5 Steps For Finding The Digital Star To Transform Your Startup
The complete guide to finding truly special talent
Suppose you want to digitize your business “for real”, where you have a sensible digital strategy and development of existing teams and recruit the digital stars who can close the gaps you have internally. In that case, several different criteria apply. And the most important insight of them all is: it’s largely about diametrically different things compared to “traditional” recruitments.
Even though we all know by now that the digital part is about first developing a solid digital strategy and then internally training your existing team in the things required to realize the strategy, it is an almost even more complex question how to find the digital talents required to take success to the next level. In this post, we will find out just that answer.
More specifically, the five steps required — based on 20 years of strategic experience of digital teams in some 100 companies on 4 continents and the thousands of recruitments I have had in my own digital companies — are discussed below. First of all, a completely different way of evaluating digital personalities and their education is discussed and the right character of the person who carries out the evaluation itself. Then we will look at how you can both attract and then manage the digital talent to realize the full potential of your HR investment. Buckle up.
1. Find the right traits
The goal is to attract a true digital talent who is an expert in delivering digital results within the development, data, or even disruption. But are there other evaluation criteria that apply to digital compared to analog personalities?
Of course, there are things in the personality of a talent (traits) that must match the intended role (R&R) and the organization itself so that there will not be a total cultural clash once they start working. Beyond that, there is a lot to suggest that your digital recruitment process will not be similar to any of the analog star recruitments you’ve done before.
And this is not so much about the nature of the job itself (task).
Admittedly, some things differentiate digital work — whether it regards backend like architecture, platforms, and data science or frontends like UX, UI, and mobile/DT development, whether development and optimization of digital marketing lead generation offsite or within channels like apps, sites or wearables onsite, whether online areas like eCom, eLearning, eHealth, gambling and gaming, or more traditional retail, government, and B2B-industry.
Common for all this is that everything can be measured, aimed at people, and depends on data and technology to succeed. This means that a mindset that is analytical and understands both people and technology has more to gain than what does not. Because the subject is so enormously dynamic, receptivity and creativity tend to be additional typical traits of a successful digital talent.
But when I look back at the diversity of cases of digital success I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing and compare them to those that were less successful, the above common denominators are still not what tends to be the most crucial. Because if we turn our gaze from a more operational inside-and-out perspective (the individual and its tasks) to a more strategic outside-and-in perspective (the turbulent world and its disruptive demands on the organization), then it is something completely different that pops up.
What we then see is how the general context affects the work situation of a digitalist and, thus, the personality that is best at tackling it.
And this is what you as a recruiter must understand, i.e., the seat the digital talents sit in and will still sit in for a long time. You have to understand that this is not like hiring an economist, traditional engineer, or receptionist. There are unique contextual factors that the digital talents will be exposed to in terms of strategic disruption that lead to organizational transformation, and then it’s no longer just the talent’s skills’ that are interesting.
On the contrary, it is a completely different type of personality that is suitable — and even attracted — by this, i.e., the one triggered by the changes, both internally and externally, that she will have to deal with in the future. To cope with various forms of internal resistance, a certain amount of resilience and a good portion of no-nonsense attitude and unpretentiousness can be useful here.
But most of all, an extremely strong “propensity to change”, which, in addition to digital excellence, forms the basis for just about everything that digitalization is about.
In digital leadership, it is now that we come to areas such as change management, while at all other levels, it is about a pathological love of change and improvement. Here, things like restlessness, ADHD, and other letter combinations, which are perceived as negative in most other services, can be a competitive advantage when it comes to digital work.
2. Detect the right skills
Having talent is one thing. It provides a good breeding ground, but if this is not fertilized with the right experience and competence, the very best seeds can wither. So, in practice, a bigger challenge in digital star recruitment is that even when it comes to digital skills, it is even more about completely different evaluation criteria than for analog roles.
