The new market: Jobs find people, not people find jobs

Today, everything feels like a market. Everything lives in the way of the market. Everything behaves as market.

And when I say everything, I’m using hyperbolic expression to point out how our society have evolved as a market. Not just things we trade and sell, but even each of us is somewhat a market commodity. Well, a commodity in the job market, or employment market, or labor market, or professional market. Whatever you want to call it.

When we talk about employment, usually we talk about job seeker. I think we are actually seeing that the new job market commodity is not the job, but the people for the job. It’s the job who is competing to get the best people to fill it, not the other way around. The commodity is the talent, not the job.

The more entrepreneurs and investors we have, more new businesses are created. This means higher competitive among businesses, where some businesses will survive while some other don’t. To survive, businesses need to get the best talents to ensure their sustainability.

In the new era of business competition, the majority of workforce will be what we call as the common job seekers, while the remaining minority will be talents most businesses are competing over. People with desired capacity, or talents, are investment units with increasing value. This may sounds like a very capitalistic view on people, but we are living in the realm of capitalistic society where everything is in the market. Some even used this ironic expression: “Even socialism is for the market”.

For businesses, competing over talents in the market is the most actual form of human capital investment. Getting more talents equals to getting more investable people for achieving better and sustainable business results. After all, getting people is investment, and like any other investment, we need to get good investment units.

Good investment unit is the one that performs. Talents are not people with degree or any other decorated attributes. Talents are people who display quality through their personality and performance history.

This kind of people is not something we can find just in any places. And, talents know this well. They know they are valuable, and therefore, have their own personal brand as the leverage for businesses. Such knowledge makes talents see that they can choose, either to work for businesses as long as they got what they want, or to run a business of their own as entrepreneurs. That’s why these days we can see two trends when it comes to talents: becoming a professional and hijacked from one business to another, or owning a new business to explore a new market in their new talented way.

Talents know quite well that they have something to bargain with. Therefore, businesses are ‘fighting over’ good talents. Hence, it is the job who is looking for people, instead of people looking for job. Few years ago, people might argue whether talents will change the job market. Now, it’s the job who find the people, not the other way around.

This is the new market, and I think it’s obvious. What do you think?

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.