What Are You Doing To Build Talent Capability For The Future?

By Author: shaily ajmera
Total Articles: 11
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“Can you help me build a talent pool?” When you ask someone this question, do you exactly know what does it mean? The answer to the question varies depending on various factors like technology, available resources, demand, industry, sectors, budget etc.

In the era of talent and skill shortages, what your company is doing to build talent capability for the future. Let’s discuss how this can be done effectively:

Understand The Difference Between The Talent Pool, Talent Pipeline & Talent Database

Term “Talent pool” is used by companies to define a group of talent (internally or externally) with a specific set of skills, abilities, or traits.

Term “Talent pipeline” is used more specifically for roles and skill-sets. It allows hiring managers to get more involved and get more engaged with their potential hires./

Term “Talent community” is the biggest misnamer in recruitment industry. The word community refers to interaction, but this is rare in ‘talent communities’, although companies try to make it happen through an online platform that allows regular communication and ...
... engagement with the members.

Term “Talent database” is used by the majority of companies. It is a database self-populated by the recruitment system, or many times, just a spreadsheet of names and contact details. Though it is limited by search capability and data entry, but still it is very effective.

Update Every Six Months The Need Of The Talent

Understand your talent needs for now and future, for a particular year. Go into the detail to identify the potential people suitable for your roles. This process must be done and updates every six months.

Use Technology For Recruitment

Along with the use of portals, use recruitment content marketing through various platforms available, whether it is mobile phones, e-mails, social networking or anything else. Now-a-days, even spreadsheet are easily manageable on phones and tablets with the use Microsoft 365 and Google Drive (docs). Even Instagram is playing a important role to build a pool of talent for future client assignments.

Talent and prospective also can come from multiple sources like internally, job boards, job adverts, career site, direct applications, social media, direct sourcing etc. The challenge to you is how effectively you identify the people you want to add/invite to your own talent pool, pipeline,or database.

Be Patient And Realistic

Building, developing and growing talent capability takes time. So be patient and realistic with your approach. Adopt medium-long term plans and strategy to make things work. Also prepare yourself that things will not happen as quick as you want or expect it to be.

Provide Your Team Enough Time

Building, developing, managing and growing a talent pool, pipeline or database is not a easy task as it seems to be. So, provide your team enough time to do this. Be realistic when setting objectives, KPI’s, or targets. Also remember that it is a continual process, so do not break the continuity.

Align Your Career Site

Keep telling people about your career site, why you build it and why it is important for them to join it. Your career sites have the capability of generating huge amounts of traffic, so integrate it into your career pages. Manage candidate’s expectation and be honest with them. This will help you with future engagement.

Whatever you are doing, communicate it more wide. Whatever you do, start doing it with your existing workforce first and ensure they understand exactly what it is all about. Include Internal Talent Available If great people are the part of your company, consider internal talent as well to build your own talent pool, pipeline or database. This is important because often existing employees don’t get exposure to job opportunities or talent programmes as they work in silos.
Also, many times it is hard or expensive to acquire talent or skill, then better to grow or develop your own through apprenticeships, training programmes, cross-training existing employees, developing existing skills, or any other strategy. Spotting the talent in your own company, develop them and stream them is a most logical approch to build talent capability.

Concluding Note

So, no matter what you call it- a talent pool, talent pipeline or talent database? What matters is how you define, manage and communicate it.

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