Howdy,
Well, what a wild week in the world – particularly in America where there is about to be a whirlwind of craziness that we will feel the aftershocks of (as is always the way). A trend I’ve been noticing over the past 6-12 months is the de-prioritisation of DEI, and the concept of “making the world equitable and fair” falling out of the zeitgeist and being replaced with “actually … that’s enough of that – we should be treating everyone the same, and DEI initiatives are disadvantaging us!”. This rhetoric is about to really ramp up, and many large organisations are publicly (and proudly) announcing they are ceasing DEI programs, redeploying their DEI teams and focusing on old traditions.
Gemma Saunders posted a quote this week by Matt Bernstein that I thought was perfect – “The sun does not care if you sign an executive order telling it to stop rising each morning. It just continues to rise.” This quote has never been more true than now, and it’s so important that as queer people and allies, we continue to rally behind our alphabet family around the world.
So … circling back () to last week’s TWIT where we ran through a 2024 Talent Post Mortem activity to set the benchmark for 2025, NOW it’s time to actually set some work-related goals for our talent pursuits this year and start preparing for some of those emerging trends we’re seeing start to rear their heads.
My colleague Natalie (Head of Talent Advisory @ We Are Charlotte) and I were chit-chatting last week about the trends we are already seeing this year with our clients when it comes to talent, and the big one that is emerging is budgets … OR lack-there-of, to be precise. Our clients are coming to us with a small budget, and wanting to get the biggest bang for buck with the funds they have available. The ‘doing more with less’ trend is going to be hanging around for at least the first half of 2025 (if not longer).
This got Nat’s brain buzzing, and she launched a poll to understand how her network is approaching the ‘do more with less’ vibe, and what people are prioritising instead. The results so far are:
- 39% of you are prioritising critical roles
- 32% of you are upskilling your internal teams
- 21% of you are investing in smarter processes
- 7% are leveraging freelance talent
You can incorporate these results into your planning and roadmap for 2025. In order to work with small budgets or small teams (or both), you might want to consider:
- Identifying your critical roles, and ensuring that those roles have an adequate succession plan in place
- Exploring upskilling programs in line with the skills your organisation will need over the next 12-24 months
- Establishing an internal mobility strategy and process, to encourage skills sharing and increase retention rates (ultimately lowering recruitment costs)
- Exploring opportunities to review, refine and optimise your current recruitment processes to focus more on value-adding tasks and limit the time-consuming low-value tasks
You all know that service design and human-centred design thinking are my jam, and those methodologies can be applied to all of these. If the problem you’re solving for is “Help I have no money but need to achieve lots of things” then this type of thinking will help you solve that problem with an approach that meets you where you’re at.
I’ve popped some resources below that can help with this thinking (and as usual, I’m always up for a chin wag if you want to brainstorm how this might work, obvs! I love to chat about this stuff over a coffee!)
Top 8 Recruitment Trends for 2025
Closing skills gaps is something that our clients are talking about, in line with the trends this article is highlighting (and what I spoke about above). People are starting to look internally for the skills they need, rather than focusing on the external talent market which is a costly way to run a business.
7 Trends That Will Shape HR in 2025
I found some really interesting insights here that I hadn’t seen before, particularly around ‘skills over degrees’ (aka the end of Graduate Programs as we know them), people analytics moving up the ranks to be a much higher priority, a rise in employee incivility (see my comments above around needing to rally for our ‘diverse’ friends now more than ever), and the effects of financial stress seeping into the workplace with rising cost of living. Super interesting!!
Workforce Planning: A Complete Practical Guide 2025
We LOVE a practical guide, particularly for something as complex as workforce (or succession) planning.
The Rise of Fractional Hiring – What It Is, How It Works, and Why It’s Trending
The word on everyone’s lips is “fractional”, and for good reason. Why hire one person into a role, with one skill set that adds to your establishment and overheads, when you could hire a fractional team of experts for the same price? Huh?! Why wouldn’t you?! WHY WOULDN’T YOU?!?!?!?
