‘If a company’s finance department has risk analysts who forecast business scenarios in one-year cycles, why shouldn’t the human resources department have analytical tools and strategic capabilities to predict talent needs in the evolution of the business and plan to meet them, too?’ That was one of the main ideas raised by Jean-Michel Caye, Senior Partner & Managing Director and Global Head of HR, Talent and Leadership at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), in his talk at the ESADE event ‘Global Trends in People Management’. According to Caye, ‘Human resource management is a strategic piece of the business for tackling the challenges posed by digitalisation, because the competitive advantage in the digital world is not technology, but the talent to move it.’

‘The digital transformation is going to spark a talent revolution: 60% of current jobs will have to incorporate new skills, and 20% of future jobs will be entirely new, created in response to the demand for key digital skills and requiring a high degree of specialisation’, Caye said. ‘As a result, companies will boost their productivity by 30%.’

Referring to these new jobs, he pointed to the emergence of ‘what Google calls “smart creatives”, profiles that combine great inventiveness and ingenuity in tackling complex problems with an ability to translate ideas into concrete technical solutions’. ‘These types of profiles are typical of the millennial generation, people who are willing to work hard, but on the condition that they be given a lot of flexibility and who do not necessarily want to be part of the company.’ As a result, ‘classic talent management strategies – acquisition and development – today include a new category: rental’, he said. However, in all cases companies seek to retain talent. Consequently, the role of the human resources area also requires cultivating the company’s reputation as an employer. ‘We have to become influencers’, he said.

‘The leaders of tomorrow are facing a crucial challenge: how to lend coherence and common sense to all the categories and parts of a company’s workforce’, he explained. To this end, it is necessary to exercise ‘adaptive leadership’, that is, to be ‘strategic and flexible when it comes to handling different levels of uncertainty and inclusive in order to give a sense of unity to diverse teams’. Above all, he warned, ‘you need to be someone who develops people’s talent’, because, ultimately, ‘a company’s culture is key to talent retention’.

Strategic workforce planning

Pablo Claver, Partner & Managing Director and Head of the People and Organisation Area for Spain and Portugal at The Boston Consulting Group, noted that the key to strategic workforce planning is ‘a methodology that serves as a nexus between strategic planning and the implementation of the company’s operational plans’. Such a methodology is essential to handling uncertainty and facing the challenges that digitalisation poses to talent management.

According to Claver, the human resources area ‘has taken on a prominent role in the digital era’ and thus has to become a ‘strategic ally across all areas of the business and participate in the definition of the company’s strategy’. Consequently, ‘human resources departments have to equip themselves with analytical tools, have data scientists and work with dynamic data-driven models to project supply and demand, forecast scenarios, identify gaps and/or surpluses in each function, and respond by means of a strategy’, he explained. Likewise, ‘data analysis will enable these departments to attract better talent and optimise the value proposition as an employer’ without neglecting their classic functions of ‘developing talent through training or mobility plans and talent retention’, he concluded.

The event also featured remarks by Joaquín Cava, a lecturer in the Department of Strategy and General Management at ESADE, and Eugenio Muñiz, Principal for People and Organisation in Spain at The Boston Consulting Group.