Gone are the days when Digital Transformation swept across the market or across the organization in a ‘big bang’ approach.

Today it is far more subtle. Industries and individual clients are tackling those areas that can deliver real change and real results and show positive outcomes, not just for themselves, but for the users and for their customers. Tackling a smaller project or a process, changing it for the better and delivering faster, better, and cheaper, is the game of the day.

This can be across far reaching areas such as recruitment, payments, the customer journeys or even customer reporting & analytics. Harnessing Digital Transformation, gaining the economies of scale, harnessing digital technology to provide better ways of doing things, often making them simpler, more direct.

It might not be at the scale we expect, but companies and industries are tackling it in slices. It is more about taking it in bite sized pieces that can easily be digested, that can deliver real change, showing real results, before moving onto the next area or process or even another department. Passion has led us here, passion for change. It is now up to us to make the final leap.

Fintech’s

Fintech’s are adapting fast to meet the needs of the Banks, and other financial institutions. It is regarded as the hot sector at this time. They need ‘Everything-as-a-service’, product automation is possible and can be done at scale with harnessing digital technology. As the pressure increases on price across the ecosystem, we have learnt the lessons from other industries including, media publishing. It is now happening across the financial services industry. Technology is adapting to deliver the change.

Finding the audience and interacting with it, is a lesson we learnt from media publishing over the last decade, feeding its content, adapting the content to individual customer needs. More than most, the financial services industry is built on relationships, built on trust, customers want and demand the detail, the analytics. Fintech’s are providing the Digital Transformation one slice at a time, clients are eating it one bite at a time, to deliver real change to the customer.

Other Industries

Other industries are starting to wake up as well. They might not be embracing the Digital Transformation wholesale, but as innovations happen across processes, or functions, which they can embrace in their own industry, they are following the outcomes that others have had in other industries. If recruitment in the FinTech space is embracing ‘Private online video portals’ delivering Digital Transformation, it starts a revolution. Something that other industries are able to quickly adopt and start to implement their own ‘Recruitment Digital Transformation’. Everyone is learning and sharing, across each other’s industry, across every sector. The impact is being felt on a processes level and a function level, but the benefits are being felt across multiple industries. With what we have all experienced throughout the Covid-19 period, we have all largely moved into digital, into a video era, it has become common place, it has become the norm.

Digital Transformation of Talent Acquisition

Covid-19 has opened the doors to Digital Transformation across the recruitment industry. Agencies will no longer be throwing ten’s, or hundreds of CV’s and resumes to clients, clients will no longer do dozens of face-to-face interviews. Now we can embrace Digital Transformation of the recruitment industry and provide ‘Private online video portals’ for clients and candidates. This lends itself to candidates doing ‘showcase elevator videos’, clients recording the interviews they do with candidates. Those that are short-listed and progressed, have an audit of why they are selected. Clients can review the ‘Psychometric Behavioural Assessments’ and other collateral done on short-listed candidates, regardless of location or on any device. It will lead to a better outcome for clients, for candidates, and for the agencies, and the recruitment industry. Enabling Digital Transformation through ‘Private online video portals’, improving the
process and the decision making, delivering it quicker, saving time, saving money and reducing the overall effort. With more rigor, it delivers a higher level of certainty. It will also deliver better candidate retention, maintaining the corporate IP for longer.

About the Author

Howard Longstaff, has over 25 years’ experience delivery people within the talent acquisition arena. Howard has worked extensively across the UK, Europe, USA, Canada as well as in South America, Australia and New Zealand.

In the last 20 years he has built companies and opened offices in New Zealand, Los Angeles, New York and most recently several companies in London. Specialising in technology companies, delivering both permanent resources across practically every department– and building teams of contractors on three continents. This has predominantly been for technology start-ups but also for many leading management consulting and enterprise clients.

He is a fly fisherman (mainly trout) in his spare time as well as making his own flies and very much a fisherman in business, always looking for that elusive exceptional catch.