Why Recruitment is Essential in Your Digital Transformation Strategy?

With digital transformations a leading aspect of change for companies across the UK, it is essential that your business is taking a comprehensive approach to caring for and growing your workforce. As you implement modern technologies, making sure that your teams can use it is essential to the success of your business.  By investing in a strong recruitment partner capable of providing both recruitment strategies and workforce solutions centred around your business goals, you can ensure that your workforce feels confident when it comes to your digital changes.

Why are businesses experiencing digital transformations?

Before exploring why recruitment is an essential component of any digital transformation, it is important to understand why businesses across the UK are experiencing this significant organisational change. Whether it is to implement more efficient ways of working or to reduce operational costs; technology and workforce are business capabilities with the power to offer unique and inimitable competitive advantages.

Reasons why businesses are exploring digital transformations include:

Cost-effectiveness

The main difficulty facing businesses is budget constraints. With the implementation of the National Insurance changes making, it more expensive for businesses to cater for a large workforce; technology and process efficiencies are becoming an increasingly urgent need to assist with cost-cutting measures.

While it is an initial investment, a digital transformation ensures that your business is putting in place processes and technologies designed to save time and resources. This allows your business to save money over time and reinvest in your workforce to offer a quality service to your clients and customers.

Competitiveness

With businesses under constant pressure to operate more competitively, many turn to digital solutions as the key to working more efficiently and cost-effectively. The benefits are being identified by a growing number of businesses across the UK, who are making digital transformation a pivotal part of their future planning.

Between 2023 and 2030, research shows that spending on digital transformation solutions is set to grow at a rapid CAGR of 27.7 [1], suggesting that businesses are increasingly turning to technology-led transformations to stay competitive in fast-moving and ever-changing sectors.

Efficiency

Efficiency is a key benefit of digital transformation, with new systems and technologies helping to speed up processes, including reducing administrative time and  increasing productivity. Whether this is implementing better processes for hiring new employees or establishing stronger working patterns to provide the best service to clients and customers, improving your efficiency comes from strong technology designed to suit your business. But it is also essential to have a workforce who are comfortable and confident in using this technology to get the best return on investment. Misuse of technology could be inefficient and lead to greater issues such as compromised data security.

Why recruitment is necessary for a digital transformation

A strong recruitment partnership is more than finding the right people. Not only can we offer businesses the best opportunities to access a wide-ranging talent community, but we can also assist your business with the implementation of workforce strategies designed to suit your business needs. If you’re undergoing a digital transformation, you’ve likely considered your technology stack to great lengths. But upskilling, reskilling, recruiting, and supporting your workforce is a necessity for implementing a long-term, successful digital change.

With increased investment pouring into digital solutions, it’s possible your business might find itself with a large digital skills gap that limits your potential. While investing in your technology stack is important to boost service offerings, limiting your investment in your workforce can increase the skills gap in your workplace – making it more difficult for your workforce to understand and use the new processes. A strong partnership will ensure a comprehensive approach to your organisational change, ensuring that the culture and confidence of your workforce is aligned with your business goals and strategies.

Three recruitment solutions to strengthen your digital capabilities

A digital transformation can help a business become more cost-effective and efficient, but without the correct recruitment solutions supporting it, your workforce might struggle to maintain the momentum you need to compete within challenging market conditions.

Three workforce strategies that could strengthen your digital capabilities include:

Skills-gap analysis

A skills-gap analysis looks at the capabilities of your workforce to find problem areas ahead of investing in technology. This can help forecast the success of your organisational changes ahead of the investment process to ensure that your workforce is in a strong place to adopt the new measures, processes, and systems.

By highlighting skills gaps within your workforce and planning to direct fill these, you can support your teams to reduce the likelihood of stagnant process implementation, technology misuse, and even burnout.

Skills-based recruitment

One way to combat the growing digital skills gap within your business is by introducing skills-based recruitment. This is a strategy designed to use the skills within your business and fill vacancies with specific skills in mind. These can be digital skills or soft skills necessary for developing a stronger workforce.

Working with a recruitment partner can ensure that you are accessing a wide range of talent, diversifying your workforce, and finding the best talent within your sector. Through a process of talent mapping and skills analysis, you can find the gaps within your current workforce, the skills necessary for supporting your organisational change, and close the digital skills gap between your capabilities and your competitors.

Improved candidate attraction

Candidate attraction is essential for a digital transformation. If you’re wanting to attract stronger candidates with the right skills, your business will need to ensure that it has a good employment proposition to attract the higher quality candidates. This can include working on offering better than industry standard pay, optimised job advertisements, and reaching candidates through the appropriate channels. A trusted recruitment partner will have a history of success attracting the right candidates for your sector and can help develop a stronger employment offer to establish yourself within a competitive job market.

Building a digital-ready workforce

A digital-ready workforce is often an oversight when diving into a digital transformation. The technology alone won’t deliver the benefits that technology enables without an aligned people change programme. It is essential to making sure that your business is seeing a return on investment for the technologies and processes you’re wanting to implement. An unprepared workforce can struggle with the new processes, widen the skills gap, and even suffer from burnout and higher attrition. By reviewing your recruitment and workforce strategies alongside your organisational changes, you can maintain momentum and encourage the right culture within your business for any upcoming changes.

Learn more about how supporting your workforce can improve your digital transformation by contacting your local branch here or learn how to budget for necessary skills-based recruitment activity here.

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