Why hiring great talent is critical for digital transformation

With the rapid pace of technological advancement, businesses must keep up with the latest tools and strategies to remain competitive. One industry that has been significantly impacted by digital transformation is retail. From e-commerce to mobile payments, digital technology has revolutionised how retailers interact with customers. However, it’s not just about technology. Hiring the right talent is crucial to driving digital transformation further and achieving long-term success.

The common misconception is that digital transformation is all about technology, but the truth is that it’s mostly about people. While it’s true that you can purchase any technology, your ability to keep pace with the ever-evolving digital landscape depends on developing new skills and bridging the gap between the demand for talent and its supply. It’s essential to future-proof your own and others’ potential to stay ahead in the race for digital transformation as without the right talent, these critical digital initiatives could be at risk. A digital talent strategy isn’t just about meeting today’s rapidly advancing digital business conditions it is about future-proofing your workforce to ensure it is resilient enough to cope with changing market demands and better able to evolve and develop newer capabilities to continuously evolve digital transformation. 

Placing talent at the forefront is crucial: While technology aims to achieve more with less, it is only effective when complemented with the right human skills. Though technological disruption has led to the automation of certain roles and the elimination of outdated jobs, it has also created new opportunities. Innovation is often regarded as creative destruction, with people playing a crucial role in its creative aspect.

If we can leverage human adaptability to reskill and upskill our workforce, we can enhance both humans and technology simultaneously. The most brilliant innovation will be rendered useless if we lack the skills to implement it, and even the brightest human minds will become less valuable without the support of technology. This highlights the importance of investing in people who can effectively utilise technology, rather than solely focusing on investing in technology.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, companies that can identify their talent requirements and effectively meet them have a significant competitive advantage.

So how do you prepare for an even-more-digital future? 

To attract top digital talent, companies should consider more than just minimum requirements like salary and respected tech leadership. They should also appeal to individual candidates’ specific needs and motivations. This can be achieved by understanding the factors that drive different types of candidates and adjusting the company’s pitch and work environment accordingly. Some industries, like automotive, manufacturing, or energy, may offer unique opportunities to work with cutting-edge technology and address challenging problems, such as transitioning to a net-zero economy.

To successfully attract digital talent, companies should also develop an accurate picture of their tech culture and hire for specific profiles that align with the overall organizational mix. This includes defining clear expectations and minimizing confusion. Culture has historically been a major barrier to delivering impact from digital initiatives, so it’s essential for organizations to set a vision that aligns with both strategy and culture.

Team dynamics within the cultural landscape are also critical. Employers should pay close attention to their collaboration models and consider the importance some employees attach to working with groups outside of their own specialties. Peer groups and the level of responsibility should also be accurately pitched to avoid disinterest and high turnover. With these factors in mind, companies can create a compelling value proposition for digital talent and build successful teams.

The success of your digital transformation depends on the quality of your talent and technology strategies, as well as the capabilities of your senior leadership, including lead data scientists who can drive the transformation. These leaders shape the organisation’s future by setting technical standards, establishing ways of working, and hiring the right candidates.

To ensure the success of your digital transformation, invest time in conducting a comprehensive search for the right leaders. The appointment of a chief digital officer (CDO) is especially critical as this individual sets the tone for subsequent hires. Allowing the CDO to hire from the top down, starting with senior roles and moving to junior roles, will facilitate the search for lead data scientists, data engineers, software engineers, and technical architects. The CDO’s experience and credibility will also help attract top-tier talent to the company by contributing to the employee value proposition.

It is important to note that taking shortcuts with early hiring could delay transformations. Therefore, organisations should proactively set up the digital leader for success by ensuring that the CDO has influence and a seat at the table and that the program is large enough to require commitment and conviction from the C-suite.

Incorporating new skills and culture is essential for the success of any organisational transformation. Nonetheless, there is a need to weigh the advantages of immediate wins against sustainability. While all companies require these skills longer term, the consideration is the extent and timing of the need, and if you have an immediate requirement to deliver on a project then utilising contractor roles can help you get to meet these deadlines. 

The rapid and continual advancements in technology over the past 18 months have only intensified the existing labour market’s constraints. The search for highly skilled tech talent has become increasingly challenging.

The digital revolution has created numerous opportunities for expansion. However, it has also generated a crisis for several hiring managers, HR departments, CIOs, and even CEOs. This has led them to reevaluate their hiring and growth strategies.

How can Troi help you hire talent to drive digital transformation?

We partner with organisations operating in many sectors globally that require hiring at scale to build a tech team ready to drive digital transformation. Our unique embedded subscription-based recruitment service shortens the traditional recruitment hiring process and saves against traditional agency spend.

The shift toward tech

With many sectors, particularly retail facing a race to modernise and replace legacy architecture with the advancement of technology altering the consumer behaviour and global challenges such as the aftermath of Covid, it is really showing how important it is to have a slick e-commerce solution across the entire customer journey. With many HR teams already stretched, it can often be quicker, and cheaper to outsource some or all of the HR function to a talent partner, such as our embedded hiring model that works alongside organisations providing and end-to-end recruitment process via a fixed fee monthly package. 

From Supply Chain, Warehouse Management Solutions, Smart-Stores, Mobile, Cloud/Platform, Robotics/AI there needs to be a robust system in place to keep up with the latest consumer environment. This has generated a huge shift in engineering culture. Moving from large releases to straight-to-production working, organisations need engineers comfortable with modern methods such as chaos testing, containerisation, and continuous improvement.

A flexible hiring solution

We are Troi, and we’ve reimagined RPO. Global pioneers of the embedded recruitment model providing in-house talent acquisition teams to help you hire at scale and retain on a flexible monthly basis. 5 years in and we’re more than just hires. We become your embedded talent partner by placing a multi-disciplinary talent team to take care of your end-to-end recruitment process primarily focusing on tech and commercial recruitment.

We have an extensive database that has been built up over many years with highly skilled tech candidates and working with organisations to develop their brand and streamline their hiring processes we know how to support organisations in attracting and hiring such high calibre talent. 

Our recruiters have hired over 500+ across Product, Data, and Engineering for well-known retail brands. From SREs to Data Scientists, they have extensive knowledge of how to find and attract the very best talent for you in the market.

They’re experienced across every level of business, hiring entry-level roles all the way up to C-Suite. They are also proficient in building teams across multiple disciplines within tech that has proven to deliver on business objectives.