The global pandemic has forced organizations to adopt digital transformation initiatives at an unprecedented pace, putting them seven years ahead of schedule, according to McKinsey’s recent Covid-19 survey. HR’s role in enabling this fast pace of digital adoption has proven to be indispensable in ensuring business continuity. As McLean & Company’s 2021 HR Trends Report highlights, HR’s contributions to digital transformation separate organizations that thrive despite crises from those left behind.
The report also points out that major gaps in talent management need attention to ensure organizations can continue to compete effectively. These gaps include analyzing the employee skills gap, developing employees on new competencies, and training new employees in specific new skills. Improving talent acquisition, retention, diversity, inclusion, and employee experiences by digitally transforming them with greater personalization at scale and visibility is key. CHROs and the HR teams they lead need to close these gaps now.
To get started with digitally transforming talent management, start by identifying the largest gaps in talent management within your organization. These often include recruiting and talent acquisition, retaining top talent and diverse talent, lack of visibility into employee capabilities, and misaligned workforce strategies.
Legacy recruiting and Applicant Tracking Systems often prioritize HR’s needs to capture thousands of resumes instead of delivering an excellent candidate experience. Organizations that are leaders in digital transformation have realized that attracting and recruiting the most qualified candidates in a virtual-first world is a daunting task. They have relied on automating the applicant experience, making it resemble the Amazon 1-Click Ordering experience. According to McKinsey’s recent Covid survey, 75% of organizations digitally transforming their operations, including HR, were able to fill tech talent gaps during the crisis.
Retaining top talent is more of a problem than many organizations realize, with top performers receiving between five and ten recruiter calls a month or more. The average tenure of employees at companies has been decreasing for nearly two decades, with employees leaving not for lack of opportunity but because they cannot find a career path internally as easily as they can find a growth opportunity at another company. It’s possible to retain top talent by guiding employees to what’s next in their careers. One approach is to provide employees with a self-service option for personalized coaching guidance at scale, like Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform, which is delivering results at notable companies such as Air Asia, Micron, NetApp, and others.
Employees often lack visibility into new internal opportunities, and both HR and business leaders lack visibility into employees’ unique capabilities. The lack of visibility from the employer side limits their ability to benchmark talent, create programmatic, scalable, and flexible career development opportunities, and ultimately redeploy talent in an agile way that serves business strategies that are evolving at a rapid pace in response to the impacts of the global pandemic.
Workforce strategies that don’t align and support business strategies waste opportunities to improve morale, productivity, and employees’ professional growth. While organizations have invested heavily in valuable infrastructure, including Learning Management Systems (LMS) and other employee experience and development tools, they often lack a unified platform to help deliver the right growth opportunities to the right person at the right time.
Talent management is core to any digital business and the competitive outcomes each can produce today and in the future. To make greater contributions, talent management needs to deliver ongoing business insights, personalization at scale, and accountability. The best talent management platforms provide the apps, data, and contextual intelligence to drive task and mission ownership deep into an organization and reinforce accountability. Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform has designed-in empathy and the ability to deliver quick, effective decisions that further reinforce team inclusion. Eightfold’s approach to combining their Talent Management, Talent Insights, and Talent Acquisition modules, all supported by their Talent Intelligence Platform, enables their customers to define their digital transformation goals and empower HR teams to meet them. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Eightfold’s platform can help organizations identify skills gaps, develop employee competencies, and provide personalized career guidance to employees, improving retention rates and enabling more effective workforce planning.
In summary, HR’s role in digital transformation has become more critical than ever. By identifying and addressing talent management gaps, organizations can remain competitive in a rapidly evolving business landscape. With the help of advanced technology like Eightfold’s Talent Intelligence Platform, HR can leverage data insights to improve recruiting, retention, and workforce development, ultimately driving better business outcomes.