The biggest differences here are two. First, that we digitalists live in such an incredibly fast-moving world, competence becomes obsolete extremely quickly. Second, because it concerns things that are not as easy to interview about, they must be tested.
The function of the general for the specific
Because specialist competencies become obsolete very quickly, it brings with it several things. The first is perhaps the simplest and most obvious, i.e., the love of learning in itself — that you are not a “finished” person but a curious star who constantly loves to develop and believes in lifelong learning for real.
Perhaps not as obvious is the interaction between the levels of knowledge, i.e., that
- a) the general digital competence takes a long time to learn and, sometimes, requires talent, while
- b) the specific digital competence is faster to learn and can be somewhat simple and thus faster.
In an analog role, therefore, A is often considered the most important for a leading position, while B may be sufficient for a more operational role.
But since A always makes it easier to absorb new currents in B, this old truth no longer applies in the digital world. On the contrary, to identify your real digital gold nugget, you need to find someone who shows a clear talent in the two dimensions that characterize the “general” digital competence. (Overall competence in both digital strategy (DS) and digital analysis (DA)).
There is no room at all to not “keep up” with such a development in the digital world. It will be expensive homework to recruiting someone who has the needed level within the specific topic today but does not have the potential to do it at least as much, or even better more, tomorrow.
The value of an academic degree?
Some would say that it is a general trend, where it is a fact even when you climb to the top in traditional companies today. Among the CEOs in the US, today, 8% of all CEOs don’t have a full degree (and only 7% have it from Ivy League University), where analog stars like Ralph Lauren, Ray Kroc, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney have historically managed “quite ok” without exams.
And the issue comes to a whole new level as soon as we move on to our digital giants. The CEO and owner of the world’s largest media empire barely lasted even 1 year at college. And if Zuck came in your door today looking for a job as a digital talent, would you say no thanks? Just as you would probably have hired a young Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Daniel Ek, and Jack Dorsey if they stepped in with as much digital drive and tech-savviness as they had non-existent degrees — not to mention the founders to Uber, WhatsApp, Twitter, Fitbit, Stripe, Tumblr, WordPress, Mashable, Dropbox. Etc. etc.
So, for those who want to take their digitalization seriously, maybe you should learn from far-sighted companies like Google, Apple, and others, and eliminate the need for an academic degree when chasing those great digital talents. Or as everyone’s our friend Musk says:
“I do not care if you even graduated high school”
The focus of the education
Does all this mean that academic education is something negative for digital talent? Well, maybe more that universities can often at best be good for preparing for life (PfL), but that at least when it comes to digital, they are no longer as efficient at preparing for jobs (PfJ).
Again, the general v/s the specific. Whether it’s about programming in python and kotlin, platforms and architecture, UX and gamification, or if it is more analytical optimization in SEO and SMM that the current role should operate within, it is not entirely wrong to approach them with both behavioral science knowledge to understand people who search, like, post and convert, and statistics and tech to understand the dynamics of the algorithms that hide behind the systems and the data that respond to the interaction.
But to be at the forefront, a wider understanding is beneficial, outwith the limited selection of sensible things written in digital strategy. Maybe even broader, such as what we have to expect from emerging technologies such as AI, Blockchain, AR, etc. (so-called ABA technologies). All to be able to, if not “lead” the application of those technologies in their sector, then at least understand and predict what is wine and water among all daylilies.
It is difficult to find an academic “degree” that fully qualifies for all the above criteria. On the contrary, it is part of the DNA of digital talent to be the one who “seeks” and paves their path in the digital jungle to reach exactly the knowledge that can help them achieve digital success. And this can just as easily be about an online course in data science, R or SQL at MIT for a month, as self-study of acronyms like MDP, CDP, DXP, and DMP several intensive nights in a row. In neither case is it her academic degree that indicates that the person in question will be the digital talent who will make a true difference.
Attitude versus behavior
When we evaluate these traits and skills, those who are socially grounded and can stuff themselves with a few digital buzzwords always manage to get through a traditional interview. This is where we get into the gigantic difference in attitude and behavior.
