In an environment where there is not just a national but a global crunch for talented employees, companies everywhere are scrambling to improve their recruitment strategies. What can be used to bring the technicians, engineers, specialists to our company rather than another? What lures of great benefits, company charity, or pet-friendly offices will do the trick to fill those vital empty positions? As more and more roles become difficult to fill and online outsourcing services pop up everywhere, one has to ask: where have all the professionals gone?
Where Has all the Top Talent Gone?
To a certain extent, this is the result of the waves and contractions in population. Boomers, the last generation of dedicated office workers, are retiring year. This is reducing the number of highly skilled and developed workers, opening up spots that would already have been difficult to fill in a completely supplied job market, but what about the millennials? The children and grandchildren of the boomers are by far the largest and most technically talented generation to date so why are companies failing to fill even entry and mid-level technical positions? The answer, of course, is remote work and freelancing.
The Freedom to Work Remotely
Modern professionals, whether they went to college or learned their skills through online courses, know that they don’t have to come into work. Everything from finances to web development can be handled at home and in your pajamas so long as you have a high-speed home computer. Those who like to go out and about are forming teams and starting their own little outsourcing firms rather than working for “The Man”. Let’s just come out and say it, millennials are skilled and valuable workers who don’t need office jobs, but office jobs need millennials.
Changing The Way the Game is Played
Companies looking to deal with the boomer retirement and the millennial tendency toward freelancing have tried everything in the standard employee incentivization toolbox. They’ve tried healthcare benefits, flexible hours, family services, and trendy new office environments. While these definitely have a certain amount of pull, if you’re wondering where the truly talented self-driven workers are, they’re still out there working for themselves.
In order to lure the successfully freelancing talent into your ranks, you’ll have to change the way the game is played. Can the commute and ditch the mandatory office hours because what your millennial talent really wants is remote positions. They want the freedom to manage their own office, wear whatever’s comfortable, and not have to spend two hours in stop-and-go traffic every day. If you want to attract top talent in the younger generation (and the older pros who learn fast), you’ll need to start considering, offering, and negotiating remote and semi-remote job options.
Adapting to the Mobile Age
Working from home used to be a huge debate in the business world and something only the most privileged workers got to do once or twice a year. This was, in part, because it was so difficult to set up the right kind of technology and communication infrastructure necessary to collaborate with the in-office team and send in completed work, but times have changed. Everything is mobile now, and not just from desktop to desktop. With the vast majority of your business software and data on the cloud, easy video conferencing, screen sharing, and online document collaboration, the old arguments against remote work simply no longer apply.
The fact of the matter is that even if you don’t like the idea of employees you never see in person, for jobs that are done 100% on the computer, you can absolutely support more than a few remote workers who collaborate online much in the same way they would have working in the same office. It’s time for the way of business to adapt to the modern tech-savvy skilled worker. If you want top talent, you’re going to have to adapt to the new world as quickly as they do.
The Network Editorial Team
