Total talent management: Why you need to swot up on your workplace mix

Total talent management is a clever technique that will help you find out more about your workplace mix.

The rise of the ‘gig economy’ has led many specialist professionals to go self-employed, taking them outside of your normal skills analysis and HR processes.

By learning more about the skills of your extended workforce (which, in many companies, can comprise up to half of all staff), you might just be able to tap into a well of new talent without ever having to hire.

Here, we’ll tell you a little bit about the definition of total talent management, and how you can make it work for your business.

What is total talent management?

Total talent management takes HR-based skills analysis techniques you’re used to using with full-time employees and applies them to your extended workforce, including:

• Contractors

• Freelancers

• Outsourcing partners

• Vendors

• Strategic partners

Total talent management techniques should give you a better understanding of:

• What skills your company has

• Where the skills are located

• How much they cost

• Whether they’re effective

• Whether they’re future-proof

Gaining a better understanding of your workplace mix makes your business more adaptable to industry changes and enables you to call on skills you didn’t even know you had.

If you find a non-permanent employee has the skills you’re lacking, it could even save you from having to dip your toe back into the job market.  

How to audit your extended workforce

Make a comprehensive list of all the skills present in your extended workforce by carrying out a skills audit. Here’s how:

1. Start by listing everyone in your extended workforce, and categorising them into small groups based on the type of job they do (e.g. junior marketing staff).

2. Then, list all the skills required to work in each group. If you haven’t got previous experience of hiring permanent staff for these roles, you can find out what behavioural and technical skills are needed from job ads posted online.   

3. Create a survey template and adapt it for each group by listing the relevant skills. Also, ensure you’ve got a section where non-permanent employees can list any extra skills (you might want to provide some broad options here to make data processing easier).

4. Send the surveys out to your extended workforce, gather the results and analyse the data to find out whether your non-permanent employees possess the requisite skills, and any previously unidentified skills that might prove valuable.

Streamline the process with advanced recruitment software

Even recruiters and hiring managers aware of total talent management are often reluctant to get started because of concerns that it will be too complex, and take up too much time and resources.

Advanced recruitment software can speed the process up massively and reduce the amount of resources required.

Using recruitment software, you can create a talent pool that lets you search for people with the required skills in seconds. You can also use it to automate communications, and fill in any skills gaps you might identify with minimal effort.