Because when it comes to the other big question about what makes digital recruitment so different, I — nerd as I am — have kept statistics on just about all of the thousands of interviews I conducted for more than 15 years in at least half a dozen companies. And no matter how awesome a person you are, and no matter how much I A/B-tested others with interviewing the same talents, it has never been the interviews that had the strongest correlation to digital success among the various talents recruited.
Instead, in addition to reviews and recommendations, it has exclusively been the tests that have significantly impacted the actual results that followed the years to come. “What is done is the truth” thus also applies here — i.e., test on analysis and competence to evaluate the skills, test on problem-solving in terms of traits.
Seeing is believing; trying is knowing.
3. Use the right recruiter
We have stipulated several criteria for what distinguishes a truly digital talent. But what does the recruiter look like who is best suited to use these criteria to detect a true talent?
Anyone aware of the breadth and depth of knowledge, the rapid mobility in the field, and the value of behavior about attitude will soon realize the answer to the question. Because what you have to understand is the seat where the digital talents sit and will sit, in.
This is not like hiring an accountant, management consultant, or bank clerk. There are unique contextual factors that the digital talents will be exposed to in terms of strategic disruption that lead to organizational transformation. And then it is no longer just people’s “skills” that are interesting; it is a different type of personality that is good at — and even attracted to — this.
To attract (and then manage) such a talent, you must have a full understanding of the very “propensity to change” that such a person must be able to have to be triggered by the changes, both internally and externally.
Your HR team is another critical factor. If you have a traditional HR recruitment conducted by general managers or HR teams who do not know their ABC in the field of knowledge the person should work in, it sends a bad message to candidates. It hardly conveys the respect and attractiveness necessary to succeed in recruiting and retaining a star who can seriously lift your digital operations. If this is then followed by mossy questions about personality, talent, and academic degrees, the race is not only run to find that real digital star — it barely got started. It’s also an open goal for the sophist who wants to use some buzzwords to get through your ancient filters and get approved for a well-paid job.
For the charlatan, it is wonderful; he becomes the emperor who can run around with his BS-generator without being revealed that the king has no clothes. For the genuinely digitally passionate, on the other hand, it is a real erotic killer. The only positive thing about such a recruitment process is that if you are not a digital giant, you will not even realize that it is a charlatan (maybe even an academic one) you got into the company. Unfortunately, it is a short-term joy, once it hits the results a year later, or, rather, when the investment in your digital talent does not (!) hit the results a year later.
4. Have the right litter
We have a set of digital evaluation criteria to detect a digital talent with the right personality and skills. We have now given the responsibility to someone who can ensure the quality of the result. And all of this means that we’ve finally found that real star you want.
Now we come to the next big challenge. 15–20 years ago, digital was something that only some special, rather crazy, companies did — and something that “ordinary” companies at most threw out some funny money on. Today, the situation is completely inverted — the “crazy” companies have taken the top position in the world in terms of business, credibility, and self-made billionaires. There is no company, not a single organization, non-profit association, or government, which is not only affected by the digital but must set it as its highest priority.
In the law on market mechanisms, this has had enormous consequences for the demand for digital talent and the skill gap it renders. 90% of executives are experiencing a skill gap in their organizations, and most of it within digital, where over the next decade, the 14 G20 countries in our analysis may miss out on as much as $11.5 trillion of cumulative growth promised by intelligent technologies if they can’t meet future skills demand. Of course, that shows in the wages and demands from the digitally skilled go-getters. If anyone thought it was a transient trend, there is clear evidence to the contrary, where apart from health and cleantech, data scientists, statisticians, and information security people have the highest explosion for tomorrow.
The supply has, in principle, been inhabited by two groups. On the one hand, we have the few “crazy pioneers” like me who were involved when everything started some decade/-s ago. On the other hand, we have the fast-paced younger abilities, which have sprung from the few more digitally oriented fast-paced educations that have emerged to complement broader and cumbersome academic alternatives.
