With today’s technology, you can create a smart marketplace that helps you match your organization’s talent with the work opportunities available to help you position your workforce for the future, talent specialists said this week in a CFO.com webinar.
The marketplace is built around an ontology of skills, a database of talents and interests of your employees so you, the HR leader, and your organization’s operational unit heads can make the most efficient use of the talent you have.
"It brings all job and training opportunities together," said Mark David, a senior director at Workday. And, as an intelligent system, it would "propose opportunities" for work match-ups based on what your employees want, the skills they have, and what you want to achieve.
Employees can take a role in managing their careers, too, by using the marketplace to see what opportunities are available and proposing to fill them if they think there’s a match.
The talent marketplace is one facet of a strategy that the CFO, as a workforce architect, can partner with the head of HR on to align strategy with operational changes so your company is prepared to compete for talent in the future.
"So much of what the future workplace looks like is about talent strategy, finding the right talent," said John Healy, vice president and managing director of Kelly Services.
Revamping your strategy is crucial, Healy said, because today's typical workforce strategy is not designed to meet an employment environment that’s changing because of technology and different attitudes among workers.
Workforce KPIs
Finance leaders are used to analyzing the KPIs of the business, but they need to analyze workforce data too with an eye toward how the workforce strategy and operations align with the organization’s business goals, said Healy.
That means in part looking outside the traditional full-time equivalent positions as you assess your talent needs. Part-time, remote, co-location and gig workers make up a growing part of the mix in any organization and all of those people need to be made part of the strategy, he said.
At Google, 53% of the workforce are not full-time equivalent employees. "If you’re only looking at full-time people, you’re missing a lot," he said.
Too often, executives invest time developing a future-focused workplace strategy by assessing where business will come from in the years ahead, and matching that up with the kind of talent they need. But often the process falls apart at the operational level, and organizational changes are never made.
"I often see a big disconnect” between the two," said Patrice Cappello, strategic industry advisor at Workday.
Part of the disconnect is driven by ineffective communications, said Cappello. Leaders might announce changes but there’s no mechanism to get feedback or buy-in from the workforce. There’s no data collection. There’s no personalization of resources. There’s no visibility into talent resources by operational leaders such as the head of delivery.
"It’s really about insights firms need, but the infrastructure to get that is a challenge," she said.
Technology can be an enabler if you adopt a system that’s flexible enough to change as your business model or organizational structure changes, said David.
You also want your system to enable continuous planning and allow for data analysis by all of the organization’s operational leaders.
Those are the same capabilities that enable you to create the talent marketplace, because for it to work it has to be smart, continuously updated and the data made usable by leaders and talent.
How Finance and HR Leaders Can Align Their Talent and Business Strategies was sponsored by Argyle and Workday.
