How "Program Hiring" helps recruit top talent
The Global 100 program at Wipro hires students from B-Schools with four-six years of prior work experience. The students are not hired against any specific pre-determined vacancy. The hiring panel looks only at their ability to adapt and thrive in unstructured ambiguous settings and their learning agility on their own. And yes, there is no specific role against which they are being hired.The premier institutions which every employer aspires to go to represent the shifting talent trends. The balance of power is clearly in the hands of the students. The placement committee run by students decides which employers will get to pick first from a rapidly depleting talent pool. So getting in early and building mindshare together shape the applicant pool.The attractiveness of a potential employer is supposedly a complex algorithm of the sector’s rate of growth, salary and benefits offered, the feedback of the alumni working there and so on. The chatter on social media sites about the company and its prominent leaders add to the complexity of the decision. Yet, every year the list of most desirable employers seems to resonate across different institutions. The fresh hires are expected to meet a job description that has been refined over the years. Each hire is done to fill a vacancy. That works well when organizations compete against established well-defined peers.
PROGRAM HIRING
That is beginning to change. The digital world views talent acquisition differently. The candidate is not measured against a specific vacancy. After all, as the companies are trying to be more nimble in responding to changes in the business environment, they realize that job descriptions rarely stay frozen. So several employers like Facebook, Intuit and Zappos, to name a few, are resorting to “Program Hiring”.A report in Wall Street Journal describes how these companies are hiring without a specific job or even a specific salary. The hiring is based on identifying “transferable skills” – the skills that can be the basis of success in several different jobs and then the employers find roles that will test these out. In companies like Intuit, the new hires get to know their compensation details based on the role they are found fit for.
WHY IT WILL CATCH ON
Companies have competed against peers in the same industry. So auto manufacturers competed against other auto industry players. In a digital world the automobile is simply delivery systems for technology. So technology companies suddenly become part of the same ecosystem. With the driverless cars coming our way, a search engine company like Google, and if the rumors are to be believed, even Apple, has become a competitor for car manufacturers.In BCG’s list of 50 most innovative companies of 2015, auto companies like Toyota, BMW, Daimler and Tesla compete with Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon for the top spots. Technology-enabled innovation cuts across industries. So suddenly tech talent has choice of joining any company they choose to.
WHO BENEFITS FROM PROGRAM HIRING
In such a fluid world the best opportunities will go to people who possess deep domain knowledge and their cross-disciplinary view of the world helps them innovate. When such a person combines strong people skills and learning agility, the world queues up to woo such a person. When business models change, the competitive landscape will change as a result of it. All this means good news for top talent. Program Hiring is just a way of mopping up the best of the talent pool that has the ability to learn whatever is thrown its way.-----------
Written for The Economic Times 22 Dec 2015