Picture this: You have built your enterprise talent framework and integrated them with HR, payroll and finance. You have even defined the best-in-class talent practices and metrics. Is this enough to guarantee you success with your talent hires and deployments?
Well, as surprising as it might sound, most talent management transformations have been found to flounder in the absence of timely visibility of organizational talent. There are no ways to view internal talent mobility on the go and therefore timely decision-making becomes a casualty.
Most organizations are constrained by the lack of data available to support strategic initiatives related to managing people and talent. However, what was surprising was that the information they sought was already available in the Enterprise Human Capital Management (HCM) warehouses they were using. It is evident that the HR teams in such an organization was harnessing only a small percentage of this valuable data to support the lines of business simply because they lacked a simple and accessible way to view their enterprise talent data.
One of the biggest challenges is to identify and develop tomorrow’s leaders. Resignations, retirements, new position openings, or demographic shifts can create chaos if the organization cannot move forward with an effective succession planning strategy.
‘Talent Visualization’ Solutions
This is where ‘Talent Visualization’ solutions can come to the rescue as one can leverage them for modeling talent mobility in organization. The Talent Visualization solution offers the organization an intuitive way to enhance capabilities in key areas including competence management, career development and succession management.
It enables us to lend the required visibility and insights into talent requirements and deployments.
One of the immediate problems at hand is to reduce the enormous downtime associated with a new hiring requirement. An effective succession planning process combined with the talent visualization model can help an organization avoid the downtime associated with new hires. This can be accomplished by enabling succession ‘bench’ employees to ‘ramp up’ well before a position actually materializes.
Since organizational competencies are the critical building blocks that connect talent management activities, one needs to first focus on redefining the organization’s competencies so that they can be used as the standard for measuring both human capital and roles, enabling the organization to clearly identify talent gaps and match it with the best-fitting employees to fill those gaps.
Once you are done with the organizational competencies, you can extract the talent inventory of the organization and model it around the future talent strategy.
Talent planning for the organization
Additionally, you can structure the Talent visualization model to align with the organization’s future business challenges. One of the ways to accomplish this is by way of defining talent planning workflows to enable HR to optimize employee productivity and establish a sustainable workforce by managing competency requirements, addressing key role vacancies, and tracking key performance indicators. You can also define the talent visualization workflows to help the organization identify talent shortages, review and assign potential successors within the organization, and visualize talent by employee groups, LOBs and regions.
Here’s how to go about deploying the ‘Talent Visualization’ Solution:
- Step 1: First, to model the talent pipeline, you need to start with building the foundation – competency profiling. Without well-defined competencies, no visualization solution can be defined.
- Step 2: Next, align the competencies with the existing roles in order to assign the competency requirements (as mapped to the Business goals) for all positions that are tagged to those roles. As a result, you get the Job Architecture your choice that is mapped to clearly laid business goals.
- Step 3: You can then link the job architecture to the Org charts to create a visual depiction of your Talent model, which you can then link with your enterprise HCM warehouse (could be SAP, PeopleSoft or Oracle) via any of the several ‘Talent Visualization’ applications available, such as SAP NAKISA.
- Step 4: As the next step, set business rules for the talent workflows, such as employee selection, deployment, and succession planning. For example, while setting up the career planning template, define a rule that makes employees, with top performance ratings for consecutive years, automatically eligible for internal mobility.
- Step 5: Finally, integrate this resulting Talent Visualization model with the secure Web Browser-based HR system interface provided by the organization to employees and managers (called “Employee & Manager Self-Service”). This helps employees and managers visualize Talent workflows (career, succession planning, etc.) by simply using their Web browser.
The advantage of performing these steps is that you can then visualize the impact of organizational changes on the Job Architecture via an intuitive drag and drop modelling interface. For example, you can clearly visualize the impact of moving an employee from one role and reporting relationship to another by simply dragging and dropping the icon representing that employee into another job role.
This clearly lends HR with a visual modelling tool to simulate any kind of Organization realignment scenarios (realignment of competencies / roles ), resulting from mergers, acquisitions and expansions, and then accordingly visualize the resulting impact on competence management, career planning and succession planning. This will also help identify talent shortages, review and assign potential successors within the organization, and visualize talent by employee groups, LOBs and regions.
From a succession planning standpoint, this can lend a visual depiction of the organizational ‘bench strength’ and ‘immediacy’ for critical positions.
This Talent visualization model not just helps HR and People Managers, but also empowers Employees to manage their own career aspirations within the organization, and share their aspirations with HR and managers. By engaging employees early, companies can improve retention rates, while also aligning employee career development with the organization's business needs.
With a robust talent visualization process in place, any organization can clearly take short and long-term views of business goals and then map employees’ skills to job openings, avoiding a time-consuming chain of interviews to “discover” the right candidate. Needless to say, organizations can enhance their talent management system so as to visualize the “hidden” talent in their midst and matching them with roles aligned to the underlying skills.
It’s like saying, I’m judging a ‘Musical Talent’ show, and I can already view a winner, whom I can hire for a playback-singer’s role, without having to go through endless auditions and rounds of competitive singing sessions to select the winner.