10 Benefits of Talent Mapping – Improve Your Talent Acquisition

What is Talent Mapping?

Talent Mapping is a powerful recruitment strategy that is often used in tandem with Talent Pipeline. Forward thinking recruitment teams use Talent Mapping to ensure they never sacrifice their quality of hire just to quickly fill a role. The idea is to analyse your current workforce capabilities against the skills of external talent to reveal gaps and the growth available to your business. Most importantly, Talent Mapping reveals potential candidates that are not currently looking for work. Rather than sitting back and waiting for the ideal candidates to come to you, your organisation can take a proactive and strategic approach in sourcing, engaging, and hiring.

Top 10 benefits of Talent Mapping

1. Identifies everyone with the skills and experience for the role

Talent Mapping identifies a wide range of candidates with the relevant skills and experience for a given role. This provides organisations’ with a talent pool of prequalified and interested candidates, plus a far greater understanding of the candidate market.

2. Both passive and active candidates are approached

Unlike job advertisements which only attract active candidates, you will also discover and engage with passive talent – those individuals who are too busy being great to look for another job. Often there’s a distinct difference between these two groups around their openness with salary negotiations, willingness to relocate or to discuss a different sector role. The mapped data enables organisations’ to shape their proposition more effectively when attracting prospective candidates. Additionally, businesses will have the flexibility of being able to identify and compare any differences between passive and active candidates.

3. Helps you understand key market factors including where people are located, mobility trends and prominent employers

Talent Mapping not only identifies an extensive candidate market, but also captures key market factors. You’ll start to understand if there’s the required talent within your desired location while establishing if candidates would consider working remotely. By understanding mobility, you’ll gain insights into the average tenure of professionals within their desired area, you’ll also be able to see how long they tend to stay within their position and which companies they are likely to move to. This then supports the ability to evaluate ways in which you would be able to improve future employee retention. In addition, Talent Mapping identifies leading employers within your industry. With this knowledge you can research what benefits those companies offer to make them a more attractive opportunity to prospective candidates.

4. Supports Diversity strategies

According to Personnel Today, to improve diversity, organisations should be ensuring it’s an integral part of their recruitment strategy. Talent Mapping supports diversity strategies by gathering valuable insight into gender, age, and ethnicity demographics along with many other diversity factors within the skills market you’re targeting. Giving you the tools to start hiring more diverse talent and evolve diversity and inclusion strategies.

5. Gathers pay & benefits data to support with reward benchmarking and ensures your proposition is competitive

It is essential for a business to know what their desired talent market would expect in terms of salary and benefits. Gaining knowledge of typical salaries saves both time and money and gives you the confidence to advertise roles that you know are both fair and competitive. You could be spending too much on a required skillset or you could be potentially damaging your employer brand by paying too little. Your talent map will help establish both candidates current and desired salary, as well as any employment benefits they either currently have and/or would expect in a future position. This process is particularly effective for enabling organisations to establish an internal benchmark for both pay and rewards.

6. Provides insight into your competitors organisational structures, team sizes, job titles and skill sets

While every company is different, it is often useful to understand what other businesses within the same or similar sector are doing. You may be missing a vital process or structure which could risk you falling behind your competitors. Your Talent Mapping should be producing extensive reports with insights into your competitors’ organisational structure, this includes their team sizes within each department, job titles and skill sets. Although organisations may not necessarily choose to emulate their competitors, this still allows them to benchmark the organisational structure, and identify any gaps that they may have within their business. Allowing them to address any organisational changes that needs to be made before it has a negative impact.

7. Supports Employer brand perception

Companies are constantly striving to maintain the best possible perception of their employer brand n from those they wish to attract. Part of your Talent Mapping process should be candidate-based surveys, gathering data around how you are perceived by the talent market and their level of interest in working for you. You should also identify the reasoning behind the brand perception as it establishes the more actionable insights you can base your EVP strategies on.

8. Evidences what makes candidates tick

Talent Mapping establishes their motivators and drivers, how they found the role, why they potentially decline & what would make them interested. This results in a far more targeted and shaped proposition moving forward in which your roles and marketing can authentically attract the people you want to hire.

9. No Placement Fees

You own all of the candidate data which means a reduced reliance upon recruitment agencies and the associated costs as you can build direct relationships with live and future candidates. Whether it is the individuals in the shortlist or those in the wider market map who were not considered suitable for the role, or who were not ready to move yet. You can hire as many as you wish without any placement fees attached either immediately or in the future. In other models they will charge you for every hire you make from their introductions, including and up to 12 months after submission in some cases.

10. Reduce time to hire, cost, and the negative impact of an unfilled role

Organisations have the ability to proactively engage with prequalified candidates before they have to make the role live. Ensuring they’re in the best possible position to engage with quality candidates before their competitors do.

Is Talent Mapping for you?

This blog should by now have shown you that Talent Mapping is essential for your recruitment business strategy. Whether you’re a recruiter, hiring manager or talent acquisition specialist, Talent Mapping should be on your agenda. However, not every business has the resources and time to map properly, if that sounds like you then you should consider an external Talent Mapping service.

At Cogito we know first-hand the difference an external Talent Mapping service can make for organisations of all sizes. Our mapping has helped identify the talent gap within a wide range of businesses ensuring they started attracting the right talent. We’ve even aided international expansions with market insight into regions such as AsiaPac and EMEA, defining the business’s recruitment process and organisational structure in both their new and current locations. Our experience and expertise have been used by some of the most influential companies in the UK and Europe and we are ready to help with all your future talent needs. To learn how our Talent Mapping service can improve your talent acquisition click here.