Human Capital Management in 2035: Your career in blockchain

A group of executives donning oculus headsets hold an urgent meeting in the metaverse. A critical recruiting search relies on a blockchain to squeeze a year-long effort into a few weeks. And an eager CEO, hoping to study the strength of her team, tracks the results of biometric sensors that her employees are wearing.

Korn Ferry has been out in front of trends in organizational consulting since its beginning. As we crest into a new era of technological innovation, a few of our “futurists” have been thinking about what to expect in the magical world of 2035. We are pleased to present a three-part miniseries which imagines what the future of human capital might look like. Please step into 2035 with us and join our heroine Katy who sits at the helm of a fast-growing financial technology company…

Background

Katy, a rising CEO in the financial technology services in California, has been tapped by a leading private equity firm to take a promising firm from early stage to IPO. The innovative technology was developed by an experienced set of former bank executives who now comprise the leadership team. They are outstanding subject matter experts but are limited in leadership and in scaling startup businesses. The private equity firm is principally concerned that the existing leadership team, nor the culture are tuned to rapid expansion in a highly competitive market. Katy will need to address both concerns immediately while further developing the technology and rapidly expanding the sales and distribution infrastructure. As all professionals in 2035 know, companies scale at lightspeed, and agility is key! Fortunately, Katy may just be able to achieve her goals using some possible futuristic playbooks from the metaverse, blockchain, and neuroscience!

Your entire professional life in the blockchain: are you ready?

Six months had gone by since Katy stepped into her CEO seat. She was delighted with the development of her team through use of Korn Ferry's professional development program and ecstatic with the success of the sales team's evolution. However, planning with her private equity sponsor in the group strategy pod in the metaverse, Katy was becoming very aware of the need to expand revenue sources. Her fast-growing small company is starting to look like a scaled business and having a sustainable revenue model was going to be essential to her investors to stay committed.

Katy was ready to start expanding the product and service line-up to create a more diverse business. Her leadership team was not short on great ideas for new products and services, the company lacked significant advanced technology development talent and experience among her broader staff. To super-charge success with their envisioned new products, this development experience and capability were necessary. Specifically, the new product development was going to require a specialized quantum computing methodology found in a very small part of the quantum programming community. Katy was panicking. She had hired hundreds, if not thousands of developers in her career and knew that a normal process would take many months or perhaps even longer given the precise and rare skillset she needed. She guessed that the search would be especially challenging given the talent that existed in small, hard-to-find pockets all over the world. Finding a search partner to identify these individuals, sell them on the opportunity, and get them hired in a matter of weeks to begin development would be virtually impossible and Katy needed to show real progress quickly.

But in 2035, the impossible was possible. Katy once again turned to Korn Ferry to identify the most likely recruiting talent pools, it was determined that the most cost-effective and relevant talent spanned fifteen geographies. With almost no HR/Recruiting in-house team, Katy asked Korn Ferry for a cost-effective approach to finding the best and brightest quantum programming talent around the world. Fortunately, Korn Ferry was able to employ its proprietary matching technology to cull through over two billion profiles on a universal career blockchain system. In 2035, various distributed ledger technologies had developed to track the global workforce, almost fifty percent of which was now mobile.  The distributed ledger technology enabled Korn Ferry to quickly identify the most relevant talent after screening for specific credentials, experience, and certifications. The decentralized ledger system ensured that matching candidates in fact possessed the requisite quantum programming skills and provided some sense of interest using an artificially intelligent algorithm.

Armed with a list of twenty-five qualified and interested candidates spread across the globe, Korn Ferry's Talent Acquisition team was able to rapidly contact each, interview and assess them in the metaverse, and present a promising shortlist to Katy. Katy was able to meet all five quickly and hired three shortly thereafter with one in Singapore, one in Lagos, and one in Minneapolis. All three were onboarded virtually and plugged into the company's team and resources. Katy was amazed at the rapid progress this highly specialized team achieved, providing the foundation for the new product in a matter of weeks, and allowing her product team to refine and launch. Given the fast go-to-market abilities the sales team developed through the Korn Ferry Simulation Center, the team was out selling the new product immediately with incredible success and the new hires were already onto their next project!

Katy was blown away with her newfound ability to identify talent with precision and speed. She sat back in her personalized meditation center and dreamed of what next project to chase!

Next week, join us for our final installment, where we imagine how biometrics and neuroscience can optimize team performance. Miss the first post? Read about how talent development could exist in the metaverse here.