The War for Talent - And the shift from Inbound to Outbound Recruiting!

Its heating up. I’m not referring to the term used in basketball when a player starts to make the majority of their shots and takes over the game. I’m actually referring to the war for talent that’s currently witnessing the world’s leading telecommunications group, the world biggest e-commerce and cloud computing player, the leading investment banking firm, a French banking and financial services company, a firm that offers research solutions to medical and pharmaceutical companies and a German multinational engineering company – all compete for a specific talent persona.

We’re talking about the much in-demand Data Scientist role. Traditionally firms had industry specific competition and talent wars. With technology becoming the backbone of most enterprises and basis the speed of which mobile, cognitive technologies and IOT are transforming the business landscape, the lines are blurring when it comes to attracting top talent specifically for hard to find, niche and emerging roles. Today you no longer have an ITES player only looking at its peers in the ITES space to attract top talent. No longer are engineering firms only looking at their top counterparts. The table below outlines that Vodafone, Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Societe Generale India Development Centre, Indegene and Bosch India are all hiring for one key job family – that of Big Data and are looking to build teams that will help build new age capabilities in house. Fascinatingly all of them are hiring for this very role in Bangalore.  

At Belong, the world’s first outbound hiring platform, we’re obsessed with data. We often like to look at recruiting with a data lens and objectively evaluate what the talent landscape is like for roles we’re hiring and our customers or potential prospects would be looking at. When we had a look at the above chart, we decided to look at and unearth what the talent landscape is like specifically for the big data / data scientist job family in India. Below are a few insights.

The total talent pool in India for Big Data Scientists is estimated to be a little over 4000 people. While that may sound as a very small number, that’s the reality. If you look at Data Analysts, broadly India has more than 75,000, however, specifically people who’ve worked on and have solved for big data problems, the pool boils down to just 4000. Majority of data scientists in India bring 2 to 5 years of industry experience – this comprises 33% of the data scientists India pool. A mere 10% of the total pool have experience of 12+ years leading to a serious talent crunch when it comes to senior and leadership roles. 

When we looked at the data from a geographical lens, Bangalore emerged as the hub for Data Scientists. Delhi / NCR came second, Mumbai and Hyderabad were almost evenly tied at third.

Interestingly, 28% of the Data Scientists came in from Tier 1 Institutions like IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, IIT Delhi, BITS Pilani and IISc. Per our research this number seemed to be exceptionally high as for generic skills like JAVA and Mobile Developers we generally find this to be correlating a mere 5% to 6% of the total talent pool from Tier 1 institutes.

Given that competition for this talent is extremely high and this a much in-demand and emerging skill set, it’s important that companies rev up their recruiting engines to hire them not only on-demand, but also at scale. Traditionally most companies embrace inbound hiring techniques where jobs are posted on their career websites along with leading job portals and social and professional networks and then candidates are expected to apply should they find the role interesting. Specifically, for these roles, where talent availability is scarce, firms need to flip their inbound strategy and embrace outbound.

If you look at engaging candidates purely from a marketing angle, candidates are often bucketed in five different stages: those that are unaware about your brand, those that are aware about the problem you’re trying to solve, those aware of the solution framework, concept and mindset you can deploy to the problem you’re solving, those who’re aware about a product you have that’s currently solving a problem and lastly those who know that your company solves the very problem. While inbound recruiting will work for people who’re aware about what your company does and along with ones aware about your product, those in the other three stages will struggle to understand or even know about who you are and what problems you’re solving for.

For instance, often people will have a notion that IT firms and internet firms scout for prime big data talent. The fact that the world’s leading telecommunications group, a firm that offers research solutions to medical and pharmaceutical companies and a German multinational engineering company – all are actively hiring for Big Data Scientists is something that people need to know and be educated about. And just broadcast advertising which doesn’t offer precision targeting and high engagement touch-points isn’t going to help.

What’s rather needed is the ability to curate top talent in a particular location and then engage with them via personalised interactions. The essence of building, being a part of and contributing to a community becomes critical from a talent engagement perspective. If firms are hiring for roles in single digits, recruiters need to be trained and up-skilled with the ability to score stellar sales pitches to curated talent pools and leverage the power of personalisation to evince their interest. If the number of roles open is in higher double or triple digits, the ability to engage top talent via automated personalised reach-outs then becomes a no brainer. This is where modern recruiting teams use outbound hiring platforms that leverage the power of artificial intelligence, big data and personalisation to hire at scale.

Firms that understand the difference between inbound and outbound today are leveraging the internet and online communities irrespective of whether its Github or Stackoverflow for top technology talent, Kaggle for top data science talent, Dribbble or Behance for top UI / UX talent and then of-course there’s also LinkedIn, Twitter and other mainstream social platforms.

Was invited by Dr.Pallab Bandyopadhyay to guest edit this quarter's NHRDN journal on social media and human resources for which I begun authoring this piece. In this edition of the NHRD Journal, we’re fortunate to have the social media elite – people who get social media, get business and get why the intersection of these two is critical to hire top talent and they’ve shared their views with us. We start with legends in the form of DP Singh – Ex CHRO of IBM India and currently Senior Executive Vice President at Chandigarh University talk to us about Talent Intelligence and Building the Workforce of the Future followed by Cipla’s Global Chief People Offier Prabir Jha who converses with us about The Neuroscience of Engagement. There’s also Anand Talwar - CHRO at ITC Infotech who talks about How to Create Optimal Collaboration on Global Virtual Teams.

While Gautam Shetty from Maersk talks about building trust for your brand using social media, Deepak Babu from Akamai writes about leveraging technology to improve candidate experience. Sindhu Subhasini from Brillio shares her perspectives on being a trusted strategic advisor to business and Savita Hortikar from Thoughtworks addresses a very important discussion on diversity on brining women back to work. Taruna Reddy from Tesco chimes in on meaningful engagement in an era of content saturation while Kevin Freitas from Dream11 talks about the future of work. Dennis from Intuit talks about the perils of AI while Mohan Kumar pens very interestingly defining ourselves with “What happens to us” in the moment. Mino Thomas from HP chips with how stellar leaders are engaging the changing workforce today while Sarang Brahme from Capgemini questions whether the future will revolve around AI and bots as Naveen Narayanan from Sapient chips in with his thoughts on hiring with data metrics reimagined. Manmeet Mahiwal from Baker Hughes brings in an interesting perspective of the progressive intersection of talent branding and recruitment.  

With this super exciting line up of articles all set to super charge your reading around talent attraction, acquisition and engaging experience, it is evident that social media and new age talent mindsets have clearly enabled firms to thrive in this era of mega trends. Here’s to you, making the most of it!