Insights by Andy: SHL’s Roadmap Guiding Organizations through 2021

Hi and welcome! Before I talk about what we have in store this year — I want to take time to reflect on 2020, and some of the lessons we have learned.

Key Learnings of 2020

1. One of the first lessons we learned was that we proved remote and virtual working could be effective and useful for us as many businesses were forced into a remote working environment.
2. The second thing is we learned that culture actually can be crucial to business strategy. As I look at the strongest organizations and how they dealt with the pandemic and with big topics like Black Lives Matters — we see strong cultures coming through and really driving these businesses into new levels and into different directions. This only proves that culture needs to be a key part of any organization, and it is a key indicator of success.
3. The third part is adaptability and those organizations who are able to quickly pivot into new directions — those that were able to accelerate digital strategies and maybe change into different segments of the market that drove success. Organizations that are adaptable and have people who are adaptable within them were able to be more successful.
4. The final area is transformational leadership. What is needed of leaders now is very different than what was needed ten years ago — in terms of their ability to transform organizations in an adaptable way. But also, we have seen strong leaders with a very human way of addressing the pandemic – they took care of their people as well as their people’s families as the pandemic continued.

So those are some of the learnings from 2020 that we can bring into 2021.

My Market Analysis for 2021

What do I expect to be different in the market this year, or things to watch out for? Well, clearly the virtual working, remote working, and doing all things virtual will remain and will be a key part of how we adapt and change to do business in the future.

I think that hiring is one of those – virtual hiring – we have seen hiring volumes up by 50% over the year before at the back end of last year. So, hiring has increased for many organizations as they look for new skills and new roles to take them into this new year.

Talent Management will continue to increase this year as well – part of that will be virtual, for example, many companies are moving away from traditional assessment and development centers towards virtual models. They are also looking at how they can assess their workforce to pivot and adapt to changes more quickly in 2021.

I am sure there will be similar levels of changes and pivoting of the workforce as we saw in 2020. Our customers are thinking about using technology as an enabler to understand the entire workforce and how to change and adapt it very quickly will be key.

SHL’s 2021 Roadmap

Finally, what to expect from SHL…

SHL has had a very busy 2020! We have been building out our capabilities in four areas – building out the product portfolio, the look and feel, so it is a consistent and a great candidate experience. We now have everything from our traditional assessment to video interviewing to coding to skills and language – a very broad product portfolio.

Our Global services remain, we have fantastic service people around the world who support our customers.

We built out two new capabilities — one that we call experiences – which is our workflow, content management, and candidate feedback. So, all of the bits you need to build a great candidate experience are part of what we call our experience capability.

And then insights are the visualization of data, including people insights, and the ability to pivot that data quickly to make better decisions and get better outcomes.

Our solutions are built on these four capabilities, which gives customers who buy from us consistency across those different solutions. The design works together, which means they are scalable and future-proof.

The functionality that is released with experiences will be available to customers as they go through their journey with us, and hopefully a multi-year journey, so they do not have to refresh their solutions all the time.

For us, it is about the capability we need to design great solutions in both Talent Acquisition for customers as they think about their hiring needs, and also for Talent Management when they think about their employee needs. We provide them both on one platform, which is quite unique in this industry — to be able to serve both Talent Acquisition and Talent Management on a single platform. Our customers can join up the journey for hiring a candidate through to becoming an employee in a more consistent way.

So, 2021 for us promises to be a very, very exciting year! We are looking forward to working with our customers and our prospects to make sure we are delivering what you need to get the best outcomes from your people.

If you would like to learn more how we can help you make the best talent decisions, please explore our Talent Acquisition and Talent Management solutions.