Job Seekers Skill’s that are needed toady, answered by Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.
What does it take to win the hiring wars these days?
According to Accenture CEO Sweet, hiring is the right place to start. When we think about talent, we actually think about how do you access talent? How do you hire it? How do you become a creator of talent so that you don’t always have to hire it? And then once they’re here, how do you unlock the potential of talent? And when you think about hiring, we’ve actually added to our workforce in the tightest labour market in history, at least our history, 200,000 people in the last 18 months.
Over that time, we’ve had 4.6 million resumes. And so we use what’s called a high-tech-enabled, high-touch recruiting model. We use technology to help us match the resumes with our needs, and our needs are really broad.
Can you talk about what skills a job seeker should have ?
Let’s just start with one of the most important things that we look for actually, no matter who you are, is your ability to learn, learning agility. Because we know that while we may hire you for a certain set of skills, the rate of change and the need for skills is quite rapid. So there’s lots of research on this, that skills that were around in the Fortune 500, for example, in 2017, that approximately 40% are no longer relevant.
As we think about our own business, we start with learning agility and we ask a very simple question to all of our applicants, senior and junior. Those who are coming from school, we ask it slightly differently because they’re in school. “What have you learned in the last six months that was not part of school?” is what we add for those who we’re recruiting on campus. And what we’re looking for are individuals who naturally learn things.
The point is, can the applicant respond to that question? It’s a really simple, but very effective way of understanding whether you’re hiring someone who likes to learn.
What does reskilling look like at Accenture?
Let’s go back to the pandemic in March of 2020. And when the pandemic hit, there was a big shift online, as we all know, and all of a sudden we had incredible demand.
Similarly, there was a big acceleration of the move to the cloud, of needing cloud skills. And so what reskilling for Accenture looks like is we actually have a database of all our client-facing people. We know what their skills are. We’re able to use AI algorithms to identify who could be reskilled, what family of skills are close to what we have more demand on, and then we can actually do the reskilling.
In the first six months after the pandemic, we upskilled about 100,000 people with programs that ranged from eight to 15 weeks, depending on what we were upskilling them for. And we were able to do so very rapidly, which enabled us to emerge from the pandemic much faster, because we could shift our people towards the new places of demand.
I think it’s good to end perhaps on a hopeful note, as I do believe that there’s a ton of reason for hope, and I see so many great women continuing to rise in companies, and that’s what you need. You need a pipeline in order for it to be at the top.