Why Disruptive Recruitment is Fundamental For Technological Change

We all know that the pace of technological change is increasing all the time, which means the way we work is also constantly in flux. The days of employees having fixed responsibilities and completing the same processes day-in, day-out for years are over. This poses a problem for both employers and the recruitment industry: how do you hire staff when you don’t know how changes in technology could impact their job role in the future?

Disruptive recruitment allows you to be more innovative and flexible in your approach to hiring staff. This allows you to form more resilient and adaptable teams who are better prepared to cope with changes to their roles and responsibilities brought about by new technology. But just how does disruptive recruitment work? And exactly how does it help companies cope with technological change?

Redefining expectations

Because employees in technology companies need to be so adaptable, hiring shouldn’t just be about finding people who match a company’s current needs. While it is, of course, important that a new employee is able to do the job they are being hired for, it’s essential to take a more long-term view during the hiring process.

What this means is that employers and recruiters need to focus on finding employees who are highly adaptable with a deeper understanding of the fundamentals involved in your field, rather than just a shallow knowledge of the specific area they are being hired to work in.

It’s also a good idea to broaden the scope of new roles to allow a degree of overlap between different employees. This allows you greater flexibility in your teams so that, as new technology emerges, teams can be easily reorganised to better fit the new requirements created by new technology.

Building talent pools

Creating a robust flexible team is all about building and managing your talent pool. One way to do this is to simply hire a successful team lock, stock and barrel. This has the advantage of allowing you to bring on board teams who already have a successful working relationship with each other. It also allows the new team to hit the ground running, rather than having to wait while they learn to work with each other.

Focusing on talent, rather than just specific skills, means that as technology changes and the skills you require change with it, you can be confident that employees will still be able to perform well. So, for example, someone with an exceptional eye for design but limited knowledge of the specific software or platform you work with can be a much better long-term hire than someone with loads of relevant experience but less native talent. This is because their talent can be applied to any technology, meaning they will have the same value even if the technology and their exact job role changes.

Many employers fall into the trap of thinking of employees as interchangeable, basing their value just on their specific skills. However, understanding the value of individual talent and then building teams of people with complementary talents means you will have a robust and adaptable unit who can cope with the changes new technology brings to their work.

Making recruitment smarter

Technology is getting smarter all the time and recruitment needs to follow suit. What this means is that recruiters and employers need to get better at understanding what makes a successful employee. Of course, employers will already have their own ideas about this, but it’s also a good idea to take a more systematic approach.

By interviewing successful employees and finding out what they value about their co-workers and what qualities of their own they feel have led to their success, it is possible to start building company-specific profiles of the ideal employee. This can often lead to surprising revelations about the skills and personal qualities needed to succeed in an individual company. This in turn can lead to more effective screening of new employees and hiring choices who will better with your existing team.

Take the Next Step in technology recruitment

Next Ventures are one of the world’s top technology recruitment firms, handling both traditional and disruptive recruitment for some of the best known names in the tech industry. Our graduate academy, “The Next Step”, offers unrivalled training in technology recruitment, meaning our recruitment consultants are industry leaders in placing the right candidates into the right companies.

So, whether you are a graduate looking to get started in technology recruitment or a tech company searching for the perfect new employee to help push your business forwards, Next Ventures can help you take the next step.

To find out more about taking recruitment to the next level, please contact us today.