring firms so the recruiters need to do a little work upfront before inviting someone to come in. You can ask the recruiting agencies to perform this task on behalf of you as they have highly skilled manpower in carrying out the upfront work so that the organization is placed with cream in front of them. A phone screening is something like taking a half-hour with a candidate about their skills and industry experience. Run through the details on the job description and request the candidate to describe how their training aligns with each one. Talking with the applicant on the phone will also enable you to learn about their character and passion for the role. If they seem adequate and excited about the position, ask them to come in for a formal process.

Incorporate questions on the online application

The appropriate hiring software will permit you to formulate custom online forms to post on your firm’s website. You can also add different types of questions on the form that help you efficiently drain out unsuitable applicants. For instance, you can simply ask the yes or no questions like Do you have the knowledge of certain software? or Do you have a certain certificate or skill? and eliminate candidates from competition who aren’t qualified. Plus, you can incorporate open-ended inquiries that give you deeper penetration into the applicant’s thought process and reason for joining. Assume these as mini cover reports where you can determine what the candidate writes about.

Inquire about salary wants early on

Even if you find exceptional talent, you won’t be able to recruit them if they desire to be paid more than your firm can afford. You can dodge wasting their time and yours by discussing salary expectations early on. You can steer clear of hard conversations altogether by incorporating the salary range on the job specification. Candidates will know not to apply if they require to be paid more. If your firm isn’t comfortable including salary features on the job description, you can ask about the coveted compensation as an application inquiry. If that won’t fly, then it should surely be discussed during the phone interview. Whatever your way, it’s essential to discuss the salary sooner than later.

Conduct smart interviews

By the moment you reach the interview scene, you will have narrowed down your candidate pool to a few notable candidates. Choosing the best one could be the most difficult part of the entire hiring process. It’s necessary to take a smart way to interviews and make certain you take benefit of the opportunity to meet applicants face-to-face. Gather an interview team of people who can evaluate interviewees from every angle, you can even take the help of recruitment firms as they are quite expert in this task. Walk them through the role requirements before they go into the room and contemplate giving them a rubric to complete afterward. This path will ensure they assess candidates on measures important to the role and don’t get caught up on minor aspects.

How the new trends have reshaped traditional recruiting for Talent Acquisition?

Introduction

The digitalized era is rewriting the laws of marketing as we know them. Economic and geopolitical unpredictability are threatening established standards while rising digital support is reshaping the forces of creation and consumption. Hiring the headhunters recruitment agencies to deal with the reformed process can help the organization focus on its core tasks and leave the dirty task to the pros. But there are even reformations that headhunters need to look for in this disrupting scenario. We have listed below a few big changes that every recruiter needs to acknowledge:

The Fundamental Nature of Work, the Workforce, and the Workplace Is Changing

Faster-moving businesses expect faster-moving workforce, and firms have far less chance to derive value from their talent. The independent and outsourced talent marketplace is growing in significance, delivering higher-quality explications more cost-effectively and with less risks than large, owned, vertically integrated workforce centralized inexpensive real estate. As technology decouples situation and delivery and sharing restores owning, organizations will have to leverage disruptive new talent designs and brand distinct talent pools.

Reputation Is Everything

As trust in “the business” plummets, customers are frequently turning to companies for ethical and social influences. Positive organizational practices have consequently become crucial for communicating persistence, values, and purposes. Culture is an organization’s most influential marketing asset, for consumers and candidates alike. Candidates are taking a further dynamic approach to their professions. Focusing on mutually profitable collaborations, they are more motivated by shared values than monetary incentives. They no longer fix themselves to fit in. They have disentangled from general corporate “push” messaging and are rather engaging with genuine “pull” content generated by independent peers. Employment branding is unfolding into talent branding, and candidate attraction is moving away from promotion and sales to advocacy and influence. Recruiters must find innovative ways of obliquely creating market while constantly contrasting a wider range of value statements to much more diverse readers. Increasingly, recruiter requires to think of candidates as assets that will gain in value; they must place their companies and clients as enablers of careers sooner than employers with jobs.

