Mitchelle’s Interpretation of How to Help GBS Become a More Mature, Confident, and Attractive Business Partner

Hire for potential, not only for specific skills

What type of skills do you need to look for when staffing GBS roles? What is the potential of the candidate with these skills?

When you are setting up a GBS organization, you need to think ahead and envision what type of roles and services you want to offer from your GBS in the future. Are you going to have information processing services only, or are you going to offer innovative services that enable the corporation to increase the value to the shareholders?

Attracting and being able to recruit the best talent is a challenge faced by all types of industries, and GBS is no exception. However, the first step for a GBS organization is to understand what type of skills and potential you need to look for in your GBS when hunting for talent in the market.

You should look to hire people with the potential to develop new skills that will enable a long-term future for your GBS organization.

The talent you hire today, will learn the basics of the work initially migrated to GBS, and in the medium term, they should be able to lead the operation, deliver improvements to the process while scaling productivity, and lead the migration of higher tiered work, etc.

However, for the long term, you must count with people who enable driving change across the business units and clients of GBS.  Enabling GBS to become a very valuable partner for the business, by performing trend analysis, identifying and fixing exception drivers in upstream and downstream systems, and by driving innovation.

Hire people with a large range of potential skills so they can rotate across roles.

This will benefit your GBS organization in two ways: talent development and retention. On the development front, the ability to move people across multiple roles will enable them to unleash their creativity, find their passion, reapply best practices and expand their skills so they can support the growth of the GBS scope of services. Regarding retention, as suggested in the by Marc Thewes in his article “Global Business Services (GBS) should enable new skills to climb the value chain”, offering of opportunities to experience different roles within GBS and the broader organization, is one of the key factors to motivate high-potential talent to stay.

Given the rapid growth of technology, you must also recruit talent with the agility to adapt to new ways of working.

The GBS associates should be able to simultaneously migrate the transactional work as is and then standardize it, be able to support system upgrades, and in the future, have the ability to lead the automation efforts. Once the manual effort is reduced, the team must be agile enough to migrate to the next wave of work, therefore having the ability to learn the new skills required to mastering apps and tools needed to perform new services like analytical-driven roles.    

Conclusion

Next time you create the job posting for recruitment of GBS roles, keep in mind what the future of your GBS organization should look like, and look to hire talent with the appropriate skills to ensure that that future is attainable.