Thinking about the next investment that can make you profits and scale up your business? Start investing in your ‘people’!

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Scaling up in business requires multiple approaches - a great business idea, a budget-friendly marketing plan, the technology used, etc. But, the most important factor to scale up a business is an effective people strategy - a very smart move, when it comes to underpinning business outcomes. Many times, business strategies are designed without considering the needs of the people and describing how they deliver and achieve business goals.  

People strategy and HR strategy are as different as chalk and cheese. Confusing the two can break the success of your business and especially your people. While an HR strategy is focused on policy and transactional functions, a people strategy makes sure that the right people are hired for the right roles and deliver the right outcomes at the right time. 

Irrespective of what it is called, an effective people strategy is all about people and their needs. Companies having a great people strategy in place, retain their best employees, accelerating the speed of their organization’s success alongside.

Here are some important tips to devise an effective strategy:

Finding that elusive fit

If you thought, finding the right talent for your organization was an easy task, and then maybe you haven’t experienced that yourself. There are many emerging profiles that didn’t exist a few years ago and these don’t have clearly defined roles and accountabilities. Entrepreneurial setups demand specific traits like skill versatility, compatibility with extended hours and comfort with no well-defined hierarchies. Then there’s another aspect of passion alignment and cultural fit, with some companies. Start-ups too lag in attracting good candidates as their brand is still anonymous.

In fact, at least 70 percent of HR managers and recruiting experts depend on other recruitment management system to hire people for them. (Source - Talentlyft)

To find the best fit for organizational culture and success, cast a net as wide as you can and dig-out talent. Here, technologies like AI can help. Going beyond traditional channels and making use of innovative recruitment avenues can go a long way in getting the best matches for your organization. Try building a quality talent pipeline. 

Hiring people who can hire well 

Most companies do not have a full-service hiring department, majorly due to cost-intensity. Employers here usually have negligible or no exposure to the hiring terrain or handling the intense and complex recruiting exercises. 

Lack of strategy, tactics, skills, tools, and information can be expensive and yet prove positively crippling. Besides, reducing labour efficiencies and opportunity costs usually ends with a bad hire.  

The best strategy to overcome this is by implementing a bespoke recruitment structure and custom-crafting a talent machinery that is synced closely with organizational challenges and goals. Deploy an end-to-end talent engine that makes sure the solution is easy to implement and understandable by all. It is important to leverage technology to stay ahead in the competition. For hiring the right candidate, it is crucial to have expertise on talent mapping, the structure of hiring and the organization, availability of talent pool and the right people strategy.  

Having a strong employer branding

84 percent of job seekers consider leaving their current employer if a competitor has a better reputation. In fact, the majority reads at least six reviews to form an opinion before applying to a company (Source - Glassdoor). 9 out of 10 candidates apply when employer brand is actively maintained (source - Beamery). These are few stats highlighting the importance of employer branding (EB) – especially for early-stage companies, where a clear organizational philosophy, values, and culture is either missing or in a formative stage. 

Employer branding is all about positioning it as a great place to work, that begins with great candidate experience. Many companies lack awareness, time and resources to handle EB on their own. If done right, apart from getting in top talent, EB can also reduce cost per hire (CPH), by up to a whopping 43 percent. 

It is important to build a targeted employer personality that is aimed at your best worker. Make every touch point memorable and focus on enhancing candidate experiences at every step. Make use of leverage bots, analytics and AI to boost engagement. 

Using technology to ease tasks and for increased efficiency

There are many digital recruitment tools to help companies in hiring as well as managing, retaining, and developing employees. Many employee digital platforms use these tools and integrate as systems to expand the company’s labour pools, refine searching, recruiting processes and in screening and deploying employees effectively.  

Such easy-usage systems can empower companies in choosing the right person, identifying skills gap, upgrading employees’ by training, developing capabilities, charting career paths, and nurturing the development of future leaders. 

Learning solutions like alt learning, Employee lifecycle solutions like HR SaaS, payroll solutions, conversation, and chatbots are hugely easing tasks of HRs and organizations.

Being agile for unplanned hiring needs

Almost all the growing companies have been in a position wherein, they are planning to open a branch in a new city or country in a short time. This requires careful planning and integration of many systems. Firstly, hiring an HR to recruit people for a specified location is not an easy task! What if you already have a system with extensive data about a particular location for screening, hiring and recruiting candidates? There are softwares that can efficiently shortlist, hire and deploy a candidate within a given time. Solutions that take data-driven recruiting, HR Analytics, social-media recruiting, video interviews, etc. into account, can help in easy, quick and right hiring.  

When there is such reliable software, let the experts do the task!

Using structured and flexible options to scale up 

With unstructured hiring and lack of professional systems that can hold up the momentum and intricacies companies often have a cloudy vision of growth. Already full with manpower, fund and resource constraints, the additional responsibility of full-fledged recruitment machinery can be overwhelming. As hiring inevitably generates into an ad-hoc and as the management starts taking decisions, disconnected with hiring, the larger business goal suffers.  

Here it is important to realize what’s working and what’s not – in real time. It is important to deploy next-generation tech to solve ‘mysteries’ & decide smartly. As mentioned above, the use of AI, technology and effective recruitment solutions can be utilized to find the right candidate.  

All of the challenges and solutions mentioned above, come with own share of complexities. For companies to scale consistently, they have to stop treating manpower functions an afterthought and ensure talent mandates are managed by the right people. At PeopleStrong, we understand the concerns of employers and employees, easing tasks by empowering the HR and making work experience better. We offer solutions that can increase bandwidths which include recruitment solutions, employee life cycle solutions, payroll solutions, learning solutions, and conversations & chatbots. 

As they say, “Talent is a universal gift. But it takes talent to find it.”

Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article above are those of the authors' and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of this publishing house