Workforce Planning – Are You Talent Mapping?
Is the Talent you have today, the Talent your Business needs tomorrow?
If you are growing (or plan to grow) your business, have you stopped and thought about whether your current staff are able to support your growth goals? What will you do if they cannot?
In today’s market the importance of cultivating talent today that your business will need tomorrow, is becoming increasingly important in order to stay ahead of the game. Talent Mapping is an established HR ‘tool’ that can facilitate effective and efficient planning of your workforce for tomorrow and beyond.
What exactly is Talent Mapping?
Talent Mapping is considered by many to be the exercise that truly links and shapes a HR Strategy to the overall Business Strategy.
Essentially, it is the process of plotting every individual in your organisation. Where they ‘sit’ based on their talent (skills, knowledge, competencies, capability, experience and qualifications); and assessing their current talent (now). And also assessing their potential future talent (where they can continue to add value to your business). From here, business owners can accurately: identify and understand business’ future talent needs; assess the capability of current staff to meet those needs; and, develop a strategy to fill any determined talent “gaps”.
The key benefits of talent mapping are summarised below, however, arguably the most valuable benefit is the process leads to articulation and proactive development of a talent pipeline to support the business goals. This creates a foundation for succession planning which can be readily adapted in response to future demands; a shift from transactional people management to strategic.
Other key benefits include, but are not limited to:
A “snapshot” of competitor activity through remuneration benchmarking;
Development or business-alignment of the Employee Value Proposition;
Elimination or significant decrease in the delays and costs associated with replacing high-talent team members;
Articulation of the business’ ‘Ideal Employee Profile’; and
Development of a fit-for-purpose Learning and Development training program.
Put simply, talent mapping done correctly creates a ‘roadmap’ for needs-based workforce planning (encompassing succession planning, future recruitment, and, L&D initiatives) which enables businesses to make investments in the right activities today, to turn their vision into reality tomorrow.
To learn more about talent mapping, and how talent management and workforce planning can improve your organisation, speak to one of our consultants at: solve@fiveseven.com.au.
