IT’S STICKY TO FILL KEY JOBS

However, the chief executive officer of its Thai unit found it extremely difficult to fill one particular position – the head of stickers.
While that may not sound like an especially serious position, it was the hardest to fill, even more so than the CEO post, Ariya Banomyong, managing director of Line Thailand, said recently.
The problem reflects complications in staffing at modern-age companies. 
“We used headhunters. They were quite puzzled, because this is a business that did not exist before Line was created,” said the Line boss at the “Leaders in Digital Economy” forum hosted by Slingshot Group.
Digital stickers, which are just images with a transparent background, generated US$268 million (Bt9.4 billion) in sales for Line in 2015, about a quarter of the firm’s haul. 
There are only three leading digital media firms like Line in Thailand, so when the company has to look for candidates, it has to go outside the industry.
It cannot not just look at the candidates’ job title or job description.
“We are an organisation that a lot of people would like to join. But we find it is difficult to find the right ones. 
“For people who have never been in this industry, they will be ‘running’ so tired in the first three to six months,” he said, citing the rapid pace of his industry. “We’re in a business that has to grow 70-100 per cent and keep doubling in size.”
Line would rather look at the skillsets of its candidates, especially in areas such as leadership, “growth mindset”, analysis and out-of-the-box problem-solving.
Firms that decide to nurture innovations by setting up an innovation unit run by their existing people are in a questionable area.
“If they can innovate, they would have innovated already,” he said.
Nutavoot Pongsiri, assistant governor of the Bank of Thailand, told the conference that he agreed that leadership would remain a core quality that firms look for in their recruits, while many other skills have become irrelevant in the digital age.
“Leadership is still necessary. There is still a place for old leaders provided they can work under the digital age,” he said.
Statistics show that while business founders are getting younger, more of them have been replaced by older, experienced executives, he said.
In the digital age, leaders must have an entrepreneurial spirit to continue innovating and “turning the ‘S-curve’” all the time, as well as a mindset to develop solutions to potential disruption.