Industry digest: Automotive must look to new fields for top recruits

The combination of a chronic skills shortage and a rapidly transforming industry means automotive businesses are having to be much smarter in the way they find and acquire the talent they need. Gone are the days when you could post an advert and wait for the applications to come flooding in. The competition for skills is now so intense that HR teams are having to be much more strategic and intelligence-led in the way they recruit. In many cases, that means looking for talent pools in other sectors because the skills needed to drive the transformation simply do not exist within the traditional automotive industry when it comes to new technologies, big data and changing business models. The shift in automotive retail from the franchise to the agency model is an obvious example. Recently, my company was engaged by a well-known car brand to identify which sectors outside automotive could provide the most fertile talent pools for its new direct-to-customer sales operation. Instead of old-school dealership sales executives, they were seeking people with strong account management skills to manage the customer journey and deliver the best customer experience. Similarly, another manufacturer asked us to look within and outside the automotive sector to find the e-commerce expertise it needed to develop its online sales business. In this case, our talent-mapping research established that the skills it needed were more readily available in online shopping sectors such as supermarkets, clothing and homeware. Based on our work, the company ultimately recruited an e-commerce director from a high street department store. With the industry facing a predicted global skills shortage of 4.3 million workers by 2030, businesses have no choice but to be proactive and research-led in their talent strategies if they want to stay ahead of the game and fight off competition from other sectors. This means that HR leaders need to have a strong commercial focus to set the skills and people strategy to drive business performance. That is not so easy when it comes to balancing the day-to-day HR remit, and some businesses may feel that the skills agenda is so important that it requires someone in a hybrid HR director-chief operating officer role to lead the way. In terms of the on-the-ground intelligence, the growing demand for talent-mapping and other research activities such as salary benchmarking and competitor analysis means I am ringing the changes at my own company, Ennis & Co. Later this month, we will be launching a new, dedicated research division, Ennis & Co Intelligence, to sit alongside our core executive search business. Using our research know-how, internal database and market knowledge, we will help businesses make the right strategic decisions and ensure their talent needs are future-proofed. In an industry that is transforming itself at such breakneck speed, we all need to be fleet of foot and responsive to market needs. Lynda Ennis is the founder of global automotive and mobility executive search company Ennis & Co