Introduction
Your most valuable business asset is the talent that lies within it.
You’ve heard this saying so often – since your earliest days in business – that you may now regard it as a valueless truism. There’s certainly no doubt that the saying is as valid as it has always been. However, how we invest in talent – how we foster and nurture it – is a process that’s ever-evolving in ways that are ever more sophisticated. One of the modern-day fundamentals of talent strategy is the process of talent mapping and ensuring that it synchronises with and supports your business strategy.
In this article, we’ll look at the concept of Talent Mapping, and the role played in the process by
– Market Research and Intelligence in recruitment
– Candidate Attraction
– Retaining Tech Talent
– Diversity in recruitment
What is Talent Mapping?
Talent mapping is the process of planning your approach to talent hiring, developing and retention in line with your overall business strategy.
Before you take your first step along the road of talent mapping, you need to be 100% clear about your business strategy. What are your business goals? What direction will your business be taking? What route will you be adopting to achieve those goals? Your approach to hiring and retaining talent must serve and fit your overall business strategy.
Once you’re clear about your business strategy, you’ll be well-placed to initiate these critical talent mapping steps –
- Identify the roles that will satisfy the demands of your company strategy.
- For each of these roles, identify the personal attributes required to fulfil the key functions of those roles.
- From day one of recruiting for these roles, make sure you clearly communicate their strategic goals.
The Role of Market Research and Business Intelligence in Talent Mapping
Intuition and experience have always been vital ingredients to a successful hiring strategy, but in today’s brave new data world, market research and intelligence in recruitment are now making a critical contribution. We’re now all able to use market insights to improve our HR decisions.
Again, how you use your market insights will depend on your overall business goals. But, whatever these goals might be, you can now gather relevant, targeted, real-time data to support you in making informed business decisions.
Analytics and Market Intelligence will play a vital part in the Talent Mapping process. You will need to find out answers to the following questions
- What kind of experience do people need to perform the roles that will lead to achieving your business goals?
- Where do candidates that have this kind of experience come from?
- What aspirations do candidates have when they’re considering working with your company?
- This can involve comparing your organisation with competitors – looking at team structures, benefits, compensation and training.
Building this bank of intelligence will give your business a detailed, 360-degree view of the market for the kind of talent you need. You’ll then have the best chance of hiring and retaining the very best candidates for each role. You’ll be able to hire with decisiveness and clarity.
Candidate attraction
Naturally, you understand the need for sales and marketing strategies for generating revenue. However, you’ll find yourself a step ahead of your competitors if you use similar techniques in your approach to candidate attraction.
The choice and breadth of opportunities for candidates are increasing. All businesses need to wake up to the reality that recruitment is a two-way process. Increasingly, as the hiring marketplace becomes ever more competitive, you need to ‘sell’ your vacancy to candidates in just the same way that they need to promote their skills, achievements and personalities to you. In short, candidate attraction will form a vital element of your approach to talent mapping.
You need to analyse and improve your candidate attraction strategy from top to bottom. You’ll achieve this by adopting the following eight key steps –
- Be clear about your target market
- Define and communicate your message
- Make the most of customer testimonials
- Check out how your competitors attract candidates
- Research where your target candidates spend time online
- Use your networks to engage potential candidates
- Ask current employees or candidates to refer your business
- Be proactive! Get out there and identify the best talent
Talent mapping and retaining tech talent
Talent mapping isn’t only about developing strategies for hiring top tech talent. It’s about developing techniques for retaining that tech talent, keeping it happy – onboard and onside. This is as critical in the tech sector as any other. If there’s so much talent out there, do we really need to obsess about spending time and effort to retain it? Yes, we do.
Replacing employees is expensive – both financially and in terms of productivity. Take into account everything from recruitment to onboarding – the cost of losing your people can be as much as twice an annual salary.
However, there’s no single silver bullet for fighting employee turnover. Here are ten employee retention strategies to consider for keeping your top talent engaged and productive –
1. Find out why people are leaving – then fix it
Has more than one employee quit claiming they were being treated unfairly? Are you being priced out by a competitor? Have those that you’ve lost been low performers?
2. Create a world-class onboarding process
Use your imagination and think about what you would like if it were you spending your first day with the company. One or two small acts of kindness and inclusion will pay dividends in the long run.
3. Build a supportive company culture
This is key to your evolving company strategy and to implementing change while minimising resistance.
