Talent management practices are not keeping up with workplace and strategic needs while organisations grapple with skills shortages, mobilising talent and preparing for the future. A barrier to keeping up, let alone getting ahead with managing current and future talent, is the lack of reliable skills data within the organisation, according to new research from Gartner HR.

Dion Love, vice president, advisory in the Gartner HR Practice, told Recruiter that getting the right data and managing talent effectively are tall orders as the mandate for talent management broadens. “You get asked to do a lot, it struggles to be able to do all that, and then it struggles to show impact from the work that it’s doing,” he said. Further, those owning talent management “can’t articulate the business impact of what they need to accomplish”.

“So,” Love continued, “we started off with this particular question in mind: How can we help to modernise talent management?”

And it’s modernisation that’s needed, Love emphasises, not transformation: “Rather, it simply needs to focus and target the work that it’s doing around getting the right people in the right place at the right time.” But he concedes that such a proposition is easier said than done.

Understanding skill supply and demand should be the first order of business. But it’s a massive job to catalogue the skills of everyone in an organisation to understand what the skill base is and where the skill gaps are – and to make such a system easily accessible and searchable. “It gets very hard, very quickly, very expensive, very quickly, and exhausting, very quickly,” Love says.

One organisation Love spoke with had identified 70,000 skills internally in just “a few weeks or months” into the cataloguing project. Some organisations may find they have upwards of 100,000 skills. And many who have taken on such a project, Love says, have had to extend their planned taxonomy period by years “because they found out very quickly how much work it involved”.

What are the skills we’re going to need in the future? How do we focus correctly on what those capabilities need to be? We’ve got to identify them

In fact, only 8% of employers of organisations have reliable employee skills data to support internal mobility, Gartner research has shown. “That’s a pretty low number,” Love says.

A second step in modernising talent management is to ‘mobilise talent’, that is to “get talent to go where we need it to go, to meet the business need as it arises, and again, the barriers are significant”, Love says. “It’s hard to mobilise talent to align with need.”

A third step involves looking ahead. “What are the skills we’re going to need in the future? How do we focus correctly on what those capabilities need to be? We’ve got to identify them. We’ve got to understand them and then to understand how we can acquire them. Do we build, borrow or buy them?”

In Gartner’s ‘Modernising Talent Management HR Leader Survey’, 76% of the 190 HR leaders surveyed agreed, organisations that are flexible in their talent strategies are better equipment to succeed in today’s work environment. Flexibility, or fluidity, allows organisations to build and buy skills efficiently as supply and demand evolve, move talent to where it has the greatest impact on the business, and to respond quickly and appropriately to changing business conditions.

To accomplish this, a targeted talent fluidity approach is called for. Steps include the need to target skills intelligence investments, for instance, by concentrating investment on a small set of roles with high business criticality – “Not all skills are created equal,” Love notes – and targeting the core skills of today. Love explains: “When it comes to current skills versus future skills, we see that current skills have a much greater impact on talent readiness than future skills – in fact, five times the impact of future skills… What we see here is that to improve your readiness right now, you want to be stronger in current skills versus future skills, and then the more you develop current skills, the better equipped you are to use new skills.”

In parallel with business change and the increasing importance of skills in the workplace, Gartner suggests in its paper ‘Building the workforce of the future: How HR leaders can effectively manage talent in today’s environment’ that diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) solutions can enable the organisation’s strategy to progress. For instance, the future of work sees actual skills overtaking degrees as a hiring marker, which allows expansion of the candidate pool by “debiasing the entire job description”. According to Gartner, one advantage is that non-degreed employees have a 10% higher retention rate than those with degrees. However, Gartner warns that removing a degree requirement doesn’t, on its own, solve the problem; debiasing the job description that emphasises learning and development programmes as benefits, specifying skills needed and describing how the new hire needs to work in the role are all crucial steps.

Demystifying future skills by understanding them in the context of current ones “the better placed we are to step into the new skill, the adjacency, in the right way the new skill presents”, Love says. “Think about it – if you’re launching into the future, the more powerful the launch, the more successful the landing will be with the more solid the foundation that you’re launching from.”

Dion Love is vice president, advisory in the Gartner HR Practice

By DeeDee Doke

Image credit | iStock