Talent shortages are felt acutely in businesses across sectors, and gaps exist in operations, logistics, and sales and beyond. For roles that require technical, business or financial analytical expertise, there are often skills gaps.
Consultancy Korn Ferry estimates that more than 85 million jobs could go unfilled by 2030. In a survey this year of 234 chief financial officers by research firm Gartner, 54% of CFOs ranked hiring and retaining enough staff as their most difficult task over the next 12 months.
Korn Ferry identifies four factors driving the current state of global employment, including rapid economic expansion, a sudden release of pent-up demand for projects that were delayed because of the pandemic, greater demand for digital transformation talent, and a talent acquisition labour shortage that hurts recruitment.
High competition for candidates also creates talent retention problems as qualified candidates can easily find opportunities elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the types of skills that many firms need are changing. Where, for example, a firm typically would search for candidates with accounting skills, now they might seek someone who can make strategic decisions. There’s a need to drive insight, and employers are searching for candidates with the skills for financial planning and analysis.
Finding the right talent – and keeping high-performing employees happy – is a bigger challenge than ever that requires strategic alignment among business functions within an organisation. Stronger collaboration between human resources and finance chiefs will put the organisation in a better position to meet strategic goals.
Getting CFOs and HR to work together to solve the talent question
“Integrating finance and HR systems facilitates collaboration since it aligns headcount planning to the company’s demand drivers and budgets for a more comprehensive, dynamic workforce strategy. This also lets leaders from both groups monitor integral resource metrics such as resource capacity utilisation, cost variance, and ramp-up time needed for a new hire to reach full productivity,” according to an ebook titled 5 Actions CFOs Can Take Now to Fuel Growth and Profitability from enterprise cloud applications company Oracle.
With finance, namely CFOs, and HR working together to ensure employee contentedness, there are strategies that can be deployed to engage with employees to boost retention.
While offering competitive pay is important, it’s not everything. Employees also highly rate career development opportunities and feeling like they’re contributing to something – and they are increasingly demanding flexibility.
An Accenture study identifies four factors beyond compensation to attract and retain talent: Having purpose, support from leaders, using technology to empower their operations, and leaders who invest in people through training and building careers.
Leaders need to understand individuals career goals and help them work toward that.
CFOs who excel at talent management can also spot underperformance and act on it, either by letting the person go or invest time and resources to coach and develop the employee’s skills.
To be more engaged with employees individually, assess their needs and wants, and adequately meet demands to keep workers happy and engaged takes time.
Technology, generative AI are easing the talent crunch
While needing to dedicate more time and resources to retain existing talent, CFOs and HR leaders also must recruit new talent. New technology can be a lifeline on this front, like Oracle’s generative AI platform that can create job descriptions and list needed qualifications, eliminating the need for someone to create the advertisement.
“The only thing we know for certain is that the speed of change is increasing. And by Oracle providing fusion applications, and quarterly releases with hundreds of new features, our job is to partner with you to best adapt to that change, whatever that change may be,” Steve Miranda, the executive vice president of Oracle applications product development, said during a keynote speech at CloudWorld 2023.
Data can be a valuable asset in the toolbox of CFOs an HR professionals, but when data is fragmented across numerous and disconnected systems, solving these colossal challenges becomes even harder.
The solution to these problems starts with consolidating data across different lines of business onto a common platform. This eliminates data silos and gives organisations a single source of truth for all business data.
When a company’s finance, operations, and human resources data reside on a common platform, it facilitates a connected planning approach across the enterprise. With better visibility into human resources and operations data, finance leaders can more accurately plan, budget, and forecast. With all of an organisation’s data on a single platform, leaders can track performance in real time, from employee turnover to inventory turnover to profitability—all in one place. It also allows for managers to adjust plans and correct course when necessary.
Oracle’s solution
Oracle’s native and innovative hiring solution is designed to centralise an organisation’s data, making it possible for leaders to manage all these problems and find solutions within the data. Its build to provide better candidate experiences, drive internal mobility, improve recruiter efficiency, and unify recruiting with the rest of the business.
For multinational firms, Oracle’s human resources software is designed to manage a global workforce whereby professionals can plan, manage and optimise global processes from a single common data source. That allows for better decision making, personalised employee experiences, and the ability to leverage highly configurable workflows that offer scalability and localisation.
To learn more about Oracle’s cloud-based solutions with embedded generative AI capabilities, download the free whitepaper.
