In Executive Search now, we have a perfect storm. There is a shortage of labour, a shortage of skills, and a shortage of talent. On top of that we have a global pandemic. A pandemic that is affecting employment now, but it is employment that will bounce back when we get through this.

However, the current situation presents a new challenge for businesses considering how to build their A Team when this startes to recede. We have seen businesses caught up in "now" - and rightly so. We have also seen businesses, still concerned about now, but making plans for the future. It is the agile and the ready that will emerge fastest.

Over a decade ago the Productivity Commission published a report called The Implications of a Ageing Australia. At that time they identified that by 2021 Australia would have zero net new entrants to the workforce. This is not a forecast, it was a demographic certainty as an understanding of the retirement rate is reliable and birth rate from 2003 is simply a matter of fact.

So, it is demographics that produce the labour shortage. This is at a time when there has been substantial growth in high-paid high skilled roles and also growth in low skilled low-paid roles. Across the OECD, it is the roles in the middle, the so-called middle management roles that have been decimated.

In looking for senior executives to join an organisation as this crisis recedes boards and hiring managers need to be considering how they can best access the required skill set. They also need to be considering the additional dimensions that define talent. Across most high-value roles, on top of the requisite skills for the job, the ability to think and act strategically, the capacity to embrace change and even drive it, and people skills, specifically the ability to inspire and motivate others are what separates the merely well-qualified from the leaders of the future. We also believe a new form of holistic leadership will emerge, systemic leadership. It had already begun, but in 6 months time, the new breeed of leaders will have a different view of the world. Leaders who can see their decisions influenced more by compassion, caring for us all and for the society we live in. 

It will be easy for organisations to sit on their hands when looking at the talent that they will require going forward. However, the current global pandemic will, one way or another, come to an end. With real talent in such short supply, it will be the brave and bold organisations who fulfil the talent requirements right now that will have the capacity to pull their businesses through into a new growth curve in the near future.

These are troubling times, but the reality is that organisations large and small need to re-think leadership.