- Skills advancement is a privilege not yet extended to all employees. AI-powered talent intelligence has the power to change that.
- Taking a skills-based approach to your talent planning increases exponential value for employees and your organization.
- Recentering work around skills—instead of traditional roles and responsibilities—is the best strategy for talent sustainability.
Too often—and maybe ironically—AI-powered talent intelligence can provide useful information that most people have no idea how to access or use.
The problem is most candidate or employee data isn’t intelligent. It might be a snapshot of data, a single point in time that captures a particular aspect of an individual’s profile, and glimpses of attributes, but without context, relevance, and application, it’s not all that insightful—especially if it’s not timely.
Intelligence is more than a collection of information. It is collecting and connecting dots in real time and in context. It signals the ability to acquire knowledge and apply it to support a decision or validate impact. This isn’t something that should sit on a shelf collecting dust. It’s designed to be dynamic, applicable, and even democratized.
Talent intelligence means recognizing an individual’s skills, experiences, and interests to create a dynamic and fluid understanding of their capabilities that can be applied to work and teams in real time.
It’s the actionable side of this intelligence that fuels individual growth and inspires organizational agility by motivating and inspiring employees.
This is how you should be thinking about talent intelligence, and why your full workforce needs access to your data.
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Minding the gap
If skills, their application, and their progression are critical to people and work, why do skills attainment and advancement feel so unattainable?
Mercer’s 2024 HR Technology Impact on the Workforce study shows that executives are three times more likely than hourly workers to spend 30% or more of their time learning new work-related skills.
Executives also feel more confident than other workers in understanding new jobs, navigating career paths, and learning. They’re also more likely to believe their pay will increase if they advance their skills.
It’s a confidence not shared by the rest of the workforce, which threatens to create a new divide between those who have the privilege of upskilling—and seeing it pay off—and those who do not.
So why the confidence gap? Leaders are more aware of the positive things that will happen if they advance their skills, and the personal and business ramifications that will occur if they don’t.
But the everyday worker isn’t in those meetings where leaders talk about the future of the business and what’s required to support it. They don’t spend much time, if any, perusing internal job boards or looking for mentors to help them advance because they’re busy working at their current jobs.
Even if they understand what skills are needed to advance the business, they still don’t have a clear view of how skill advancement can help them personally.
Simply put, perceived or real, skill advancement is a privilege we haven’t yet extended to all.
AI-powered talent intelligence has the power to change that, both by showing who has what skills, where the gaps are, what the business needs and where to deploy for value, how to translate those skills into action, and how to determine the worth of those skills.
Knowing how to put your workforce’s collective and individual values to work for you makes your organization more agile, competitive, and durable in changing conditions. Understanding employees’ needs, motivations, and potential is imperative to ensuring their roles align with their strengths and goals.
Talent intelligence achieves that.
Related content: Learn how HR leaders are using AI to streamline and enhance their recruiting processes while addressing compliance and ethics questions.
Creating exponential value
Talent intelligence also flips the traditional approach of organizing short-sighted and linear talent strategies around jobs on its head. When we do that, we lose sight of unique talent combinations right in front of us. We miss opportunities to fully deploy or redeploy talent we’ve acquired and promised to develop.
What if you flipped the script on this strategy and organized work around the talent already inside your organization? What if you tapped into your current workforce’s capabilities and future potential?
We leave a lot of value on the table when we make talent fit their jobs rather than deploying work against talent.
There’s exponential value beyond tapping into people’s skill strengths, too. Prioritizing individual capabilities and contributions fosters a culture of engagement and empowerment, leading to higher job satisfaction and retention rates.
Imagine what happens when an employee feels valued and understood: they are more likely to invest their energy and creativity into their work, driving innovation and customer satisfaction and ultimately benefiting the organization.
This kind of talent-centered design requires bidirectional insight to put talent at the foundation of an organization. By building and integrating a complete understanding of skills, experience, and interests, organizations can create a dynamic and better understanding of what people can do, what they can learn, and what they want to do.
This data-driven approach helps organizations identify high-potential employees and allows them to tailor development programs that align with organizational needs and individual aspirations.
It also gives individuals insights into their journey and ownership over their future in a way that was once only available to their leaders.
No more ‘leaky bucket’
All of this sounds simple, but complex processes and staid strategies have left organizations stuck in the infamous “leaky bucket” approach to talent, failing to realize people’s full potential and letting them slip out the door.
Historically, talent processes have centered around jobs. The job and its description govern every part of the talent life cycle, including who to hire based on requirements, what they should focus on, how performance will be measured, and what a talent life cycle in a specific job would look like.
What if organizations treated the life cycle like a journey focused on the person more than the job? Instead of starting with a job and its description, leaders would start with the individual to discover interests and skills—and, more importantly, how those skills and interests align with the organization and team’s needs.
This is the essence of talent sustainability. By understanding and applying an individual to an organization, leaders can match a person’s unique talent or skills to the projects, roles, and needs of the business while creating an environment that allows talent to stay within the organization and grow—versus leaking out.
It sounds utopian. After all, haven’t we been trying to plug the leaky bucket and focus on talent and their skills for years?
But it’s not about building a utopia. It’s about creating a sustainable foundation to grow and optimize over time.
Talent intelligence is a key building block to that foundation. Without it, you’re building on shaky ground, making it harder for everyone to connect the dots between what’s good for the organization and what’s good for the individual.
Without a foundational, evolved agreement about how to view talent and work, managers will continue to do things the way they’ve always done them—not because they want to, but because it’s all they know.
Talent intelligence provides this new, foundational understanding of talent as a dynamic, evolving asset that can be better utilized and aligned to produce exponential value for business.
Learn more about talent-centered design and how to create your blueprint for success in our e-book.
Jess Von Bank is a 20-year industry veteran and global thought leader on HR transformation, digital experience, and workforce technology. She offers specialized expertise in recruiting, talent strategy, employer branding, DEI&B, brand-building, and storytelling. She also runs the Now of Work, Mercer’s global community for HR and work tech.