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Identifying and Hiring the Right Talent in Professional Services

Published Date
Author Nada Chaker

Professional services firms face a highly competitive talent market with myriad applicants and a lack of needed skills. Surviving in the industry requires a proactive talent acquisition approach that looks ahead to embrace the workforce you need rather than the workforce you have.

As with many industries, the majority of top-tier professional services firms are inundated with applicants. Soaring unemployment is only increasing interest in these opportunities, making the job of finding the right people that much more challenging. 

The cost to hire a new entry-level employee starts at $4,000, according to Glassdoor. Add training and onboarding that can take six to 12 months, and the expense quickly rises. Hiring the wrong person is quite costly — and time-consuming, requiring a firm to start the hiring process all over again. 

Addressing the skills shortage

Complicating the problem is a skills shortage. According to PwC, “79% of CEOs worldwide are concerned that a lack of essential skills in their workforce is threatening the future growth of their organization.” 

Fortunately, 84% of managers believe learning can help close skills gaps, states LinkedIn Learning’s 5th Annual Workplace Learning Report. Employees agree. The report further found that 60% of employees worldwide equate learning to adaptability.

How can professional services firms reap the rewards of learning opportunities while retaining workers and keeping costs down? To survive, service providers must balance the need for developing new skills with the retention of evergreen skills that will be required for decades. 

Plan for the workforce you need

To be best positioned to stay ahead of competition today and into the future, service providers need the ability to find the right talent — not necessarily new hires — to perform the work the business strategy requires. You need to be able to source new talent and search for existing talent within your data stores. And you need to be able to use that talent data to forecast needs based on strategic company goals. 

What if you could get better results for less time, money and effort while staying focused on driving business results? We’re not talking about replacing people with automation — quite the contrary. We’re talking about automation and machines empowering human workers to do their best work. 

The Beamery Talent Data Platform offers an evergreen, accurate and compliant data set that never lets a candidate relationship go to waste. The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered solution provides recommendations to help you identify what a good candidate for a role looks like. 

It can help you: 

  • Mitigate risk and cost associated with bad hires
  • Eliminate wasted interactions
  • Remove reliance on hiring active applicants
  • Get fresh, curated and engaged talent pools

Take a proactive approach

With a real-time view into accurate and actionable talent data, your firm will be able to see the availability of skills at a glance, providing an actionable understanding of where to source the best talent. This frees firms from focusing solely on external talent, empowering teams to leverage internal capabilities too. This proactive system encourages strategic resourcing, from attracting to engaging and retaining. 

Professional services firms that are able to hire, train and deploy the right capabilities most efficiently will be more resilient to evolving client demands. These firms will also deliver more consistently and, ultimately, grow more revenue. 

Taking a proactive approach to talent recruiting can help you focus your efforts in areas that hold the most promise for executing your defined business strategies. Investing in your internal talent by growing, upskilling and reskilling workers can put your firm in the best position to future-proof your talent acquisition strategy. This, in turn, can help your organization increase efficiencies, maximize profitability and keep up with client demand.

Learn more about how Beamery can help professional services firms attract, engage and retain top talent.