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Demand for Talent has Gone Global.

Talent scarcity is worldwide. The world faces declining fertility rates. Education standards vary greatly. Last, worldwide there is an aging population.

Employers need strategies to retain employees as well as faster strategies to attract talent.

The solution to recruiting challenges includes collaborating with other companies, educational institutions, and even cutting across industries.

Business leaders and their employees need to encourage broader understanding and cooperation between cultures. It’s simply a fact of life to the success of any business, no matter how small.

Employees need to at least welcome change.

This recession has taught employers around the world how to do more with fewer employees. Remaining employees at least are open to change. The best actually embrace change. Unfortunately that has meant the disparity between the best talent and the rest has become much more pronounced—in their jobs and in their standards of living.

It’s important for all businesses to do a better job training, motivating, and coaching employees. Likewise, employees need to take more responsibility for their own careers, motivation, and the types of coaching they need and best respond to.

Your Company’s Growth

Smart companies and entrepreneurs spend time thinking how to attract and retain the employees that will contribute to their growth and profits. Growth is much more than increasing sales. It involves identifying additional products or services existing customers want. Identifying additional market niches. Finding pockets of business where your company can carve out a competitive advantage.

Tools You Can Use

More and more companies are using contract labor. Businesses have more short-term market opportunities and opportunities to provide a highly targeted set of skills or services. That also means business needs to look at more out-sourcing instead of doing everything ‘in-house.’

Self-education, through all the tools available on the Internet is a rapidly growing trend. What is your company doing to identify additional skills your employees need? Then helping them find Internet sources they can use to acquire the skills.

Employers need to work with local schools to acquaint the schools with the skills schools need to be teaching. That also means schools need to become much more flexible in what they teach. In the US that will be a tough transition given how entrenched the public education system is. Many feel this is a primary reason so much is being done with training through the Internet. That enables individuals to take responsibility for their own educations to assure they get the skills to enable them to thrive, instead of survive.

Improving Communication

While there will be increasing reliance on the Internet for educational opportunities there is also increased need for better communication skills when face-to-face. The Internet is still relatively new, and ‘texting’ is very new. All of us are still identifying when that’s the best way to communicate and when face-to-face, or actual voice communications are more effective. As we become more comfortable video texting communications will improve.

The reason for face-to-face communications is to enable the use of more senses, hearing, voice inflection, facial/body language, etc. Video communications can enhance communications. As the need for skills expands worldwide so does the need for all of us to acquire some foreign language skills, especially those of us responsible for recruiting employees for our organizations.

We don’t need to speak several foreign languages, but we need to know how to use the Internet to enable us to communicate easily with people who communicate in different languages.

Summary

Increasingly we live in a global world. That is unlikely to change. Step back and identify how your company can effectively benefit from globalization. What skills do you, and your employees need? Where are the business opportunities? What can you do differently?