All Experiences Matter

The information debacle is pushing greater distinctness and accountability, making commitment much harder to win and much simpler to lose. On survey sites and social media platforms, businesses and supervisors are rated like Airborne hosts or Amazon sellers. Workers are overlooking corporate telecasts and shifting to independent, like-minded peers for trustworthy insights. Differences between what a company says and what it does are instantly shared and immediately lethal. Like customers, talent demands to see a firm's purpose and values consistently pondered at every stage of the talent quest, not just at “the point of buying.” Candidates across ages expect more personalized, worthy, and immediate expertise throughout the talent life period — and the talent practices of independent and outsourced operators need to be just as appealing as those of permanent agents.

The Value of Talent Has Transformed

Talent is increasingly the fundamental source of competitive edge. People raise sales by enhancing corporate reputations, personalizing consumer experiences, and differentiating contributions in crowded marketplaces. They are key to advancing vital new products and services, forming new intellectual property, and developing new methods and systems that deliver game-changing outcomes. In short, representatives build the holy cups of customer loyalty and support.

Commercial success is increasingly reliant on a new set of skills and practices. The half-life of talents is plunging as new technologies, new economic models, and new businesses disrupt officials in every sector. Artificial intelligence and automation are substituting repetitive tasks, and functional expertise is satisfied cost-effectively on demand.

In light of those advancements, human capital advantage is increasingly defined by the prominent cognitive leaps, divergent reasoning, and the strong relationships that humans are uniquely assigned to deliver. Hence headhunter Recruitment agencies must, consequently, refocus on nominee quality, not quantity. Job specifications and advertisements cannot center on the skills and practices of the past when it is the capacity to create a radically different prospect that matters. As windows of event compress, selection and evaluation programs must target and carefully assess relevant traits much sooner in the hiring process.

Recruiters must also substitute their focus away from just putting people in positions to procuring the candidates that produce lasting commercial value. They require to stop prioritizing transactional business efficiency and rather index their resolution to the act of new hires. They need to concentrate on pace to value, not pace to service.

Key difference between organizational recruiters and talent acquisition consultants

By the assistance of either the in-house team of recruiters or talent consultants, the organization fill their vacant posts. They both are quite different in their ways of recruiting both fundamentally and operationally. To thoroughly understand which can produce wonder for your organization's needs, you need to be aware of their differences. Here is a list of key differences from which you can choose, the most compatible one for your organization:

 

HR vs. Sales

Corporate recruiters usually endure within HR departments and often come from a human resources background, rather than a recruiting background. The approach to recruiting undertaken by corporate recruiters is quite different from what talent acquisition consultants incorporate since the former works for a solely for an organization compared to the latter which have multiple clients from diverse fields. The major role of agencies is job advertisements, executive-level candidates, phone screening candidates, getting applicants engaged in their company, and fixing interviews process while organizational recruiters are much concerned about the sales and hence give less importance towards recruitment. Subsequently, agencies are typically hungrier and have more experience in negotiation and better assessment. 

Exclusivity vs. Competition

Recruiting consultants are aware of the fact that to survive in the market they have to perform exceptionally in order to have steady growth and decent pay. You have an added pressure of responding quicker and better than your competitors whereas corporate recruiters are the company's regularly paid employees and hence feel less pressured. Like the competition in the business benefits the consumer, competition among talent acquisition consultants benefits the employer.

Technical Knowledge vs. Recruiting Expertise

The basic difference between the two is that the recruitment consultants are highly proficient in recruiting for varied positions and for all sorts of industries while the organizational recruiters are limited within their setup. The recruiting agencies have multiple requirements every passing day for a wide variety of clients while corporate recruiters have a maximum of 10 roles to fill within their enterprise. This suggests that agencies have better technical knowledge in comparison to organizational recruiters. 

Firsthand Culture vs. Secondhand Interpretation

As we know the corporate recruiter abide and live by the company policies and culture whereas agency recruiters know the culture from what they can witness in limited meetings and essentially what the hiring manager tells them it is. Hence, the in-house recruiters are in a better position of responding to questions like how is it to work in a corporate culture compared to external recruiters. A talent acquisition executive would never be known about the day-to-day activities and its related nuances and political challenges.

