Talent mapping is vital for your business growth. A talent map is more than scouting and hiring employees according to your company's current needs. It plays an integral role in aligning your overall business strategy and talent acquisition strategy. In addition, candidate mapping is a strategy catering to long-term organizational needs beyond short-sighted quick hiring and onboarding processes.
What talent mapping offers is an approach to business expansion wherein the experience and capabilities of your present employees are highlighted to serve better and support your greater vision and goals. It helps you identify talent gaps and areas of improvement, too. So, wether you're thinking of a more DIY approach to HR talent mapping, or wanting to outsource a dedicated HR company and just want to learn the basics, this article is for you.
Table of Contents
What Is Talent Mapping in HR and Recruitment?
Talent mapping is a proactive career pathing approach to finding the right talent, matching them to the right roles, placing them in the right seats, retaining them, and developing their skills. This talent pooling and recruitment strategy are based on your business' forecasted long-term hiring needs.
A talent map assists with strategic human resource management and comprises these three essential actions:
- Proactively determining potential new positions, your company will need to propel long-term business growth
- Updating existing job descriptions, roles, and responsibilities to more accurately resonate with how business strategies are executed
- Mapping out motivating and realistic career paths and professional advancement opportunities for your employees
Tying all employee duties with tangible results that drive your organizational strategies forward is critical. Moreover, talent mapping has to be communicated with transparency across the company.
To guarantee the success of a strategic and mindful candidate mapping, consider answering these important questions early in the process for proper prep work:
- What are the behavioral and technical demands of the job?
- What are the ideal attributes a new hire should possess to contribute to the team and the enterprise?
- How will the new hire’s remuneration affect the equity within the department and the company?
The Advantages of Using a Talent Map
Experience the following benefits of candidate mapping:
- It creates and sustains the company culture
- It develops employees into leaders in their unique ways to help realize your business strategies
- It champions employee engagement
- It helps you identify impending attrition
- It brings in opportunities for internal mobility
- It shapes employees for success
- It cuts down on the duration and costs of the recruitment process
- It helps collect market intelligence
- It is great for employer branding
1. It creates and sustains the company culture.
Culture is one of the defining aspects of your business. And talent mapping is an imperative factor for building and maintaining an optimistic culture in your work environment.
An empowering culture emerges from candidate mapping that is done right. It motivates your people to perform at their peak every time and deliver as many high-quality valuable results as their capacities allow. In turn, the results of their work help execute your business tactics and methodologies.
Embracing and reinforcing a healthy culture is essential as your organization grows in employees and revenue. Talent mapping keeps up with the business it serves, so, a culture of excellence and values can lead to increased opportunities for expansion.
For your HR and recruitment teams, this means that proactiveness and flexibility should be underscored. If your business requires them to deviate from their regular headhunting and talent pooling processes, they must willingly accommodate these changes and demands.
2. It develops employees into leaders in their unique ways to help realize your business strategies.
Effective talent mapping produces leaders. Employees in the right roles where they perform optimally impact your company directly, bringing about well-fueled, robust business performance.
Talent mapping guarantees room for professional growth for both present and prospective employees. It enables you to see if there are leadership opportunities for specific team members or aspiring candidates.
3. It champions employee engagement.
A talent map presents valuable opportunities for employee engagement. It opens the floor for career conversations through which you can gather qualitative information about your employee’s interests and goals. You can compare their professional objectives and determine where they may fit your business growth strategies and future investments.
Furthermore, acknowledging their potential and career aspirations and understanding how you can help fulfill them build trust and boost employee morale.
4. It helps you identify impending attrition.
Talent mapping can help reveal signs that a team member has plans of leaving and moving forward with opportunities outside your organization.
Considering such behavioral patterns can strengthen your talent map and candidate mapping exercises. It can guide you toward devising the most favorable solutions for all parties involved.
5. It brings in opportunities for internal mobility.
A practical talent map allows movement of present employees within your organization. Whether it is vertical or lateral movement, it is important to help team members maximize and reach their full potential. Internal mobility should allow them to acquire more work experience through appropriate training and upskilling initiatives.
Fully utilized capabilities and career growth are incredibly beneficial for your enterprise, preventing you from stumbling across issues related to skill shortage.
6. It shapes employees for success.
Succession planning is critical in your talent mapping programs. Candidate mapping paves the way for clear avenues for professional development and career growth trajectories. It helps you distinguish people with leadership potential so you can adequately invest in a system to elevate and accelerate their progress.
7. It cuts down on the duration and costs of the recruitment process.
A talent map aims to achieve a solid, streamlined talent pipeline. It enables you to make strategic hires in the long term. It equips you with a method to approach active and passive candidates in your talent pool.
