How to use talent mapping for successful recruitment

Ready to take recruitment to the next level? Turning your attention from plugging the gaps when they appear to strategic sourcing and talent mapping sends your recruiting strategy into the stratosphere. Rather than running to fill vacancies as and when you need to, these proactive and forward-thinking recruitment processes ensure that your hiring is efficient and streamlined. Plus, in the era of the Great Resignation, it’ll give you a leg up on the competition!

Companies that use talent mapping focus on their short, medium, and long-term hiring needs. In this article, we’ll explain the process of talent mapping and how you can use it to level up your recruitment process.

‍

What is talent mapping?

Talent mapping is essentially a plan for short, medium, and long-term talent acquisition. Recruiters, HR or the people department of any organization literally “map” talent to forecast hiring needs over time. Creating talent maps cultivates organizational support across the board and gives you better insights into your company’s strategy and goals. That means that talent mapping involves not just recruiters but leadership teams, business development, founders, and more. You need to bring a number of people in from across your organization to make sure you’re accurately predicting the open roles which need to be filled in the coming months and years.

‍

What are the best ways to map talent?

Talent mapping is a multi-department and multi-focus activity. Because it revolves around strategy and predictions, you’ll need to make a comprehensive plan for your talent map, bringing in people from across the organization for their insights. Here are important ways you can map talent.

Identify staffing objectives

Who will you be looking for? When? What will their responsibilities be? When are your current employees going to meet their capacity? These are all questions you must ask yourself as you start understanding your staffing objectives for the near and far future. At the same time, you need to consider larger, organization-wide questions, like: Where will your company ideally be in five years? How about ten? Do you have any major changes planned in the next few years?

You can also use this strategy to assess your current staffing situation. Ask yourself questions like: where does your organization need more support? Which departments lack direction, organization, or skills? Then meet with the leaders of each department to get their feedback and input on the current staffing situation as well as how that aligns with their vision of the company’s future. Do they need certain skill sets to meet business objectives?

Identifying staffing objectives is all about trying to find the gaps in your current organizational structure, as well as forecasting where those gaps will appear in the future. You could also use this stage to put together a series of organizational charts, showing not just your current structure, but a structure that could work in a year’s time, and another structure for five years from now.

Assess current employee performance

If you know that you’ll need a full stack engineer in six months, and you have someone on your team who’s already worked in that role, that gives you an exciting opportunity for personnel movement. That’s why assessing current employee performance is a valuable tool to help you map talent!

This stage is all about understanding the background, skills, and goals of the people who already work for your organization. If you know you’ll need a manager in a year, and you have someone in your team who really wants to move up to management level, you could use the opportunity for professional development. It’s a great incentive for your existing employee to work hard and stay with you, and it also saves you the trouble of finding a new hire!

Work with team managers to assess their direct reports, and make sure you’re always alert for an opportunity to build on existing talent.

Use competitors as a guide

Look at your current competitors as well as the heavyweights you might be planning to challenge later in the game to see how they’ve set up their company. Is there an obvious position you’re missing? Do they have a department that would also set your company up for success? Every company is different, but your competitors offer the chance to see what’s working (and what’s not!) in your industry. Take advantage of this to strategically analyze your competitors’ growth and plans for the future to find roles, departments, or skills you might have overlooked.

Identify key industry players

You should work on identifying potential future employees well before the role actually opens. Here, strategic sourcing can be a real help. Network, build your brand, and start contacting key players in your industry so that they already have interest in and awareness of your organization before a role opens up. Creating professional relationships outside of your company creates an easy link for you to bring in the best and brightest candidate when the time is right.

Create a database of passive candidates

Similarly, using strategic sourcing to create a database of potential candidates is a huge opportunity to keep your recruitment process farsighted in strategy yet simple in practice. Keep track of everyone who shows interest in your organization, strong candidates who didn’t quite land a previous role, and old employees, including interns. This gives you an easy access database of mapped talent that can be your first port of call when you have a role to fill. It also means that when you’re forecasting future roles, you could also forecast the future person who might fill it!

‍

Why should recruiters talent map?

Talent mapping is full of strategic advantages. Talent mapping can:

• Help your company grow strategically
• Save time and money on unnecessary hires
• Allow you to prioritize open positions that will have the biggest impact on company growth
• Avoid hiring-and-firing cycles
• Boost employee morale and retention

It’s all part of a modern approach to recruitment, in which you can streamline processes and attract the best talent at the same time. And if you need an extra boost, HiPeople is here to talk you through strategic sourcing, talent mapping, and more. Book a free demo today.