How HR can leverage the talent shortage
Employers are wrestling with a shortage in talent. It comes from the acceleration in technology and its applications, the new demographics representing mobile populations and shifting generations, and an evolving sense of choice among customers and workers. However, HR professionals can leverage their HRIS data into talent solutions.
You can measure the shortage.
Manpower Group has been reporting on talent availability for years. Its 2015 report cites employers concerns about the impacts on business performance:
- 43% expect a reduction in the ability to serve clients.
- 41% predict reduced competitiveness and productivity.
- 32% foresee increasing employee turnover.
- 22% envision a loss of their edge in innovation and creativity.
These fears can impact employee engagement, morale, and retention. What clearly follows is an increase in labor burden.
Manpower Group’s research lists the following top 10 employer needs;
- Skilled Trade Workers
- Drivers
- Teachers
- Sales Representatives
- Administrative Professionals
- Management/Executives
- Nurses
- Technicians
- Accounting and Financial Staff
- Engineers
Because the majority of businesses fall into one or more of these categories, HR professionals have the opportunity to make strategic use of the data held by their HRIS.
You can fix the problem.
If you want to become an HR strategist, you must move beyond legacy recruiting to vacancy. You must develop the recruiting, onboarding, and mentoring function into a continuous operation that does more than merely find and hire the hands to fill a position.
HRIS data gives you the information to:
- Identify, classify, and describe jobs as evolving – not static – responsibilities.
- Develop a talent profile for those successfully filling the job as it is now and as it can be expected to grow.
- Target resources and talent pools that provide a resource of qualified eligible recruits.
- Design training to enhance skills and competencies in widely disparate functions across the organization.
- Facilitate succession planning and continuous development.
You can lead the solution.
- Your HRIS database offers the best chance and mechanics to align your workforce to your business mission and goals. It gives you the data to study past performance in measurable, achievable, and relevant metrics. Based on those descriptive analytics, you can form the prospective metrics that show the way to personal growth and development.
- Your HRIS gathers data, but it also provides the tools to communicate goals and visions. It provides a means to inform and train. It enables integration with big pictures and futures. It makes alignment a method as well as a purpose. In placing an individual’s labor in a larger context, it creates and enables belonging.
- Your HRIS counts and measures attendance, chronicles performance, and archives other signs of employee commitment. HRIS operations illustrate the commitment as a sign of accountability and engagement.
- Your HRIS captures workforce behaviors. In doing so, it can report on paths to success, and you can use that history to create a map for succession planning. You can then leverage that plan to engage in a strategic partnership with executive management once you make solutions tangible, measurable, and achievable.
The HR professional, wanting to add the value of strategist, is smart to exploit the current and future HRIS capabilities to manage the talent shortage. HRIS can facilitate and design remedies to the ensuing talent management problems. And, it can reshape the business culture into one commitment and engagement, creating a new loyalty and reducing turnover losses and costs.
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