45% of CEOs say that their company will face an existential crisis in 10 years if it continues on its current path. It’s no secret that when companies lag in innovation and value creation, they lose their market share. But what impedes innovation? Well, among multiple other factors, 52% of CEOs believe that a lack of skilled workforce inhibits innovation. Of course! By the way, did you know that only 32% of talent acquisition leaders are actively involved in strategic workforce planning? The remaining feel left out, and don’t have a seat at the workforce strategy meeting table. Could this be a reason why organizations are unable to bridge the skill gap? Is your HR department working in silos too? Are your people processes broken too? If they are, you need to fix them. ASAP. “How?” you ask. Well, start with an integrated talent management strategy.
“What’s Integrated talent management (ITM)?” you ask.
Good question!
Read this Skima Insight to find out
- What’s integrated talent management?
- Why do you need an integrated talent management strategy?
- What comprises an integrated talent management model?
- How to effectively implement ITM strategy?
- How does Skima AI enable modern recruiters to build winning teams, and assist with ITM strategy implementation?
What’s Integrated Talent Management?
An Integrated talent management approach stitches together fragmented/siloed HR processes—
- Workforce planning
- Talent attraction
- Sourcing & recruitment
- Employee engagement
- Performance management
- Employee recognition
- Learning & development
- Succession planning
ITM interconnects these and facilitates making talent-related data accessible to all HR professionals for effective collaboration among HR teams. Thus enabling CHROs, CPOs, Talent heads, and HR strategists to create an effective and cohesive talent management strategy— using an integrated talent management model that takes cognizance of the current talent pool, future organizational needs, existing skill gaps in the workforce, and HR process inefficiencies.
Why Do You Need An Integrated Talent Management Strategy?
As mentioned earlier, an existential threat is looming over many companies. And the workforce skill gap is a big factor contributing to it. It's natural for you to wonder if it’s a known problem then why aren’t HR teams doing anything about it?
Well, in most organizations HR teams are caught up in the bureaucratic processes. The HR processes are fragmented. The teams are lost in the maze of disconnected departmental data. With time, their productivity stifles, and their creativity and efficiency nose-dives. Thus, they are unable to deal with the skill gap challenges. An integrated talent management model is an approach to address this very concern.
Example instances that strengthen the case for the need for an integrated talent management strategy:
Recruiters struggle to find good-fit talent
This is because they often have zero clue about what is needed.
Should they go for a skill hire? A diversity hire? A win-win for both?
They can’t decide because they have no insight into what the current workforce looks like, and what could possibly help skyrocket the performance of the respective project teams.
Many recruiters are just asked to hire a “frontend software developer, DevOps engineer, retail floor manager, ICU nurse, insert_whatsoever_role_you_are_aware_of, …) and that’s it. They never receive any additional details or insights on what traits to look for in the candidate. Everything is left to the guessing game.
Don’t you too see that as a problem?
The current workforce feels frustrated and looks to jump ship
Often, the compensation & benefits team has negligible insights into employee performance data, learning and development data, or data from hiring assessment reports. The organization development teams too have a similar story. In short, HR professionals are drowning in a sea of disconnected data.
Do you expect high-performers to stick with their role at your company when the career growth aspects look murky, and everything seems random?
They will alight the ship.
Low employee productivity, disengaged workforce, high turnover, and a missing next line of leadership, often find their roots in broken HR processes.
Feeling the pain?
This is exactly why you need an integrated talent management model that interconnects all the HR processes and HR teams.
But... what comprises an integrated talent management model? Well, continue reading, and you’ll find out.
Integrated Talent Management Model/Strategy
There are three aspects to any integrated talent management model—
Understand your organizational goals and the workforce requirements
Know what your organization aspires to be. Try understanding the challenges it faces in terms of the workforce skill gap. Strive to understand the future workforce requirements of your organization. Get acquainted with all the regulations & compliances that you need to obey.
Interlink all the HR functions/processes with their data & information systems
Analyze your current HR functions i.e., how do you
- Source & recruit talent
- Engage with the talent (onboarding, allocation to projects)
- Track performance (productivity, impact)
- Reward talent (compensation, promotion, recognition)
- Nurture their skills (learning & development, leadership development)
Also, take note of the tools & technologies (HRIS, ATS, LMS) you use to collect data at each stage of the employee lifecycle. Try to understand what data is collected, and how data flows between different tools. Look for blind spots in the processes, where teams do not have much visibility. Ensure that the employee information flow is smooth and accessible to respective teams.
Use data to align the HR processes with organizational goals
When you analyze the current state of your workforce, and compare that to the desired state of your workforce, you will be able to find out the gaps. Dig further into the data you gather by unifying the information systems used by different HR teams, and you will be able to spot what’s going wrong. Fix or tweak it to align all the HR processes with the organizational goals.
For example-
Let’s say that your organizational goal is to make your eCommerce portal more modern. And for that, the team needs to switch from PHP-language-based WordPress to a Javascript stack. They would need a workforce of 150 Javascript developers and 50 Python developers to support the development initiatives.
How will you go about it?
If the HR systems are isolated a lot of time will be lost in the bureaucratic process to extract insights from different teams and their information systems. HR teams will be clueless about how many Javascript developers can be hired, and how many in-house PHP developers are open to be trained in Javascript/Python language.
