Hiring for today is good. Hiring for today, while considering the future workforce needs of the company; now that’s excellent! While 65% of growing companies need to hire in high volumes, the cost of a single bad hire can go upwards of USD 14,000 for a company. Add to the mix the recruitment challenges modern recruiters & hiring managers face when trying to secure high-quality employees.
Talent mapping today is a necessity for companies to prepare for their long-term workforce needs. In addition to the current demands, the process helps you focus on the overarching goals & missions that the organization is set to achieve by helping you identify high-potential employees for future talent needs, evaluating your current staff's ability to meet those needs, and source high-potential candidates for future recruitment. The talent mapping process also helps your talent management strategies in skill gaps. So, here is everything you need to know about Talent mapping and how to use it in your recruitment strategies.
Understanding Talent Mapping in Recruitment?
The term Talent mapping can be simplified as a strategic approach that businesses use to understand and plan for their long-term hiring goals. While it's true that filling the current open positions should be a top priority, recruiters need to have the bigger picture in mind when making hiring decisions. Talent mapping requires HRs to not only hire the right people, but also upskill their current employees, and keep the job roles and responsibilities updated to the growing demands of the company. The process encompasses everything from identifying potential successors for a senior-level role to tracking employees nearing retirement and pre-planning recruitment strategies and training plans for their replacement. Additionally, with 85% of talent acquisition specialists addressing talent retention as their top ten priorities, talent mapping is one of the primary ways to achieve it. Talent mapping assists in:
- Building detailed plans to identify organizational vulnerabilities.
- Developing strategic plans to address skills gaps.
- Creating personalized learning programs to enhance employee skills.
- Identifying and promoting top talent within the company.
With a clear understanding of your current and future talent needs, you can make more informed hiring decisions, create better training programs, and align the workforce toward the continued growth of the company.
How Is Candidate Mapping Different From Talent Mapping?
Candidate mapping and talent mapping – both might sound the same, but they have quite a few differences. For starters, candidate mapping can be considered an integral part of the larger, talent mapping spectrum, considering both internal and external hiring. The candidate mapping process incorporates planning a candidate’s journey and scrutinizing any susceptibilities in the varied steps of the process involving application, screening, interview, and selection. The goal of candidate mapping can be to enhance candidate experience, enrich recruitment productivity, and make good hires.
A general process of building a candidate mapping plan can be devised as:
- In Awareness, you would want to reflect on how and where job-seekers would come across your company or job post.
- Next, during Consideration, candidates would compare your company with multiple others. Your value proposition here will differentiate you.
- When the candidates enter the Interest stage, they will be drawn toward your organization.
- Finally, Application is when the candidate applies.
- Followed by Screening, where the candidate is evaluated.
- Lastly, Selection, here the candidate is ready to be onboarded.
How To – Talent Map
Understand the Company’s Talent Needs
Before you can even begin preparing talent mapping strategies, you must dig deeper into the talent needs of your company. Whether it’s a small start-up or a Fortune 500 company, start by examining your company's business goals for the upcoming year and the next three to five years. Once you know the direction the company wants to head towards, you will have a better idea of the talent required to support these objectives and identify the skills needed for both today and the future.
You must also check for loopholes in the company’s workforce that can negatively affect its progress. For example, if the company doesn't have an inclusive environment and there is nobody to address employee concerns, the people there might soon start looking for a different job. In fact, 92% of business owners believe that workforce education on DE&I is necessary to meet diversity and inclusivity goals. It’s important to identify these trends in the company quickly. But, only identifying will take you so far, you must also assess whether your leadership is willing to invest in developing your workforce's skills. Speak to the leadership team and get clarity on their views to conduct talent mapping exercises, be mindful.
Build Ideal Candidate/Employee Descriptions
By developing ideal candidate/employee descriptions for varied roles in your organization your ability to identify and hire the ideal candidate will increase multifold. The profile will provide a comprehensive overview of the necessary and desirable attributes for a specific position, including skills, education, pay range, and level of experience.
The practice of developing ideal candidates might go beyond quick Google searches. The key here is to create a description tailored to the company’s culture, goals, and long-term plans. To master it, you must engage with managers responsible for hiring for these roles and current team members who will work with the new hire. Based on the company’s talent demands and candidate description you can channel your recruiting approach. For example - a startup with a new product will need to hire aggressively to enter the market and disrupt the competition, whereas a company doing R&D for a new product will require specialized employees, making strategic hiring a necessity.
Identify Key Data Points
Based on the company goals, key employee skills, and long-term vision, certain data points will guide your talent management plan in the long run. Some common data points include:
Skills Inventory
Criteria identified that 78% of resumes are misleading and as much as 46% have included lies. Therefore, building a skill inventory based on testing is necessary for a continued and hassle-free talent management experience. Listing down the specific skills that current employees and potential candidates must have. These are crucial for matching talent to organizational needs.
Career Aspirations
Take into account the professional goals and ambitions of employees which will help you in succession planning and career development initiatives.
Performance History
Regularly monitor and track past performance metrics to measure the capabilities of current employees and identify their potential for growth within the organization.
