Foto von rawpixel.com auf Unsplash

Is matching of project roles with candidate profiles still up to date?

7 February 2018 - Priska Burkard

Digitisation is everywhere, in your home, your office, your daily life. And with it comes the fear of losing work, jobs that won’t be necessary anymore and tasks that will be done by computers and robots. But what is left once everything is digitized? Are we all out of work? The key lies not to think in jobs and profiles but in tasks and skills. With this blog entry I will show you what job matching should be really about and how recruiting could be improved. With the right matching approach, people need not to fear the digitisation as skills and expertise are still required.

What are you looking for?

While working as a Project Manager, I often had to fill positions with external resources. The reason was, that the tasks ahead were very specific and we only needed the resource for a pre-defined time. The usual approach is to identify the tasks and derive a role profile from it which was then given to the procurement team for sourcing. As sometimes these tasks varied a lot, we ended up with a profile that was a mix of different roles; we needed a Project Manager, a PMO, a Business Analyst, a Change Manager and a Test Manager – and this all in one person! One can clearly see that this is almost impossible to find.

Lost in translation

At this point the Project Manager tries to find the most important tasks adds the best fitting name of a profile and provides the description to the Procurement specialist. Now they are then in the lead finding a fit for the position and will translate the requirements once more to be published and distributed. During this process, a lot of information will go missing. While translating the requirements into a profile description, the procurement specialist is lacking the necessary knowledge or expertise to fully understand what the Project Manager needs. This could lead to a lengthy sourcing process, since the Project Manager might not be satisfied with the proposed resource by the procurement team and the process has to iterate a couple of times.

Change your matching approach

But why is there a need to translate? The more obvious approach to be able to find a perfect match for a project would be to focus on the tasks to be done rather a profile description. A candidate’s title or profile can be very limited in regards to the experience and skills. While candidates would call themselves a Project Manager, they might have equal experience as Business Analyst or Change Manager, depending on the tasks they have taken on in their past jobs. In this situation it must be more important to match the tasks on hand with the skill and expertise a candidate has in his resume.

Taking advantage of the available

As Project Manager, one does not think in role profiles when it comes to planning a project. A plan consists of tasks, milestones and resource allocation. Wouldn’t it be of advantage, if it would be easier to assign resources to these planned tasks, based on their skills and expertise rather than their job title? Thinking in tasks is something a Project Manager does already today, therefore the need for translation from a task to a role profile and back to the tasks once a resource is engaged will be completely unnecessary if tasks can be matched to skills directly.

On the other side, there is not only an advantage for the project and companies requiring resources. Imagine as a candidate, a job profile does not limit you to certain jobs, but skills and expertise will allow to do tasks, which might not be considered as part of the candidates outlined job profile. Such an approach would help to open up more opportunities for candidates as not only their expertise and skills will be considered for matching, but also the passion and preferences will be taken into the matching calculation. Candidates will be able to do tasks, they really love as even interests and passion outside an employment can be considered.

Facing the war of talent with the right matching

Even though the above approach makes sense and might be logical, the reality might not be as easy; the matching can hardly be done manually as the processing of the data and information would take a long time. Although the tasks are described in job offers, to be able to match them to skills would still need a lot of experience if done by Procurement team. Also in this situation the digitisation provides a huge advantage; with cognitive computing, machine learning and in combination with Blockchain, matching can be mostly automated and helps to release a yet undiscovered pool of talent. The war of talent can be fought back with by finding skills for tasks.

SKILLS FINDER is dedicated to provide the most up to date technology to support the matching of freelancer and consultants with best-fitting projects. Matching tasks with skills is just one of many services we will offer in the future. Register now and stay informed.

Register