How Can Talent Mapping Benefit Your Business?

Most organizations hire reactively. A position becomes available and then they seek to fill it. Hiring this way can be slow. If you are hiring because an employee is leaving, productivity can suffer if a role is left empty for too long, and there is no guarantee that you’ll find the best possible candidate available. Companies should instead use proactive hiring strategies, such as talent mapping processes, to pinpoint candidates with the skills and experience they need and make better hires, faster.

Talent mapping can also be used to support strategic growth by identifying skills gaps within your current workforce, uncovering the causes of high employee turnover , assisting with succession planning and spotting opportunities for internal advancement. Think of talent mapping as one of the tools available to you for long-term talent development.

Benefits Of Talent Mapping For Your Business

Talent mapping is a crucial part of building a sustainable talent pipeline that ensures your business has access to the skills and expertise it needs for years to come and is one of the big benefits for using an outsourced recruitment partner. In the short term it can reduce your time to hire and the other negative effects of unfilled roles, but these are only some of the benefits of having access to wider talent pools.

Other benefits of using a talent mapping process include:

1. Supporting Your EDI Efforts

Building inclusivity into your recruitment processes can be an effective way of improving the EDI of your whole organization. The diversity and demographic data collected through talent mapping processes can support those inclusive recruitment practices by giving valuable insights into the diversity of your current talent pools and indicating where you can invest in your current team to improve the engagement and retention of diverse employees.

2. Giving You a Deeper Understanding of the Talent Market

You can use talent mapping processes to gather critical market intelligence. Data gathered can include an overview of key market factors, such as leading employers in your industry, mobility trends, and pay and benefits data to aid with salary benchmarking.
Understanding how your competitors attract and retain talent, how long employees tend to stay in positions, and what causes talent to move can help you improve your own retention strategies.

3. Expanding Your Candidate Reach

Talent mapping processes can help you identify a wide range of both passive and active candidates with the right skills and experience for your roles. This gives you the chance to build relationships with large volumes of potential candidates through targeted emails, social media, and other engagement so they are warm and receptive when you need them. This can be incredibly useful for pinpointing niche skills.

4. Improving Internal Employee Engagement

One of the key steps in the talent mapping process is assessing your current employees’ performance levels and effectiveness. Doing so gives great insights into why your staff might choose to leave and what tools you can use to help improve performance and motivation such as training, benefits, and internal promotions. By following through you can increase internal employee engagement, lower retention, AND make your organization more attractive to new talent!

5. Building Your Employer Brand

Regularly engaging with potential candidates is a great way to gather information on how you are perceived as an employer and determine their level of interest in working for you. Understanding how your employer brand is regarded in the market in comparison to your competitors and why is also the first step in building an attractive employer brand.

How to Conduct a Talent Mapping Process

With so many benefits available to organizations who engage in talent mapping and using it to build a sustainable talent pipeline, it’s no surprise that so many businesses want to build it into their talent acquisition strategy. Doing so, however, can be a challenge, especially if your TA teams are stretched and are having to manage recruitment needs for multiple departments and functions.

If you want to develop talent mapping processes in your organization, use this checklist to ensure you’re getting the most out of your talent mapping:

• Identify your future business goals
• Compare those goals to your current staffing
• Assess your employees’ performance levels

Tip: The Nine Box Grid is an excellent resource for evaluating internal talent

• Use your competitors to benchmark your staffing
• Identify potential for internal advancement and upskilling
• Create a database of potential candidates for future positions

At Pierpoint, we can provide you with full lifecycle recruitment support helping you build a talent pipeline that will support your business’s strategic growth for years to come. Talk to our solution designers today to discuss your hiring needs.