In today’s professional environment, hiring managers are under increasing pressure to recruit highly talented candidates with diverse backgrounds, skillsets, and well-rounded experiences. That’s why it’s never been more important to analyze your options.
Talent mapping is a proactive approach to forecasting long-term hiring needs and cultivating organizational support for new roles over time. It bridges the gap between a company’s goals and the personnel they must hire to reach them at any or all stages.
In short, talent mapping is essential because it:
- Identifies industry trends and themes in talent profiles
- Uses competitors as a guide
- Creates a database of potential passive candidates
Talent mapping is a great place to start if you’re looking for new ways to improve your talent management strategies. Below, we’ll detail where to integrate talent mapping, why it’s useful, and how Concentric can help.
How to implement talent mapping in hiring
Talent mapping involves collecting and analyzing data on potential candidates’ skills, experience, and qualifications, as well as their availability and interest in joining an organization. This information is then used to create a “map” of the talent pool, which can identify gaps and plan for future hiring needs. Talent mapping is a resource-intensive process, nor is it a one-and-done solution. As your company grows, hiring needs are bound to change. Talent mapping is an effective way to ensure next-level strategies.
Ask and answer the following:
- What are the company’s goals for the year (for the next three years, five years, and so on)?
- In which areas are the company struggling the most?
- Are the main challenges related to talent shortages?
- What skillsets and traits does the company on board to address said issues or support said goals?
- Is leadership willing to invest more in workforce development?
Take the answers to those questions and create correlated data points to populate your map. Some examples include:
- Job descriptions
- Skills inventory
- Surveys (employee & client (if applicable))
- Competitive intelligence (information on competitors’ strategies and practices).
Next, define benchmarks for what success looks like for the roles you want to hire. When you have an in-depth understanding of the hard and soft skills needed for each role, the specific measurements you’re after, and how they’d translate into performance goals, you can use the right performance-management strategy. From there, assess talent needs consistently as they arise or evolve. This could include tracking the success of your recruiting efforts and gathering feedback from potential candidates to understand their needs and interests.
If you’re overwhelmed, don’t worry, there are plenty of templates around the web to make mapping a little more approachable.
What are the benefits of talent mapping when working with a staffing partner?
Working with a staffing agency can provide several benefits, and talent mapping can effectively make the most of those benefits. Talent mapping can help the staffer identify a pool of qualified candidates who are available, interested, and adequately fits the needs addressed in the map. This can save time and resources that would otherwise be spent on narrowing the pool. This can improve the overall quality of the candidates provided, besides ensuring that those candidates are a good fit for the roles they are being placed in.
Here is a quick recap in case you need it
We know we just threw a bunch of information at you, so if you need the bullet points, here they are.
- Talent mapping allows a company to evaluate its existing talent gap, identify high-potential candidates in their industry, and create strategies for future staffing needs.
- Analyzing key industry players can reveal hidden opportunities, weaknesses, and strengths to build a more effective talent mapping strategy.
- It’s crucial to create a candidate persona to set the direction right for your talent mapping strategy.
- Recruiters in executive search firms like Concentric come with robust expertise and access to technology that internal HR teams and hiring managers don’t.
Concentric can make hiring easier
Concentric takes its role as a hiring partner very seriously because we know the hiring process can be stressful on both sides. To help, we’ll do everything from resume editing, interview prep, practice sessions, and even advice on a candidate’s first interview ensemble (if they want it). We want the entire job search to keep meaningful personal experiences. Concentric strives to build mutually beneficial connections between companies and candidates so that all parties can grow toward sustainable success.
Contact us today to learn more about how Concentric can help with your short and long-term hiring needs.
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