Create A Winning People Strategy, With AI-Enabled Talent Intelligence
HR professionals and business leaders have their hands full with numerous talent challenges – skills shortages, a highly-competitive talent market, budget cuts, high turnover – and it’s a lot to juggle at once.
One reason why these challenges are proving to be so difficult is the rate at which they are developing and changing. With the half-life of skills shrinking, the skills you’re short of today won’t even be the ones you desperately need in the future. Since new technologies are being developed all the time, your organization will develop the need for new skills on an ongoing basis.
So how do you keep up and make smart, effective decisions around talent and your people strategy? You need AI-enabled Talent Intelligence.
What is Talent Intelligence? 🤔
In simple terms, Talent Intelligence is the combination of real-time and historical data on all your talent and skills across the entire talent lifecycle. It includes the process of collecting and analyzing data to identify patterns within your organization (and in the wider market), and then using those insights to make better decisions.
Talent Intelligence encompasses data from each stage of the talent lifecycle. This means it’s crucial to have accurate, dynamic data on active and passive candidates, your current employees, people managers, brand new hires, alumni, silver medalists, and even your competition.
When you have this data at your fingertips, your Talent and HR teams can more easily answer the critical questions, like: which candidates are the right fit for our company? Which of our current employees are at-risk of leaving? Would an internal job opportunity encourage them to stay?
Answering these questions (and knowing what questions to ask in the first place) is a vital part of any good people strategy. If you’re looking to launch a new and improved people strategy, based on high quality Talent Intelligence, you should seriously consider how explainable AI can help.
Using AI to create a top-notch people strategy ⭐️
As industry analyst Josh Bersin points out in his whitepaper, many organizations are at a stage of digital transformation called “industry reinvention”, meaning there is a real need for both new operating models and new approaches to leveraging data for decision making.
With the pace of change ever-increasing, businesses can’t expect to keep up – and make good, forward-thinking decisions – without relying heavily on data. Businesses need the most up-to-date and accurate data to make quality decisions.
That’s where AI comes in. The technology has the ability to bring together data from disparate HR systems, allowing you to view all your talent data in one place. And, once you have your connected data set, AI can help with enrichment and enhancement, keeping the data complete and up to date in a way manual maintenance would never accomplish.
The right AI-driven Talent Intelligence may even bring together your internal talent data, and data from the wider talent market, to give you a full understanding of the talent you have, the talent you need, and external trends.
But it goes beyond that – AI technology has the ability to analyze and make inferences about skills and proficiency levels, potential, and even behavioral attributes of employees and candidates – offering suggestions that HR professionals may not have spotted by themselves. This ensures that all the options are on the table, and ultimately, you end up with the right people in the right roles.
The benefits of Talent Intelligence across the talent lifecycle 💡
When we speak about things like Talent Intelligence, the first thing that often comes to people’s minds is Talent Acquisition (TA). But the truth is, Talent Intelligence should be a critical part of the entire candidate and employee journey.
How can Talent Intelligence help HR teams improve experiences at each stage of the talent lifecycle?
Sourcing
The process of sourcing normally involves identifying potential candidates that have in-demand skills and could be a good fit for your company, and then organizing them into specific talent pools.
Traditional sourcing is reactive, meaning most companies begin looking for candidates with specific skills once a gap opens up. With AI-enabled Talent Intelligence, your sourcing process can become a lot more sophisticated than that. One of the key benefits that dynamic talent and skills data bring to this stage of the Talent Acquisition process is greater proactivity.
With Talent Intelligence, the HR function can use valuable, dynamic insights to help predict the future needs of the workforce, and in turn, can enable sourcers to start finding qualified talent, before they are actually needed.
Recruiting
Recruiting is another part of the people strategy that has traditionally been both reactive and time consuming. In a tight talent market, there’s no time to waste, so the faster you can make confident, data-driven hiring decisions, the better.
Talent Intelligence empowers your recruiters and hiring managers to do that. With the right data, Talent Acquisition teams can speed up the recruitment process dramatically, because the technology has already done the hard work of matching candidates’ skills to roles – whether they have opened up yet or not. This frees up recruiters to focus on building human connections and providing an excellent, personalized candidate experience.
Of course, saving time in the recruitment process is important, but making sure you are hiring the right people for the right roles is critical. That’s where Talent Intelligence and skills data can really make a positive impact. If you have an established Job Architecture, AI-driven HR technology can help you identify which candidates are the best-fit for each opportunity, based on skills, interests, and potential.
Learning & Development
Our latest Talent Index research shows that 46% of respondents were keen to pursue Learning and Development (L&D) opportunities at their current workplace. These opportunities can come in all shapes and sizes – mentoring, apprenticeships, classes, workshops, or short-term gigs, for example.
With Talent Intelligence and skills data, enriched and kept current by explainable AI, people managers can better understand who on their teams would be a good fit for specific training, who has the skills and desire to serve as a mentor for other employees, and who is interested in progressing their career.
Additionally, with the right AI-driven tools, employees who are eager to grow and develop have the ability to seek out those opportunities themselves. They can receive personalized recommendations for training, mentors and gigs based on their career goals, skills, and interests.
Employee engagement and retention
Our Talent Index data revealed that 32% of people who are looking to leave their jobs in the next 12 months said their reason for wanting to leave was due to the lack of opportunities to develop their careers. It’s worth noting that this could include taking on short-term projects or gigs outside of their team, or making lateral moves, as well asr promotions within their current department.
AI-driven Talent Intelligence can help HR professionals identify warning signs – indicators that people are at risk of quitting. After all, 47% of workers are considering a job change within a year.
With these insights, Talent professionals and managers can proactively work to re-engage workers.
One of the most effective ways to re-engage a disengaged worker is through upskilling opportunities, or internal mobility. If a disengaged employee has the opportunity to try out a new role in a different department, that may be just the thing they need to become excited about their work and their future at your company, all over again. And, with the right Talent Intelligence, you can match employees to those opportunities (hopefully) before it’s too late.
Succession planning and alumni management
No matter how hard you work to keep talent engaged, dealing with resignations will always be part of your people strategy, on some level. And, when employees leave, they become alumni – another critical piece of the talent management puzzle.
Whether or not you have a lot of notice before an employee leaves, Talent Intelligence can help you with succession planning and filling their shoes. With AI-powered skills data and insights, your HR team can easily view which employees within your organization (or candidates in your CRM) have the skills needed to fill the newly opened gap.
And, on a similar note, with the full picture Talent Intelligence gives you, you can even look at your alumni pool, to see if any of your former employees would be a good fit for a given role, and might be interested in coming back.
A good people strategy considers every stage of the talent lifecycle – from sourcing, to alumni management. With AI-enabled Talent Intelligence, your people strategy can go from one that is manual, reactive and outdated, to one that is automated, proactive, data-driven and effective. This can give your organization a true competitive advantage.