Digital transformation initiatives have accelerated over the past two years, increasing demand for skills in ecommerce, digital marketing and customer experience management. In the first six months of 2021, marketing job vacancies on LinkedIn increased by 63%, with a clear skew towards digital specialist skillsets.

Simultaneously, the emphasis on first-party data is helping drive an in-housing push. Organizations are reluctant to hand off initiatives involving customer data to third parties because it can slow workflow, complicate privacy processes and takes data out of the hands of the teams tasked with managing CX.

What can businesses do to give themselves an edge?

1. Apply agile practices to hiring

Hiring top talent is hard enough without having to deal with internal inefficiencies.

There has been a movement in recent years to bring agile thinking to the HR function but hiring has been resistant to change. That’s understandable since it involves multiple internal stakeholders and is a high-stakes part of how the organization invests in the future, but a cumbersome workflow has a direct, negative impact on success.

Given today’s competition for digital talent, cell phone numbers list prospective employees are evaluating multiple opportunities. How quickly and easily a business communicates with them and provides tangible next steps is a powerful clue about its culture.

2. Look internally first

Most companies post new roles internally, but that’s often as far as their mobility programs go.

The argument for in-house promotion is two-fold. First, existing staff already have institutional knowledge and an established problem-solving network, saving weeks or months of onboarding. Second, employees stick around roughly 40% longer at companies that hire internally.

Best practices should include custom job descriptions, socializing postings and instituting policies that prevent managers from slowing employee advancement. Above all, executives should highlight internal movers to stress that mobility is a cultural value.

3. Use learning to take the pressure of hiring

The hiring boom runs parallel to the digital skills gap, which is covered as its own trend here.  Not only can training address the need for a more digital workforce. However, it can greatly improve the efficiency of key roles by offloading tasks to general staff.