The battle for talent has never been so important. Employers are being pushed to rethink their strategies in response to an economic downturn and a lack of skilled workers. Unsurprisingly, in this climate employee retention is a top priority for most HR departments.
Although there’s no easy solution here, fuelling employee growth with the help of technology is a great way to get started. This means that policies that have historically held back progress must be revisited, and HR departments need to find new ways of getting opportunities like training, projects and new jobs directly to the right people without convoluted systems. Additionally, managers must be aware of non-traditional ways of growing their team members’ skills and prospects.
Talent Management in the Spotlight
The current climate is pushing businesses to think differently about the ways they attract, hire and retain top employees, with an increased focus on talent management. Hiring new people is a difficult, expensive and time-consuming business. It’s also fraught with uncertainty: whether the employee is a good fit for the organization; whether they will succeed in the role; and how long they will stay.
Employers are therefore seeking cost- and time-effective ways of keeping employees with an appetite for growth, especially as it’s vital to retain top performers during recessions. As a result, internal mobility programmes have recently gained momentum. It’s often better for businesses to hire or promote from inside their existing workforce, for multiple reasons:
- Higher employee retention: The vast majority of workers in a recent survey, at 94%, say they would stay at a company longer if it invests in their careers, making internal mobility a meaningful strategy for improving employee retention.
- Powerful cost-cutting: It’s estimated that large enterprises lose over $400,000,000 annually from expenses associated with recruiting and training new hires. Internal mobility helps to eliminate these costs.
- Familiarity with the organization: Internal candidates already understand the company and its processes, and have established relationships that allow them to do their job better.
Internal mobility is critical for building better employee experiences inside businesses. If individuals feel more valued for their contributions, they feel a stronger sense of connection to their company, driving loyalty and reinforcing a positive company culture. This, in turn, means that employees will be less likely to leave in pursuit of career advancement. A positive company culture also reflects well on its brand, helping attract quality external hires to the organization. It’s a win-win.
The Internal Mobility Conundrum
Despite these advantages, many businesses struggle with internal hiring, for three main reasons:
- Low employee awareness: It’s often difficult to ensure employees are aware of all the open positions in a business, and that they can apply to roles outside their immediate department.
- Friction among managers: Managers are hesitant to lose an employee to another department, especially as it shifts recruitment problems onto them. Now these managers not only have to fill a position, but also spend more time training the new hire.
- Overly complex HR systems: Whether you look at internal hiring or project staffing, the process is typically resource-intensive and time-consuming. Much of the burden falls on recruiters to screen applicants, and most internal hiring data is stored on multiple HR systems. Recruiters often don’t know how to navigate these systems, resulting in lack of access to the right data and a long selection process.
Every business has a wealth of employee data already available on various systems — for example, human capital management, talent marketplaces or applicant tracking systems. There’s information about applicants who have previously applied for roles and what they’re interested in doing next, as well as those who have been in their role for a long time and are probably ready for something new. There are also insights on non-linear moves in an organization — between departments, divisions and career domains.
However, it’s not practical for everyone in a business to have access to all these insights. There’s an opportunity for a better solution, one that uses technology to bring the most relevant options to the right people at the right time. This provides employees with growth opportunities that they can choose from, enabling them to take control of their development.
From Reactive to Proactive
One interesting approach to tackling this problem comes from HiredScore, which is bringing artificial intelligence (AI) to talent management with a situationally aware, personalized and predictive offering. The company has shown that organizations already have most of the information they need to transform their talent management, only needing more effective connections between systems.
HiredScore’s software-as-a-service solution connects to all of a company’s existing HR systems, processing data about employees, job postings, trending skills and talent deficits, alongside a multitude of related information. By bringing all this data together, HiredScore makes proactive recommendations to recruiters, managers and employees. These suggestions align with an organization’s demands as well as employee interests, matching the right talent to the right opportunity at the right time.
The system can rapidly screen employees for a role and automatically send the most relevant people to HR, recruiters or hiring managers, while taking into account a business’ commitment to diversity and inclusion, personal data privacy and so on. This is attractive to many companies as it significantly accelerates the process of fairly identifying employees for new roles. It also increases employees’ sense of control over their careers with little effort from themselves or their managers.
What’s interesting is that HiredScore can go further than automatically surfacing relevant roles to internal employees. If the system spots an employee who has shown interest in a role or who is ready for something new, HiredScore can make recommendations about training courses or projects that could help them develop relevant skills. This contributes to the company’s wider development targets while ensuring employees feel their careers are progressing.
These recommendations can be surfaced wherever makes most sense for the business, such as through a bot on Microsoft Teams, meaning that employees don’t need to adopt a new HR application or understand a particular process to connect with these opportunities.
This AI-driven approach enables businesses to benefit from the tech very quickly; according to HiredScore, typical implementation and training time takes about 90 days. Crucially for compliance, the system has ethical AI built-in and is able to include its reasoning alongside each recommendation. This builds confidence among managers and employees alike.
Data privacy is also taken seriously by HiredScore, as employees must opt in to their profile data being accessed by the system, and in practice, the company says that most recognize the benefits of doing so.
AI Changes the Talent Management Narrative
It’s clear that businesses need to be much smarter about the way they think about resourcing, recruiting and developing talent to meet increasing growth demands in a post-pandemic world. Given the increasing role of technology in creating this new demand through digital transformation initiatives, it seems inevitable that tech should play a vital part in transforming talent management processes too.
AI solutions like that of HiredScore not only enable businesses to scale and automate recruitment processes, but also to rethink their approach to talent management for all involved. It might have been a long time coming, but talent management transformation using AI is now an imperative that no business can delay.
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