Investment in Corporate Brand vs. Self-seeking

External recruiters get paid to fill the vacancies and hence that is the motivation for them whereas corporate employees are more endowed working in a way that serves the organization’s best interests specifically. The company's recruiter presents their organization as a brand and hence they would want to provide the best candidate experience in terms of the level of professionalism and responsiveness throughout the entire interview process. It is a more positive approach compared with agency recruiting.

Slow vs. Fast

External recruiter works round the clock means they recruit all day, every day, with high stakes. They work in a highly contentious environment and are conventional to accumulating contacts and appropriating every networking possibility to build pools of active and passive candidates for nurture. This translates into more comprehensive applicant pools with external agency recruiters than corporate ones and usually quicker hiring cycles. Given the huge cost and lost opportunity related to slow hiring, this could turn out to be a major benefit.

Salaried vs. Performance-Based Remuneration
Mostly, in-house recruiters are organizational employees and that suggests they are on the payroll and if they aren't able to procure the required recruits, it’s worthless to put your budget into strains. In contrast, talent acquisition consultants could prove to be a more cost-effective answer for firms that aren’t continually hiring for a lot of evergreen roles. In-house recruiters are companies standard employees and so couldn't be easily dismissed and replaced, unlike the staffing agency recruiters. You can measure the worth of an agency recruiter based on the client's feedback and can access its credibility. So, it is easier to get back the worth from a staffing agency in comparison to corporate recruiters.

Conclusion

Organizational in-house team of recruiters might have more authority to change job roles, requirements, details or they can even outsource to a talent acquisition executive to fill up those positions which the in-house team have no experience with. However, the staffing firms must employ creativity to accommodate different interests, and along with it carefully evaluate the authenticity of candidate and customer expectations for each role they work to fill. External recruiters are more precise with what they want so the organizations be more likely to get what they want by a staffing agency compared to the company recruiter. 

Myths associated with Recruitment Process Outsourcing and their and their benefits over staffing agencies

Introduction

RPO firms have various roles to play depending upon the strategic goals of each organization. Few firms require a better scalable solution when it comes to talent acquisition whereas some find volume hiring a tedious task hence they approach RPOs, as they are better equipped with the latest technology, data, and analytics to deal with multiple problems. Despite proven advantages, there are still myths associated related to these industries. Let's see a few of them:

·       Robots will replace recruiters- Whenever there is a technological advancement in the recruitment sector, there is a misconception that it will replace manual jobs. For say, when applicant tracking system first came into the market, it was presumed that the administrative tasks will come to an end, but in actuality, it came to aid the existing process. Now, people are worried about AI and related technology. The role of recruiter has always been made efficient by these technologies. Technologies are just enablers they cannot replace human intelligence, but yes they can help in making the process better. 

·       RPO staffing firms take jobs away from in-house teams- In the past decade or so, RPOs have become a firm partner in elevating business recruitment teams. RPOs have wisdom, expertise, and scalability with a global influence that complement hiring results. They serve in collaboration with the in-house team to produce the best possible outcome, often freeing up in-house teams to successfully fulfill their strategic and business imperatives. 

·       In-house teams have a wider reach in markets than RPO firms-This is not true, as data proliferation and exponential extension of online forms make nearly everyone searchable and contactable. It’s no longer finding people with the right skill it’s more about engaging with them efficiently and finding cultural association for businesses.

RPOs benefits over staffing practices

Organizations hire RPOs for transferring their complete or a part of the recruitment process to ensure that they help the firm in providing quality candidates and along with it help in branding its image. RPOs provide long term benefits to its clients and hence focused on long-standing relationships instead of providing tactical results for short-term benefits.

·       Global best practices- RPOs deal with multiple companies in diverse sectors with different geographies which mean they have extensive experience. Thus, they bring in the best global practices which might not have been experienced by the in-house team with a similar degree. They deliver effective practices gained through designing and integrating customized solutions. In simple words, Recruitment process outsourcing play the role of a change agent whereas staffing agents help provide relevant data services to fill demands.