Market Availability
Keep a tab on the exterior pool of talents and gauge the availability of skills and talent in the market to make informed recruitment strategies.
Leadership Potential
Identifying individuals with the potential to assume leadership roles in the future. One of the key aspects of succession planning.
Identify & Monitor Your Competition
To hire and remain the preferred choice of top candidates and high-calibre employees you must conduct a strategic analysis of how your hiring practices compare to the competitors. Whether it’s adapting to the latest tools or making changes to enhance your employer brand, when you comprehensively compare yourself to the competition you will have insights into organizational strengths and creative recruitment strategies that contribute to their success.
Not only hiring but having a competitor watch is equally valuable for retention strategies. For example: if your company doesn’t provide any growth aspect to a senior developer after a point, they might think of leaving the organization to pursue better positions. Interviewing regular employee interviews will help you discover such issues and act upon them.
Evaluate Employee Motivators and Performances
Talent mapping includes a strategic approach to identifying employees with the potential to grow into key roles aligned with organizational priorities. These can include developing mid-level sales managers for field offices. The process consists of a mix of current performance evaluations with an assessment of future growth potential. The idea here is to evaluate long-term compatibility. In addition to the hours of time and effort saved in making an external hire, promoting from within the organization also displays a commitment to employee development and organizational growth. When evaluating employee performance, existing data from quarterly and yearly reviews and one-to-one discussions are pivotal. Skill tests and specific questions about employee strengths, potential gaps and achievements can also play a critical role.
In addition to evaluation, put some time into discovering the primary motivators of employees in the organization. These play a crucial role in performance enhancement. Here is some data to make it vividly clear.
- 92% of employees mention trust in leadership as a primary motivator.
- 21% of employees take fewer sick leaves when they are appreciated.
- 15% of applicants turn down job offers because of bad company culture.
Your talent mapping development plan will help identify what motivates your employees to drive sustained performance and growth.
Develop a Candidate Pool
As a recruiter, you are continually in the process of finding the right candidate and equally alarmed that they might just slip past you and join your competition before you even reach them. The faster you are able to reach available candidates, the higher your chances of locking them for the job role. As easy as it is to say, identifying the right candidate can steal crucial hours of your recruitment process, especially if you are dependent on active job seekers. Building a pool of passive candidates can eliminate such uncertainties. Using tools like Skima AI, you can develop a pool of valid candidates and screen them instantly to identify the best fit for a certain job.
Additionally, you can use practice actively reaching out to preferred candidates based on job seeker personas for maximum outcome. You can also practice nurturing connections and exploring potential interests among former employees for future opportunities. Therefore, when a potential job opens, you know the right set of candidates to approach right from the get-go.
Practice Talent Management Diligently
Once you have hired the right talent, and discovered their current and future potential, you now have to be diligent in your talent management efforts. Your talent management plan will help you prepare retention strategies and support employee development. Be available, interact with employees, and bridge the gap between the employee expectations and what the organization demands from them.
Challenges of Talent Mapping
We have learned about the many benefits of talent mapping through its implementation. However, sometimes, executing such strategies can take more effort for recruiters than making hires. Some of the most common talent mapping challenges are:
Leadership doesn't see potential in it
A successful talent mapping plan thrives on the acceptance of the whole company. While you can go all in by prioritizing talent management strategically and outlining its application, comprehensive acceptance—from executives to employees and supervisors is critical for the success of talent mapping endeavours.
Tracking KPI
Today data & analytics are among the top recruiter skills. Integrating data points and tracking specific KPIs can be intimidating for some recruiters and hiring managers, especially some like candidate experiences that are difficult to track. If your data collection process is flawed, developing a talent mapping strategy will be extremely difficult as it’s a data-driven process.
Understanding your employee’s needs
Employee needs are constantly changing and sometimes you can’t keep up with them. Even after continued efforts, there will be reasons why your star employees will choose to leave, and explaining it won’t be possible. For example: where investing in training enhances workforce development, careful prioritisation of employee workload is also necessary. Therefore, implementing streamlined training programs can effectively provide diverse learning opportunities while simplifying progress tracking for efficient management.
Practice Talent Mapping to Future Proof Your Talent Needs
A combination of talent mapping and the right types of recruitment tools can set you up for talent management success. Implement a dedicated talent mapping plan – start by identifying your company needs and skill gaps, followed by employee evaluation, streamlined talent acquisition, and building a pool of passive candidates. Constantly evaluate and reevaluate your talent map to find loopholes and fix them. Keep recruiting!
Pro-tip for high-performing recruiters:
Use Skima AI to supercharge your sourcing & hiring process
Skima AI gives you access to our in-house recruitment database of 500Mn+ candidates. You can use our advanced search filters to find the best candidates.
Use our AI Matching Score platform feature to shortlist the candidates who would best fit the job role you are hiring for. Skima AI’s artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm is designed for vetting candidates against job descriptions and assigning them a job compatibility score i.e., AI Matching Score. The higher this score, the better fit a candidate will be for the job. Thus, it saves you a lot of time in the sourcing process.
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Happy recruiting!
