Were you an early adopter of the cell phone or were you skeptical, not eager to be available to everyone all the time? Can you believe that people thought that way? What did it take to change that person’s mind to adopt this new technology? To not consider all angles of response to a change, will inevitably leave gaps in adoption.
Let’s paint this picture: Growing a centralized sourcing structure to a group who has mainly been comfortable doing their sourcing, running their recruiting desk, how do you convince them that this model is not a threat? Take it a step further, introducing a technology, or multiple technologies, that will do some of that sourcing, initial screening and assessing of candidates for them. How do you position that change to a team? How do you then maximize the team’s strengths to support the change? These are the questions that are bubbling to the surface in the Talent Acquisition space as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” gets underway.
According to research done by Gartner, the typical organization today has undertaken five significant firmwide changes in the past three years — and nearly 75% of organizations expect to multiply the types of significant change initiatives they will take in the next three years. Half of the change initiatives fail, and only 34% is a definite success.
I have certainly experienced my share of failures when trying to implement a change in the process. What I have also seen is the magic that happens when a change is adopted. There is that “lightbulb” moment of how much better or more efficient the change makes to a process. So how do we manage change in the changing time?
Build trust
Identify Champions
Leadership Support
Data to support the value of the change
Be Flexible
Continuous Training
In the world of recruiting and sourcing, change is constant, whether you are building a team of sourcers, implementing new processes or ideas, or pulling together a full technology stack with all the AI bells and whistles. Managing the change along the way will be challenging. What I have seen to be true about sourcers is they are chameleon-like and tend to quickly adapt to change. Often, they are the individuals who are bringing forth new strategies and change themselves, so they are well-positioned to be change champions.
As our world moves rapidly toward this new revolution, examine how you can be an agent of change rather than a barrier.