Candidate mapping saves you the apprehension of having to fill a role immediately when there is a sudden need to because you conveniently keep an updated database of potential job applicants. This trims the duration of headhunting and hiring, thereby significantly reducing the costs and effort that come with the whole process.
To assist your in-house recruitment specialists, you have the option to employ the services of an employer of record agency. An EOR firm has access to the global workforce, so it is fully competent in onboarding remote employees.
8. It helps collect market intelligence.
Talent mapping processes make gathering market intelligence easier. You can gain insights into your competition’s organizational makeup, job titles and skill sets, and team sizes. A talent map provides an encompassing view of the talent market, enabling you to investigate and compare compensation and benefits trends.
When you have this information in hand, you can evaluate if your company’s salary range and benefits offered are at par or, even better, exceed the current market pay rates and conditions. This gives you a substantial competitive advantage over other enterprises in your industry, increasing your chances of attracting quality leads and onboarding good hires.
9. It is great for employer branding.
Candidate-based surveys are essential in talent mapping. When your organization establishes and maintains a positive employer brand reputation and perception, it piques your prospective candidates’ interest in working for your business. Top-notch talent will flock to get a chance to build a career in your company.
How To Build a Candidate Mapping Strategy
A talent map connects your current hiring needs and future demands for additional job openings. Here are the best approaches which your recruitment team can put into practice right away and take your candidate mapping strategies to new heights:
- Sketch Your Ideal Candidate Persona (ICP)
- Study Your Competitor’s HR Management Methodologies and Recruitment Processes
- Leverage a Recruitment CRM System that Suits Your Business Requirements
1. Sketch Your Ideal Candidate Persona (ICP)
For recruitment and talent pooling purposes, your ICP is the standard guideline for the qualifications you want your future employee to possess. The most important yardstick is their technical competencies and behavioral skills.
Paint the picture of your candidate persona based on the nature of work, responsibilities, and expectations required of the role.
2. Study Your Competitor’s HR Management Methodologies and Recruitment Processes
Learn what the key industry players are doing to attract top talent. Your competitor’s website careers page is an excellent place to start looking. Assess their application process and see if you can spot any headhunting tactics, trends, and activities. Know their hiring needs and the quality of their talent pool. Look into the channels and platforms where they scout their candidates. This data is genuinely helpful when examining your own.
3. Leverage a Recruitment CRM System that Suits Your Business Requirements
When expanding your business and workforce, you will want to use a customer relationship management system that most fittingly meets your demands.
Subscribing to a dedicated CRM platform where all HR functions and actions occur is efficient, scalable, and sustainable. Reap the following benefits a CRM solution offers:
- Streamlined recruitment, hiring, onboarding, and offboarding processes
- Automated email campaigns and job advertisements
- Centralized calendar schedule that is visible to all team members
- Reports and analytics on employee retention and attrition trends
Tools To Improve Your Talent Map
These tools can help you perform proper candidate mapping:
- LinkedIn Talent Insights: It delivers real-time data on active talent pools and hiring companies from across the globe. This tool gives you recommendations and candidate suggestions based on the vacancies you are looking to fill.
- Tweatbeaver: It is a Twitter search tool that extracts multiple data beneficial for headhunters, allowing the download of information on the applicant’s professional profile and other links associated with it, such as website and work portfolio.
- AmazingHiring: This search and data enhancement AI technology enables the analysis of candidate profiles.
- Job descriptions: These are a high-level overview of a job post’s functions and responsibilities. Plus, they include an outline of the required skills and experience. It is advisable always to keep your repository of job descriptions updated and adaptable to tweaking.
- Employee performance reviews: Performance appraisals help you distinguish their strengths from the aspects that need improvement. These also help evaluate a team member’s readiness to take on more challenging responsibilities.
- Employee surveys: Discover how your staff perceives your management style and the work culture. These surveys help you look inward to evaluate your company’s relationship with your people. Pay special attention to signs of dissatisfaction, such as complaints, and see how frequently particular negative feedback pops up on surveys.
Final Thoughts on Talent Mapping
Recruitment is a dynamic process. It evolves together with your ever-changing business needs. It may not be the most straightforward feat, but it does not have to be tedious or overwhelming. When there seems to be a high demand for new talent, talent mapping steps in with a critical role in easing these transitions and transformations.
In conclusion, mindless hiring tends to be short-sighted, while candidate mapping serves in the long term. The latter puts your recruitment processes into perspective and aligns them with the company vision and business objectives.
