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At a recent innovation conference, Efrem Stringfellow, Microsoft Vice President, touted his company's commitment to R&D (more than Google and Apple combined). He also gave a clear indication as to what he and his colleagues believed would be a key and significant challenge for companies in the future.
No, it would not be converting from Version 7.0 as support is dropped.
No, it would not be learning Microsoft for iPads, which is pretty cool by the way.
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 | | It is in finding talent with potential where an organization can score big! |
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It would be attracting and retaining millennials in the workforce.
The game changer, many believe, will be finding talent with potential, not simply searching for those with education and/or experience. This shift is huge and the implications are staggering.
In
21st-Century Talent Spotting (
Harvard Business Review, June 2014), Claudio Fern�ndez-Ar�oz gets it right when it comes to identifying the key characteristics of people with potential. Research at Egon Zehnder, a global search firm, identified four essential characteristics of people with high potential: curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination.
If we accept Stringfellow's assertion and the research of Fern�ndez-Ar�oz, employers face having to re-write their approaches to recruitment and development of talent. Further, when we take into account the shrinking of the talent pool, employers must not only change processes; they must start identifying and engaging talent with potential sooner in the career path of the millennials.
In a recent meeting of CEOs from Midwest US companies, discussion centered around identifying the targeted age of emerging top talent, people with the likely characteristics cited in the HBR article. Several CEOs believe that such identification needs to be done as early as junior high school, and that altered recruitment efforts may need to begin at that same time.
Altered recruitment efforts actually could be interpreted to mean having businesses become more actively engaged with schools systems BEFORE high school to ensure an adequate pipeline of talented youth, who, as they develop, would be familiar with companies interested in them.
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