A different view on how to fill your open vacancies…
“Finding new employees with the right skills is a struggle”. During the past years, I’ve encountered countless managers who told me that. Even though the business was very successful, paid good salaries, and had a great company culture. And now, while I’m looking for people to join our team, I can say the struggle is way bigger than I expected.
Naturally, when companies struggle to fill their open vacancies, they start investing in (expensive) new initiatives: hiring external recruiters, buying promotions on social media, creating recruitment movies, or being present at job fairs… Huge investments are made to gain the few people that haven’t got a job yet or convince them to change companies for higher wages. These efforts often have limited success to increase your pool of talented co-workers.
While I’m convinced of the irreplaceable value humans can bring, I also have had too many moments in my career where I thought: “How is it possible that you still need to do this task in 2022?”. We have encountered too many processes at our customers where people lose so much time to collect data from different systems or even worse copy data from one excel to… yeah you guessed it… another excel. These tasks are not only killers when it comes to efficient working, but more importantly, they are taking away the feeling that you made a significant contribution or — in a more millennial way — ‘an impact’ at the end of the day.
Automating or even completely rethinking these cumbersome processes often results in way more value than hiring more people. But to do so you can’t let technology and maximizing technological investments drive you. Technology is the enabler; People are the drivers. Companies need to stop getting paralyzed by holy-grail-solutions like ERP migrations that will solve your employee’s problems in a few years. Instead of that, better focus on building teams with business people and IT that focus on building small & flexible solutions that solve their issues in weeks. This will not only increase the efficiency of employees, but it will create a whole new collaboration between business and IT where they are solving issues together that really matter.
At RoboRana, we have helped numerous companies change their way of work and become more ‘automated’. Losing this initial focus on technology and changing towards an end-2-end approach where you start from the people is not easy but it’s an absolute necessity. It requires time, requires guts to think differently, and maybe even involves rethinking certain processes completely. We believe that ‘automated’ companies are not defined by using state-of-the-art technology but have an IT department that is seen as an enabler, a business value generator that supports people to be more efficient and interact better with customers and suppliers. They make sure that people feel they made an ‘impact’, tell their friends how great it is to work at their company, and you will be sure you’ll find the right people for your open vacancies.
Interested to see how we are doing this within our own company? Feel free to connect here & let’s meet for a coffee!
