I recently suggested that it’s time to cease thinking of talent in terms of wars, and start thinking about how to widen your reach to the right talent. In order to do this, your starting point should be to make more talent connections.
For many companies, the first way they try to get ahead of the skills shortage is to create spreadsheets or manual lists of talent who could be available at short notice (a rudimentary way to create a ‘Talent Pool’). This is an obvious approach to closing the talent gap — have talent ready to deploy as the hiring needs arise.
It’s a great approach in principle, but there can be two key challenges with these ‘Talent Pools’:
- They can be shallow, small and worse static; and
- They are based on past needs rather than the future needs which you may or may not be aware of given the pace of technological change
When it comes to talent, you really do need to cast your net wide. You need to have the greatest reach possible and more importantly you need to keep it fresh and relevant. There’s no point in having pools of ‘maybe’ talent that when push comes to shove, isn’t quite good enough, or was great for something similar but not the same, or simply isn’t available.
It all comes back to those connections. You need to be able to add in the right talent that match your needs perfectly as they appear, and then be able to access that talent the instant you need it. Essentially having more connections means more talent available to you.
At Talmix, we already offer our Clients a market leading solution which creates dynamic talent pools, providing them an easy way of accessing rich and deep talent networks instantly. The extensive size of our direct network, and its global footprint means it’s easy to connect into any high-end business talent, very quickly. This helps when:
- you aren’t quite sure how to describe who you need or what you need delivered;
- your requirement is falling into that ‘hard to find, short supply’ area; or
- you know exactly what you want, but it’s in a new region where you don’t have that existing pool or knowledge to create one.
The 60,000 and growing Talmix network of highly skilled professionals have helped us grow our business substantially and more importantly grown the options to close the talent gap for our clients. And we not stopping just yet. Our aim is to connect any Company with talent that matches their exact needs even faster — our proprietary data, global and extensive reach and our unique talent intelligence combines to deliver this. In fact, on average we match over half our client requests to their ultimate hire in under 24 hours- significantly faster than the industry average.
I would encourage you to recognise that sometimes it does pay to be in deep water. When it comes to talent, you can never have too many connections. And the deeper, the wider, the better.
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More Content by Sandeep Dhillon
