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Gaining a competitive advantage with Talent Intelligence

Gaining a competitive advantage with Talent Intelligence

Talent Intelligence (TI) is democratising data and giving SMEs the power to outsmart the competition. But our research shows that 42% of SMEs are not yet taking advantage of the huge opportunities presented by TI for businesses of their size.

Do you use talent intelligence to inform workforce strategy?

What is TI?

TI provides a window into talent that many companies have yet to discover. It draws strategic insights from data to inform recruitment and business strategy. Used properly, it can help people teams understand the talent make-up of an organisation and spot skills gaps, as well as mapping and understanding talent that sits outside the organisation at an industry and market level. “Talent intelligence is currently a secret level of insight that only a few companies are using to examine talent, skills in an industry and industry dynamics as a way to understand what is going on in their world,” explains Felix Mitchell.

TI can be used both strategically and operationally. It’s not limited to people data - it encompasses much more: from analysis of broader macro factors and data on the competition, to assessing the state of the labour market and workforce planning. “TI is much broader than the recruitment process,” explains Toby Culshaw, Head of Talent Intelligence at Amazon, “The exciting thing about it is there's still so much undiscovered territory.”

The smaller the company, the more important every decision - whether it's your hiring strategy or your location strategy. Percentage wise, every single hire is that much more of your organisation.

Toby Culshaw
Head of Talent Intelligence,
Amazon

What do SMEs think TI is?

Sourcing Strategy
Labour Market Analytics supply
Labour Market Analytics demand
Talent Acquisition analytics
Competitor Intelligence
Strategic decisions – business and workforce planning decisions

At a business strategy level, TI can determine how an organisation tackles a growth market. Can that new area of growth be serviced by the organisation? If not, what’s needed to find the right people?

One of the big four consulting firms used TI to understand the size and location of the skills pool for sustainable energy, a huge potential growth market. To be able to deliver for clients, they needed to understand what access it had to relevant skills, where to build specific functions within the organisation, and how to target its client base.

TI can also be used to look at existing internal skill sets. Identifying skills gaps will highlight opportunities for upskilling or re-deploying talent. In turn, mapping talent within an organisation supports not only internal mobility but also retention.

“If you've a large software engineering population and all the software engineers at your competitors are either working fully remote or hybrid, then there’s absolutely no point in determining that the software engineers in your organisation have to be in three days a week, because you're just fighting against a market trend,” says Alison Ettridge, CEO, Stratigens.

As with all data, an awareness of any source limitations is critical. Is the data you’re looking at self-reported? Is it of sufficiently high quality and offer the right depth of market coverage for your industry?