Naturally, neither of the latter two groups has yet had time to become gigantic in terms of volume, and in step with the growing demand, it has had two consequences. First, both groups have been spoiled with sky-high salaries and benefits. Secondly, in cases where the above evaluation criteria and headhunter profile were not in place, even fewer brilliant talents manage to crawl through the holes for extremely well-paid jobs. If you have had 1 digital job before, you have a “looooong” experience, and if you can throw yourself with some digital buzzwords, you are a “digital expert” (and there are often few gutter kids internally who can call you in the seams and reveal that the digital “emperor” has no clothes).
It may seem like an exaggeration to say that it is the “seller’s market,” but when your competitors for the digital talents in a panic offer insanely high salaries and the most generous employee benefits, it is time to look up. That is, what is it that makes the perfect talent you find to accept your offer compared to all the other money-loving lures that rain down on them?
If you try this with only bait tempt like salary and standard package of employee benefits, you will at most be able to catch these wannabees who “sound” like stars and can make you feel stupid by throwing in some nice words.
Instead, we must again go back to the digital personality and what attracts a more genuine digital talent. What triggers a person who has a good portion of receptivity and creativity, who has a certain resilience and authority mixed with social skills and lack of prestige, but who above all has a high degree of the propensity for change? What are they getting started on, what will make them attracted to the task and the workplace you offer, and able to do so with a commitment that leads to concrete digital success for you and your company?
Several things come to mind, but one of the absolute most crucial things to understand is that such a person likes everything that has to do with change. With Generation Greta perhaps most of all, a change that has a meaning, an impact, but at least that it is characterized by the dynamic rather than the static, with more challenges than routine, more development than stability.
In the dawn of the digital world, I had an over-intensive girl who accepted a relatively un-brilliant role at one of my digital spearhead companies in a basement, rather than the financial prettiness company she had just been offered and her father wanted her to take. The reason? Well, she loved the whole digital field, had not learned a single digital knowledge in four years at the prestigious university, and knew that I had the leading knowledge in the industry. She accepted a slave salary and said that she would only be here for a year to learn, then she would go on, but that I would never regret it because she would, quote, “work the shit out of her”. She remained for 1.5 years, became one of Sweden’s real digital stars and later European head of an American billionaire company.
If you look at the broad picture, this type of real digital star can be attracted to a completely different kind of criteria. In particular, we can identify 5 things as the most central:
1. Development: You always want to be at the forefront of your field, have understood the need for lifelong learning, and are triggered by having a budget for continuous education, at best during paid working hours.
2. Task: You love challenges, and even if the job involves certain routine steps, you are triggered by the fact that there is a development around the corner where you not only take care of the continuous optimization but also in some way will work with challenging things like constitutes an important part of the digital development for the entire domain/role/company.
3. Responsibility: you want to be involved, and since you have competence in areas that few others have in the organization, regardless of hierarchy and years in the company, you are willing to take concrete responsibility and authority within your digital domain … rather than an ignorant analogist.
4. Friction: You can handle but do not like internal politics. Apart from pure eCom/mCom and internet companies, friction between analog and digitally educated people will be inevitable. And since the digital personality is attracted to change, one is willing to contribute to transformation, innovation, and disruption and has enough social skills to deliver on it. At the same time, things that take energy from the actual execution of the assignment are seldom positive energy. The less time one spends on internal politics and endless meetings to “awaken corpses” the better.
5. Leadership: You want to develop in your work situation and if you have not done so before, you will immediately notice if you have been charmed by the charlatan who can swing with buzzwords or if you have managed to find your true star. Because while the former is overjoyed to be a big fish in a small shoal — where no one can reveal their ignorance — it is, except for short-term projects, pure death for the star. For him, the best thing is that you are, or can lift yourself to become, the digital sparring partner he needs to reach his full potential (and thus do an even better job). If you cannot, it may be a sound investment to bring in a digital coach — internally or externally — who can do the job.