4. Are all your people aware of your overall business strategy? Do they feel engaged with it?
Many employees feel little or no relationship between their day-to-day work and their employer’s goals. When employees can’t see the impact that they have on a business, it reduces any sense of purpose and productivity. Try re-imagining your goal-setting processes. Also, make sure you provide opportunities for talent to engage with strategy and provide feedback.
5. Are your people receiving positive feedback
Even the best managers forget to personally acknowledge employee achievements. Performed well, this will build the necessary trust in case the time comes for some negative feedback.
6. Perform regular compensation analyses
Pay isn’t the number one job satisfaction factor. But it still matters. Make sure the way you compensate your employees is both fair and competitive.
7. Provide opportunities for learning and development
Lack of access to growth opportunities is the fastest-growing reason people give for leaving jobs. When given opportunities to develop new skills, the best employees leap at the chance.
8. Keep up with HR trends
To successfully retain employees, it’s important to be aware of the ways in which the world of work is changing and to adapt accordingly.
9. Identify potential leavers early
Work with them to find a better fit within the company. Learn how to spot clear warning signs of employee exits.
10. Say ‘farewell’ well
However effective your talent retention strategies might be, there will always be employees who leave. If one of your people receives a better offer, be happy for them! Then – get to work on fixing the problem of why you weren’t the better opportunity.
The role of Diversity in Talent Mapping
Research shows that with a fully diverse workforce, your business will have a 35% greater chance of success than your less diverse competitors.
There are at least five good reasons why you should build diversity into your approach to Talent Mapping.
1. Stronger Applicants
With a diverse workforce, you’ll find that when you do recruit, your company will appeal to far more candidates.
2. Greater worldwide opportunities
Is your business international, or are you planning to expand globally? If so, clearly having appropriately diverse staff in key positions will be critical. You won’t want language difficulties to be any kind of a barrier to client relations.
3. More talents, skills and experience
The more people you take on from a variety of backgrounds, the more likely your company is to benefit from the inherent diversity of skillsets.
4. Improved individual performances
The success, or otherwise, of your organisation will be down to a number of factors. Chief among these is the chemistry between your individual team members. Without a diverse mix, it will be much tougher to have everyone pulling in the same direction.
5. Innovation
With a variety of diverse employee types and skill sets, your business will, almost by definition, be open to innovation – new ideas and approaches, which will inevitably lead to growth and increased prosperity.
How do you hire for diversity?
So, these are some of the benefits of employee diversity, but how are you to go about achieving these benefits? How do you, in practice, hire for diversity. How do you translate the rhetoric to action and results? This is where your Talent Mapping strategy comes in, and much of the key to this strategy lies in the realm of behavioural science.
Recognise and deal with bias
The cornerstone of a diverse hiring strategy is the ability to recognise and deal with the condition that lies within us all – bias. We all like to think of ourselves as good, ethically sound individuals who treat others with dignity and respect. However, like it or not, bias inevitably seeps into the hiring process and results in systematic disadvantages for some groups of people. We all suffer to some degree from the notorious “bias blind spot” – the inability to recognise our own biases. To establish a rich and diverse workforce, we need to do all we can to recognise, resist and counteract them.
We achieve this by
– Creating standardised processes that apply equally to all job applicants
– Establishing clear and objective hiring criteria
– Ensuring we use neutral language throughout the hiring process
– Resisting ‘nice to haves’ in job descriptions – otherwise, you’ll narrow the field
– Evaluating CVs ‘blind’ – blocking out the kind of information that signals age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, or other demographically identifying information
– Involve a diverse set of people at all stages of the hiring process
– Stick to structured interviews and scorecards with objective metrics
– Create specific diversity targets
– Hire multiple people per role at a time
– Post jobs to targeted platforms & targeted outreach
– Intentionally select for diversity
Talent Mapping – a continual cycle
Don’t make the mistake of scorning the concept of talent mapping as the latest HR fad. Its capabilities will become ever more necessary for the modern, evolving business in a modern evolving business world.
Talent mapping is not a one-off process. To work to your business’s benefit, it needs to be an integral element of your company’s annual strategic cycle – being regularly reviewed and evaluated.
At Thrivve, we’re a targeted Search and Executive Search consultancy. We use our years of experience and know-how to place top talent into forward-thinking organisations. We understand the value and the intricacies of talent mapping.
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