Finding and retaining the right talent has become harder than ever. Without the right data about the labor market, it is not easy to prepare the right strategy. And that is why organizations can utilize the concept of talent mapping to manage their talent needs and experience exponential growth.
Let’s have a look at what talent mapping is and how your company can benefit from it.
What Is Talent Mapping?
Talent mapping is a recruitment strategy that can play an important role in a company’s hiring process. It helps organizations determine their talent needs for the future and assess their current staff against those talent needs.
In essence, it allows businesses to develop a strategic plan that bridges the gap between their long-term goals and the candidates they must hire to reach those goals.
How Talent Mapping Can Improve Your Hiring
- Identify Skill Shortages
One of the key benefits of talent mapping is that it helps identify the skill shortages that exist within your business. This way, you are better able to set business goals, gain a perspective on the skills you need to reach those goals and prepare the right hiring strategy.
By mapping out talent, you can pinpoint specific departments that could use upskilling or new team members. This helps you ensure that your existing staff members are working to their full potential.
Additionally, it also helps you recruit new candidates and fill the right job roles that are missing from your organization’s structure.
- Assess Existing Talent
The majority of companies look outside for talent. However, you could be sitting on hidden talent within your company, and you probably are. This is one of the reasons why talent mapping can be so useful because it allows you to evaluate the readiness and talent of your existing workforce.
During a talent-mapping exercise, you want to look for an employee’s current performance along with their potential to grow. These are people whose future development aligns with your long-term business goals.
- Gain Competitor Insight
Gaining insight into what your competitors are doing can be extremely helpful. It lets you identify a crucial step that may be missing from your business processes.
Your talent-mapping process should include extensive research into your competitor’s strategies and process structure. This should include seeing what skill sets and job roles are missing from your organization in comparison to theirs.
This will help you identify any gaps you may have in your business and improve upon them.
- Diversity Hiring
Data you will acquire during a talent-mapping exercise will also help you to better prepare your diversity strategy and set expectations with your hiring teams. It takes proper research to identify challenges you might have, understand where diverse candidates live and identify the talent pool you need to target.
Having the right data regarding diverse talent is crucial for any good diversity strategy.
Image Source: An Optimistic Data-Driven Look at the Post-COVID Future of Tech Hiring
- Reduce Hiring Time and Costs
Through talent mapping, you would be able to identify the ideal candidate persona your business is missing—a person who has the specific skill set that will fill your talent gap and help your business progress.
By knowing exactly what you want, you can then reduce the time and cost per hire. Moreover, if you spend time searching and speaking with your ideal candidates regularly, you can build a relationship with them beforehand. This means when a position becomes available, you will have a quality candidate interested in filling that job role quickly instead of going through the tedious recruitment process.
- Support Your Employer Brand
With all of the insight gained through talent mapping, you’ll be able to support your employer brand. Having a greater understanding of the skills your organization needs would help you segment your message to appeal to the right candidates.
Moreover, you should invest in the career growth and aspirations of your current employees by offering them opportunities to develop new skills. This is going to affect your internal brand perspective positively.
Final Thoughts
Talent mapping will help you to identify your current needs and understand what will be needed in the future. And it will help you identify high-potential candidates in your industry, prepare the talent pipeline for future hires, and prepare the right talent strategy that meets your future staffing needs.
Data from talent mapping can uncover whether your company is behind your competitors, show the available talent pool in your market or help you to find the best candidates for a specific job.
