Feature
Talent mapping isn’t new. For years now, HR professionals have evaluated the abilities of their workforce in an effort to forecast and prioritize future hiring needs.
For many organizations, however, it’s involved more guesswork than data-driven decisions. Ashley Cox, founder and CEO of consulting firm Sprout HR, remembers the time about a decade or so ago when it was normal for HR teams to evaluate paper organizational charts and speculate about when individuals might retire or be ready for a promotion.
But, like most any business processes these days, automation and artificial intelligence are transforming talent management. Now, human resources teams can mine the data they’ve always had and uncover workforce insights that can drive business success.
Predicative AI tools, in particular, can forecast the future when they’re fed everything from your current workforce’s performance levels and credentials to your organization’s plans and goals for the future. “We’ve had this information in the past but in very antiquated systems — a lot of pencil and paper,” Cox said. “Now, we can have real data.”
Proactive Not Reactive
Plenty of employers are reactive when it comes to workforce management, waiting for too long to identify skills that a new project or expansion requires. But at a time of rapid change, proactive workforce planning is especially critical.
“If you’re not building the skills in advance, then you’re stuck,” said Victoria Pelletier, a C-suite executive and board director who has led HR and workforce strategy. “It creates an impact to your bottom line.”
Predictive AI uses data, algorithms and machine learning to predict the future. In the case of workforce management, it lets employers map their current talent and finetune their hiring practices, so they’re capitalizing on the abilities of their existing employees and hiring effectively.
Here are three actions it can accomplish:
1. Catalog Employee Skills
Accurately capturing your workforce’s actual skills can be difficult, Pelletier said. Resumes are rarely updated within HR systems after a hire. And women and employees of color have historically downplayed their skills, she said. “This is where AI becomes critically important to start to identify the skills that we believe the workforce has based on career paths, skills development or what we’ve seen within our workforce in the past.”
AI can be used to analyze employee data such as resumes but also performance reviews, training records and outcomes of projects to home in on the skills individuals have mastered — new or strengthen abilities they may never have noted on their own. AI can even document employees’ propensity to learn, partly based on their past successes, Pelletier said.
“It really provides talent leaders with a more holistic view of the talent landscape within their organization, so that they can identify trends and make better decisions based on those trends for workforce planning,” said Tracy Avin, founder of Troop HR, a professional community of HR leaders.
2. Connect Talent With Business Needs
With AI, employers can feed in their OKRs, KPIs and short-term and long-range plans and compare them with their current workforce. The tool might uncover that you need more employees with a particular expertise — for instance, engineers with knowledge of a specific software language or business analysts with familiarity of the Asia-Pacific market.
Or, perhaps your business plans might require more people in specific roles — entry-level, middle management or senior executives.
“AI and talent mapping will absolutely help us have better data and have better plans, so that we can meet those needs and not be stuck not having the talent that we need in order to reach those goals,” Cox said.
Related Article: Generative AI Could Make the Workplace More Equitable — or It Could Be a Disaster. It’s Up to Us
3. Boost Employee Growth
With a map of your workforce’s existing skills and data about what expertise is missing based on your business plans, you can start filling in those gaps with either your current workforce or new hires.
Now that you’ve identified which workers excel at learning and what skills your workforce needs, you can start upskilling them. “Career growth can mean moving into new functions and taking the employees you already have within your existing organization and giving them career growth,” Avin said.
Once you’ve bridged the skills divide with your current employees, you can finetune your search for new talent to fill whatever needs remain. “It’s identifying the skills gaps … where are we falling short, what skills are needed to meet that need and then finding the right talent to fill those gaps, whether that’s internally or by creating a job opportunity,” Avin said.
Related Article: How to Get Started With an Internal Talent Marketplace
Getting Strategic
Of course, when it comes to AI in any sector, it’s important to remember that we’re in the early phases. “The outputs are only as good as the inputs,” Avin said.
That includes the prompts you put in and the data that the AI solution’s creators may have added. Bias in AI solutions has been well-documented. Any data an AI tool delivers should be reviewed, Cox said. “It still requires us to put on our critical-thinking skills and to be really mindful and aware and to have diverse people in the room looking at the data with us.”
But when used in a thoughtful way, with the right inputs and analysis, AI can transform HR departments and their role within organizations.
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Long considered merely pushers of employee-related paperwork, HR leaders, when harnessing the power of AI, can provide the C-suite with what they desperately need — a road map with data-driven evidence that builds the skilled workforce required for success.
“You can come to the table as a strategic business partner,” Cox said. “Use this technology to your advantage … so that HR isn't just a cost center. We're actually helping produce revenue, and we're driving the talent that creates all the magic that we want in the organization.”
