Can’t find talent? Grow it yourself!

How Building Heroes found talent in a time of scarcity.

We hear it often enough. There just aren’t enough job seekers. We call it a labour shortage or even a War on talent.

What are the old ways of responding to this shortage? We all know and recognize them:

1. Actively targeting the competition to attract their best achievers.
2. Pay more to attract and retain talent.
3. Keep investing in a short-term strategy that doesn’t actually lead to a future-proof way of working.

For Building Heroes this wasn’t a sensible solution. After all, you’re still fishing in the same talent pool. One that is still too small. So what can you do to expand that pool?

Selecting on the basis of a resume isn’t enough.

Recruiting new talent on the basis of a resume, on education and past experience, works on a principle of past glory. From a resume, you can see what someone can already do. But what if there are too few people who can already do what you need? In that case, resumes are useless to you.

What you want is to find people with the potential to do well in a certain job, but who might not have the experience yet. If you know they can handle it, you can train them yourself and teach the necessary knowledge on the job.

So how do you know who has the potential?

How do you recognize potential?

Building Heroes worked together with BrainsFirst to find talent with the potential for specific jobs. The whole process worked in 4 steps:

1. What am I looking for? What kind of talent do I need? On the basis of those questions, a Search profile was made for the specific job.
2. What are the talents of our candidates? With the game-based assessments of BrainsFirst, a Brain profile was made of each of the candidates.
3. The candidates were matched with the job. The similarity between an individual’s Brainprofile with the Searchprofile together forms the Chance of Success.
4. Start interviewing those candidates with the highest chance of success, which are the people with the highest potential for this specific job.

To a future-proof talent management

This was Building Heroes found a totally new talent pool. Most of the candidates they found this way had the potential, but not the skills and knowledge for the job. That meant Building Heroes had to train them so they could do their (future) jobs quickly.

“If you can’t find them, grow them”

Maaike Arns, HR Director Building Heroes

With the traineeships of the Construction University, Building Heroes trained their freshly discovered talents for the jobs where more people are needed. By selecting at the door on the basis of a brain profile, candidates were selected to do work they’re good at and enjoy.