COVID-19 impact | Companies looking for candidates who can think ‘inside the box’

• Follow

The year 2020, with the outbreak of coronavirus, led businesses to take a complete 360-degree review of how they would like to approach the coming years in terms of not just their product but product-makers as well. Today, interviewers are looking for a unique set of attributes amongst jobseekers which outplays traditional analytics requirements.

According to a report in The Times of India, companies are now looking for candidates who either fit as visionaries, executioners or be a healthy mix of both. If you’re great at problem solving but lack interpersonal skills, the recruiters won’t probably be convinced to take you. They’re looking for the “needle in the haystack” who could come from an arts background and still possess sound technical skills or be a history student with a creative mind that could trigger social media.

With the work from home culture gaining momentum in the backdrop of the ongoing pandemic, recruiters are looking for people who can boil their creative juices from the confined walls of a bedroom.

““We will welcome talent that displays non-linear thinking at work. As a society, we have been trained to deal with limited data. With data explosion, information is abundant and now the real deal is finding the ‘relevant need in the haystack’,” Akhilesh Tuteja, KPMG India’s digital advisory head, was quoted in the report.

The CEOs of top companies across the world feel “managing a remote workforce will be the top leadership challenge in the coming year and it would require providing employees with digital tools for a smooth collaboration”.

With ever-evolving technology on display, companies are forced to ensure their workforce is smart enough to not only sustain the competition but create new avenues for profit generation. The learning acumen of candidates alongside their ability to see the larger picture by connecting the dots will be the key attraction for interviewers in times to come.

Companies want employees who not only finish the given task to perfection but are also able to catch upcoming social media trends. They want job seekers to possess something beyond academic outperformance.