·       Continuous innovation and improvement-Constant enhancement is a crucial component of the top Recruitment Process Outsourcing Companies and their development programs. RPO companies are continually transforming their training programs to assure their recruiters are up to date with the latest trends and technologies in the talent acquisition field. In contrary, staffing firm that still rely on the traditional recruitment practices and are aligned towards their day to day work instead of focusing on the prospects. 

·       A well-rounded employer brand- RPOs are skilled in designing solutions that encompass well-rounded employer brand tactics. They work towards attracting the passive applicants and retaining employees along with improving the candidate experience and boosting hiring manager satisfaction. Messaging could be inappropriate as it could lead towards diluting the employer brand which is practiced by Staffing agencies. While RPOs advice clients on how to intensify the perception of their employer brand while observing the client and their top opponents' brands for benchmarking. They analyze the results so as to make changes in external communications and recruitment marketing messaging. RPOs even tie-up with the local vendors such as Indeed, Glassdoor, etc to boost the client's local brand growth. 

THE UNTOLD ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF WORKING WITH HEADHUNTING COMPANIES

If an organization is relying on headhunting recruitment to expand its team, it needs to be aware of all the benefits and drawbacks so that it can make a balanced decision, according to the work culture and environment.

Let's look into their benefits and drawbacks:

Knowledge about the market

An ideal headhunting firm has its ear on the ground. They are very informative about the current condition of the job market. A few of the headhunting firms are specialized in one or a handful of industries. Hence, in comparison to an in-house recruiter, they are better placed in finding a compatible candidate for a job role and that too in a short span. They could prove to be quite beneficial for small and medium enterprises as they have limited resources within their hands and hence need to spend those on quality services. The exposure to a new market is full of challenges for these SMEs firms so these agencies could prove to be an invaluable asset to them. 

Headhunting firms are driven by results

The headhunting firm aims at matching an opening with the applicant best qualified to do the job in the present situation. Headhunters browse dozens of CVs keeping in mind the job description. After keenly going through them, the most promising candidates are called up for further process. After going through various rounds of interviews, they expose only the best to their clients for the job role their client is looking for. So they are driven to give the top results to their clients. 

STRONG NETWORK OF PROFESSIONALS

It is not just that headhunters keep reviewing resumes all day long. Even though it is an essential part of their job but they also are keen on building their professional networks. For this, the recruiters go to various conventions, workshops, seminars and other events that could help them building or expanding their network. Due to this exposure, they are continuously meeting people of different mindsets and keep adding them to their lists. But this is a long process, so experienced companies have an edge in this as compared to the fresher in the market. 

 QUICKER TURN AROUND

Whenever an organization thinks of expanding their team, it would generally due to some new projects at hand. It will require them to multi-task, hence handling the task of recruiting to headhunting placement companies will allow the managers to focus more comprehensively on the projects. Even, filling a vacating space is easier for a recruitment firm in comparison to an in-house team as they have more resources and experience at their end. 

Poor initial training

Organizations hardly look for the training of their new hire. It takes around 6 months before an organization begins to see the results from hiring a new person. So before picking up a firm, research into the way, they train the recruits. If your recruit feels ignored and isolated within a few days or weeks of his joining, there are very high chances of him/her leaving the firm at these initial days. 

Working in the wrong function

Recruiters are not the masters in each sector. Each of the recruiting firm has their mastery in two or three sectors. So if your resources are aligned towards the wrong sector it would be hard for the firms to deliver results. If a sector particularly niche and requires a lot of quality contacts such as the executive search and allocating it to a newbie in the market could prove to be harmful for the firm. Since executive recruiting is different from generalized one and requires specific skill and knowledge. So be careful while allocating sectors to a recruiting firm. 

Although there are no such drawbacks in hiring firms headhunting jobs, it’s just that organizations need to be cautious while selecting the one as each firm has their own strong and weak points. Choosing the one that meets your requirement at best, could prove wonders for your business.