These things may not apply in just about every case, to every business, and to every digitalist at every stage of her life. If you paint with broad brushstrokes, then the more of these things that you can offer — compared to traditional “employee programs ” — the greater the chance that you will be able to attract that real star that you have found.
5. Coach digital talents properly
So, you succeeded in the end. You had the right digital evaluation criteria and had the right man/woman who did the evaluation. And not only did you know that you really found a genuine star, but you also then managed to muster the right kind of artillery to overthrow her so that she chose you instead of all the other attractive offers that rained down on her.
Together with your new digital strategy, your old skills-developed team has now been supplemented with a real star who can ensure that the digital strategy really will fly. All set to go, no?
Well, you could say that. But if we are to ensure that our new star recruitment becomes a successful investment, you cannot stop here.
The finishing line is the starting line.
If you have put time, money, and energy into succeeding in attracting a real star, it could still prove an unsuccessful investment if he does not approach the task with the commitment required or becomes a misfit with other projects in the organization, or that the environment does not stimulate such a development.
So how do you make sure that your investment gives the predicted return after you hit?
The reason to have a truly awesome digital strategy is not only to have goals and direction for your business, but you also need it to motivate and engage your digital stars to the great deeds they have the potential for. For the highest possible commitment, he should — if not involved in developing it — then at least be responsible for translating its general lines into more operational SOPs for his tasks, making sure to make them as challenging as possible with both good KPIs and tough benchmarks for follow-up.
To ensure a qualitative effort in both these strategic and operational parts, you also keep what you promised when it comes to lifelong learning with frequent visits to seminars and lectures and a continuous update through real digital education (online or offline).
But then we have that the social thing. To reach the next level of human development, individual trailblazers delivering the true moonshots are extremely rare, and to some extent, this also applies to digitalists. We all know what a truly “hot group” can do for a company’s dynamics and development, and if you can create such a revolutionary “internal digital commando squad”, it’s fantastic. Properly handled, the group dynamics generated by such an intrapreneurial squad working within the liberating framework of a data mesh architecture can create results you have not even dared to dream of.
Which group your new talent ends up in is crucial for your new investment to bear fruit. And the smallest group is you as the leader and the one you hand-lead — it takes two to tango. And the guidance you give, the coaching you can offer, is here A and O (and if you do not have the time, do not be afraid to take external help).
So far, we have talked about what is happening within closed doors, internally within the digital team. But as soon as we get outside the team, we reach the next level of internal politics. And should you recruit a pitbull who can rush forward and wake up the whole organization, at the same time (!) as he is an expert in everything that is called digitally at the same time as he should fit into the organization, at the same time as… well then it can be tough.
The dissonance between the analog and digital is large enough in itself, without him having to take 90% of his time to go around like a ferret and handle organization and internal politics. It’s about as smart as letting 90% of doctors’ time be taken up by administration and gives about as fantastic results.
Takeaways— How to recruit real digital talent
A small piece of disclaimer. I would not be who I am if I were not convinced that machines will eventually improve — or take over — this evaluation. And, of course, I will probably not be able to refrain from contributing. But that’s as much a “philosophical” question — once the machines are better at evaluating people than humans are, then will we even need to recruit people anymore?
But as long as we need people, and people are so far better at evaluating people than machines are, the main thing is that you must not only understand the genuine digitalist’s personality and situation but preferably be one yourself.
In the middle of it all, the most important insights are:
- that truly digital stars today are crucial for a company’s future (ends)
- completely different measures are required to succeed in recruiting them (means)
And once you’ve realized that and then managed to make your way through all the five steps to success, you have all the prerequisites in the world to succeed in recruiting a true digital star and enjoy the fruits of this recruitment. Several digital fruits that are not only healthy for your company and its goals but despite often tough challenges both internally and externally, are often extremely stimulating and — in fact — fun for most of us! Break a bunch of legs.