But with an integrated data system and robust employee communication system in place, you can easily look into talent insight. Look for people with both Python and PHP skills or Javascript and PHP skills, and train them (if they are willing to learn) on the required skills using the LMS. This way, you’ll have precise insight into how many more developers you need to hire, and how many could be moved internally.
How To Effectively Implement ITM?
As per recent research, technology helps improve outcomes for both- employees and businesses. When leveraged properly, you can map the aspirations of the employees and the employer. You can further use technology to assist you in fulfilling those needs.
For devising an effective integrated talent management strategy, ask yourself the following questions-
- What do we hope to achieve with an integrated talent management strategy?
- What talent resources does my company need to thrive in the future?
- What are the strengths of our existing talent management model? Where do they lag? What can be improved, dropped, or added to make it more effective at fulfilling the company’s talent needs?
- Who can be shouldered the responsibility to move the needle?
Once you have the answers, optimize your HR processes to efficiently accomplish the identified goals. Now, because every company is different, their integrated talent management strategy would be different too. But here are some high-level goals that many companies might be pursuing-
Increasing Talent Retention
Your integrated talent management strategy could look for the reasons behind high employee turnover.
For the candidates who left, you may leverage your ATS data to see their employment history, especially average time at organizations. Compare that to how much time they spent at your company. If it is higher, you might be doing a few things right, and you can optimize the same to maximize the positive outcomes.
You can look at their performance and promotions records in your HRIS. If you find that they had hit a career stagnancy, see what the LMS data says, were the employees constantly upgrading their skillsets? If they were, check if the employees were assigned to the right projects based on their skills and interests. If they were not upgrading, look for opportunities where you can improve to inspire employees to learn new skills and sharpen existing ones. According to Stephanie Conway, Senior Director of Talent Development at LinkedIn, it has long been recognized that career-development opportunities play a significant role in determining whether employees (your north stars) choose to remain with or depart from a company.
In short, dig as much into data as possible, and identify avenues of improvement to increase employee retention. The solutions you identify here should find their way into your integrated talent management strategy.
Building A Talent Pool For Specific Skills
If the leadership at your organization seeks to build a pipeline of talent skilled in a particular domain, you can evaluate your existing talent pool, and see if that’s sufficient to satiate the demand. Otherwise, you need to plan ways to attract the target talent, nurture them, and then motivate them to apply for the job at your company. This will be followed by interviewing, recruitment, and onboarding. Ensuring that you’re not exceeding the supply is critical to cutting costs.
Now, your integrated talent management strategy can help you further optimize the costs. Depending on how adept the talent needs to be, you can sometimes prefer less experienced candidates to hire them at reasonable annual packages, and then train them to deliver as expected. This demands close collaboration of the learning and development team with the recruiting team.
Build a Diverse Workforce To Support DEI & ESG Initiatives
Diversity and inclusion are also becoming central to HR initiatives. It’s becoming increasingly clear that building diverse and inclusive workplaces is not just an ethical imperative but a strategic advantage.
Organizations that have a good gender diversity among executive teams are 25% more likely to be more profitable than average organizations. For ethnic diversity, the percentage spikes up to 35%.
Your integrated talent management strategy must analyze the current diversity composition of your teams, and acknowledge the need to bridge gaps, if any. This again would need to be backed by data to bypass the red-ribbon bureaucratic processes and get a go-ahead from the CHROs, or top management.
Cut Costs & Improve Profitability
A study shows that companies with highly engaged workforces see a 20% increase in sales and a 21% increase in profitability. If the top leadership wants you to cut sourcing & recruitment costs wherever possible, one of the best ways is to tap into your existing talent pool to fill the vacancies. This helps save job advertising costs and the resources that you need to channel for attracting talent, evaluating & assessing them.
Another approach to maximizing profitability is upgrading the skills of your employees through continuous training and development initiatives. You may also optimize employee reward and recognition programs.
A holistic integrated talent management strategy would incorporate and streamline all the above.
Additionally, the goals could also be to build the next line of leadership at your organization or prepare the workforce for the looming AI challenge or climate challenge. All this needs intentful close collaboration and concerted efforts from different HR departments.
How Skima AI Helps You Implement Your Integrated Talent Management Strategy?
TCS’ COO and Executive Director, N Ganpathy Subramaniam, highlighted recently, “We continue to make investments in our people and technologies. We now have a 100,000-strong pool of Gen-AI ready consultants and prompt engineers who are engaged in hundreds of GenAI projects for our clients across various segments.”
Acing Integrated Talent Management (ITM) involves more than just aligning HR functions—it involves accepting cutting-edge digital technologies and creating a diverse workplace culture.
Enters Skima AI.
Building a talent pipeline is at the heart of all your talent management strategies. But it is also one of the most time-intensive and cost-intensive activities. Skima AI helps you-
- Minimize the time recruiters spend screening resumes
- Minimize your average time-to-hire
- Minimize your average cost-of-hire
- Improve your quality-of-hire
- Improve your retention rate, and reduce your turnover rate
- Improves training outcomes
How? Well, we have highly designed sophisticated AI engines that devour your candidate resume database, and extract talent intelligence in the blink of an eye to help you discover your purple squirrels (top matching candidates), thus saving you a lot of recruitment time and costs.
Try Skima AI today, or book a demo now. It’s free.
Happy Recruiting!
