Technology is pushing organizations to transform every aspect of their business to digital experiences. This means hiring people who have specific skills sets, experience and cultural expectations. This also means determining who you need to hire for your digital transformation project. Making these hires can prove challenging, but by the time you finish this post you’ll have the smarts you need to hire the right talent to help you build… and manage your digital transformation.
Five Steps to Fundamentally Rethink how to Hire for Your Digital Transformation Initiative
1. Ask The Right Questions
There are a number of questions you can ask when starting your digital transformation project, and we suggest you start with the following:
• What skills sets do I need now, in six months, in three years?
• Do we hire leadership first?
• What does a digital transformation organization chart look like?
• What do I look for in soft skills?
• Do I have the tools in place for the team to start working right away?
• What tools do we need?
These questions can prove challenging to answer, but throughout this post we have thoughts on how you can guide these discussions.
2. Manage Your Expectations
Ultimately, digital has taken marketing from a brand function to a top line sales function, which many companies realize can more effectively, and efficiently, increase top line revenue than the traditional sales function. But it takes a lot of know-how to make that happen. We suggest that you start with understanding your digital transformation goals and as a recent article in Inc. titled: “How To Manage Your KPIs And Expectations During Digital Transformation” recommends, we encourage you to “be realistic about what your organization is capable of.”
3. Start with Strong Leadership
Building on expectations, you need to make sure you have a plan for your digital transformation. This plan should be focused on what you want to accomplish business wise, so you can find a candidate who can evaluate the challenges and clearly articulate how they would solve it. Otherwise, you’re just lighting money on fire. What this means, is that hiring a generalist who can do everything is not the solution for handling a transformation such as this. Instead, your company needs to start with a strong, savvy leader who knows the customers’ needs, and we would suggest, as Inc. does in another post titled, “The Key People You Need On Your Digital Transformation Team,” that you look at your Chief Marketing Officer to fill this role.
4. Find the Right People
Once you have that strong leader in place, you can then fill in the gaps around him or her with consultants or specialist FTEs based on need. As the Inc. post “The Key People You Need On Your Digital Transformation Team,” also stresses, the right people, even more than “technology or strategy… (are the difference) between success and failure.” And one of the key traits the right people need to possess for a digital transformation, is their ability to adapt, because as the video “How to Hire Great Talent for Digital Transformation,” from ca technologies highlights, your job in hiring the right people, is to look to the future.
5. Embrace Transformation
Technology is forcing organizations to transform every aspect of their business to digital experiences. That means hiring people who have specific skills sets, experience, and cultural expectations. Those who don’t embrace digital transformation will be out of business. We suggest you not only embrace it, but proactively manage the transformation… and make the right hires to ensure success.
Technology is pushing organizations to transform every aspect of their business to digital experiences. This means hiring people who have specific skills sets, experience and cultural expectations. This also means determining who you need to hire for your digital transformation project. Making these hires can prove challenging, but by the time you finish this post you’ll have the smarts you need to hire the right talent to help you build… and manage your digital transformation.
