What if there was a way to ensure the right candidate was waiting in the wings when an employment vacancy arose in your business? According to Don Holley, talent mapping helps businesses avoid the delay and cost involved in replacing talented staff.
Forecasting the future
Talent mapping is a real alternative to ensure businesses are on the front foot. Instead of waiting for someone to resign and then scrambling to fill their vacancy, talent mapping offers employers peace of mind. They are prepared for the inevitable recruitment process through an existing relationship with a talent mapping expert who knows the company’s staffing needs and culture and has suitable candidates ready to step in when needed.
The key difference between traditional recruitment and talent mapping is a reactive versus proactive approach. In most organisations a position becomes vacant and the company initiates a recruitment exercise, using methods such as advertising, referrals and recruitment agencies. This process typically takes two to four months to fill the role. Talent mapping involves a longer-term approach initially, but provides candidates who are pre-qualified and interested in moving at the time they are really required.
Talent mapping is the solution to today’s recruitment crisis and turns the way the recruitment industry currently works on its head. It works like a retained talent scout. It is like having an internal recruitment and search capability, with the flexibility of an external brand representing you. This is particularly important if the candidate works for a competitor.
Faster decisions
Availability of quality candidates is decreasing and the time it now takes to hire is increasing. Put simply, with talent mapping the recruitment process starts before the vacancy exists. Every company has staff turnover, so thinking ahead and knowing how many new employees are needed means they could be looking for talent before someone has even resigned. Candidates are pre-qualified in terms of skills, culture and motivation, leading to faster decision times for both the candidates and the company.
Traditional recruitment methods have become less effective as a result of the supply/demand dynamics in the current employment market, as well as the propensity for candidates to move roles more frequently, particularly Generation Y (those aged up to mid-20s). Talent mapping addresses candidate quality issues through a comprehensive map of the market and creates a pipeline to reduce time to hire.
How does talent mapping save money?
Roles affecting a company’s profits through either creating revenue (sales positions) or billing revenue (delivery positions) will cost an organisation while the post remains vacant. For example, a vacant sales role results in reduced revenue for the allocated territory/vertical. Also, technical roles can be imperative to companies bidding for projects where the candidate’s skills are required for successful delivery. Companies without the necessary skills can be forced to pass on opportunities.
On a fee level, talent mapping agencies charge based on a fixed-cost model, whereas traditional recruiting involves higher percentage-based fees.
How to talent map
A company’s employee value proposition (EVP) provides the basis for approaching talent. Without an effective EVP, it is harder to garner the interest of passive candidates (those not actively looking). A company that knows what its employees want and writes that into the EVP will find it much easier to sell an opportunity and get the candidate to buy in before they have even started their new job.
Don Holley is Managing Partner of human resources consultancy Odin Management Consulting, one of Australia’s leading players in the field of Outsourced Human Resource Services. He assists companies to improve their business performance through the utilisation of their people.
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View Comments
Jorge
February 17th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Talent mapping, talent pool/bench development, etc. are in theory more effective processes than the usual recruitment transactions, which only kick-off when a new job requisition is generated. This is how it got done 25 years ago… and it hasn’t quite changed much, has it?
For practical reasons, mapping has been applied to a proportionally small part of the talent within organisations (the key personnel pool); in this context the challenge here is twofold:
1- how to scale the model to a large piece of the org chart, which has to do with cost and effort. Technology can play a significant role in the “democratisation” of the service
2- how to make talent mapping a ‘persistent’ service for the candidate whilst ensuring there is a fiduciary duty of sorts with the paying client. In other words:
* what happens after people have been mapped/identified and subsequently placed when the opportunity arose? Does it get ‘mapped’ for the next client?
* Is there room for contact between the outsourced talent mapper and (placed) candidate that would resemble a career management type service?
The recruitment workflow needs a huge revamp before those questions can be positively replied to; this has little (or less) to do less with technology than with current/outdated commercial and operational practices.
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