Archive for the ‘Workforce Planning’ Category

I had a recent visit to a client that said they had over 500,000 resumes on file for this 28,000 person organization. This was pretty impressive since their policy was to hold resumes for only 1-year. They had over 100 recruiters and a well-oiled process for brining new talent on-board. Their time to hire was 28 days – which by my count has to be in the top 10% of all companies. After hearing them discuss their best practices in recruiting, I asked, “How many internal resumes do you have for the 28,000 employees? A look of consternation came back to me – the answer was none. They even posted for 5 business days internally before bringing the requisition out to the public. (5 days was included in the 28 which makes that number even more impressive) How does a company like that spend its resources on people that don’t even work at the company? This is not a unique case. Amazingly enough, I would say that most companies don’t capture employee data. Resume data for an internal employee (aka “Talent Profile”) is outdated on day 1 of the job.

Building out your Talent Pool accomplishes these two things:

1) It classifies and inventories your Human Assets. Everything else is accounted for – why not account for your people?

2) It allows you to create the foundation for your Succession Planning process.

There are multiple Talent/Core vendors that have Talent Profile functionality. Be sure to take advantage of this. If you are launching a talent initiative, make the Talent Profile step 1 before anything else. Why? It is the easiest win. Here are some tips:

1) Employees won’t update this on their own so definitely send out a task to complete this.

3) The KISS principle applies – half the point of launching this first is to introduce your employees to the system. Don’t overburden them with a long form.

Do these things and you will be well on your way to managing talent.