“Having the wrong people in your business, even consultants, can be expensive for the company. Consequently, I view wise investments in technical solutions to evaluate competence, regardless of whether it is about matching or testing tools, as a crucial aid,” says Sarah Willis Carlsson, senior advisor at the Connected Car and User Experience (CCUX) at CEVT, an innovation centre for the Geely Group in Gothenburg.
CLIENT MEETING / Ework Annual report
SARAH WILLIS CARLSSON SENIOR ADVISOR, CONNECTED CAR AND USER EXPERIENCE, CEVT
Technical development means that companies are demanding ever quicker access to the right competence in order to be able to develop at the pace required to maintain their competitiveness.
At the same time, more and more people are beginning to realise that a CV is a blunt instrument when evaluating a candidate for an assignment that may impose great demands on social ability, for example, and to work quickly under pressure or to have a developed strategic ability. This has brought about the rapid development of digital tools for personality assessments in the recruitment process, an area in which Ework has been a pioneer in consultant matching.
One company that has understood the benefit of using technology when it comes to recruitment is CEVT, China Euro Vehicle Technology AB, a technical research and development company owned by Chinese Geely Automobile. Sarah Willis Carlsson, who works with the development of new technology, feels that several factors play a significantly more important role than a person’s education and experience. By way of example, she mentions ‘soft skills’ such as the ability to fit into the organisation and perform in a given context, which she says is crucial for success.
Agility is a buzzword right now
To describe the best way of managing recruitment in a digital age, she uses the term ‘agility’. “Agility is a buzzword right now. We must be ready to experiment, try new methods and approaches in order to identify the talent we need. We face a struggle with a growing shortage, because we not only need specialists who understand complex technologies, but who can also work well in a team.”
Sarah Willis Carlsson highlights the change in view of recruitment that started around ten years ago, a time when specialists were much more limited in their relevant areas of expertise, but where they are now expected to be much more agile in their roles.
Sarah Willis Carlsson highlights the change in view of recruitment that started around ten years ago, a time when specialists were much more limited in their relevant areas of expertise, but where they are now expected to be much more agile in their roles.
This means that recruitment today is more and more about digging deep into personalities in order to be able to determine whether the candidate has the right overall competence. “We previously had mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and software engineers who were experts in their particular fields. We also had system engineers who kept everything together across competencies. We are now seeing that more and more tasks require that team members communicate directly with each other, and that they themselves assume the role of the system engineers, as the challenges are more complex than an individual can manage alone,” she says.
Facts
Ework has been working on developing a digital tool for measuring, among other things, social skills since 2016. The aim is to become even better at identifying the right candidate for the assignment by marrying competence with assignments in an independent, transparent and non-discriminatory manner, which includes using decoded CVs and mathematical algorithms.
