Why static jobs are holding your workforce back—and how to fix it with talent intelligence

Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing internal talent to fill key leadership roles, ensuring business continuity, minimizing disruption, and driving growth.

Why static jobs are holding your workforce back—and how to fix it with talent intelligence

8 min read
  • It’s time to restructure your business around employees’ skills and stop relying on job descriptions that quickly become irrelevant or outdated.
  • A skills-focused view of your employees’ capabilities can also identify aptitude and improve employee experiences.
  • Leaders who understand employees’ skills, potential, and career goals will have the greatest impact on creating and sustaining a positive work environment. 

In the sea of buzzwords, talent intelligence may seem like the latest ship everyone is jumping on to stay afloat, but those who think talent intelligence is all about technology are in danger of losing sight of the human element needed to make sure it does what it’s intended to do.

Confusion around investments in talent technology can prevent organizations from fully seeing and tapping their workforce’s potential. As a result, top talent can stagnate, disengage, or leave altogether. The true power of talent intelligence, powered by AI, goes beyond simple data collection and even static insights. Real talent intelligence focuses on understanding and revealing your workforce’s skills, experiences, and aspirations— and connecting their needs and experiences to overall business goals.

Here, we delve into how activating talent intelligence can bridge the gap between organizational needs and employee potential. By fostering a culture of talent sustainability, we can drive both individual growth and organizational agility. 

When organizations adopt this more dynamic approach to talent, they unlock exponential value and build a sustainable foundation for success.

RELATED CONTENT: Learn how the right insights can help you shift your talent strategies in this webinar with Mercer and Eightfold.

Talent intelligence changes how we think about work

Like its definition, the execution of talent intelligence-supported strategies can be murky. Yet every organization can and should turn to talent intelligence because better outcomes are possible when there’s a clearer understanding of what should be accomplished and how. 

It begins by flipping the script on how we think about talent—rather than organizing talent around jobs, what would it mean to organize work around talent? 

We’ve been conditioned to approach talent needs by focusing on the job—creating the title and the job description, assigning the cost center, aligning it to a hiring manager and the location—all so we can expose that single job to as many candidates as possible. This forces us to mass message and overspend on job advertising. 

This results in job-oriented decisions, where valuable people who could greatly benefit the organization are disregarded because they do not conform to the strict specifications of a role. It forces talent teams to become order-takers instead of strategic advisers.

Instead, if we begin to organize around talent—with a focus on their current skills, attributes, motivations, preferences, availability, and propensity to develop new capabilities —we can then expose that talent to as many opportunities as possible in the form of jobs, projects, and tasks. 

In this scenario, organizations become more agile, recruiters become talent advisers,outreach to talent becomes intentional, and the focus ends up being on work, tasks, and skills that keep people engaged and identify the external talent needed  to help the organization grow.

RELATED CONTENT: Learn how Forvia transformed their talent acquisition using talent intelligence.

Drop processes designed for a workplace that no longer exists

When we look at the systems that are typically in place today, many are based on processes built to support the workplace of yesterday.

Talent acquisition relies heavily on job descriptions. Although relying on job descriptions alone  to  identify and hire the best talent is questionable at best, this remains the de facto mechanism for hiring.

Job descriptions date back to when a physical ‘Help Wanted’ sign in the shop window might list a few necessary skills or details to draw in potential talent from the streets.

Digitization drove the ‘Help Wanted’ sign to the ‘Help Wanted’ classified, which morphed into online job boards, job ads, and career sites all hyper-focused on a specific job.

While this strategy was effective in the past, it was not designed for today’s talent conditions. Yet, the myopic focus on jobs continues. 

Today, work and workforces are evolving at an unprecedented pace, rendering the traditional concept of static jobs obsolete. Organizations clinging to rigid, outdated job structures risk falling behind in a world where adaptability and skill fluidity drive success.

Static roles fail to capture the dynamic blend of expertise, collaboration, and innovation required to compete today. Instead, organizations must embrace a more agile approach that focuses on developing transferable skills, fostering continuous learning, and empowering employees to adapt to shifting priorities.

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Aligning with today’s talent conditions

What if we designed our TA processes to align with today’s talent conditions? 

Instead of blasting a meaningless job description to the entire world, what if we broke work down into skills, tasks, and projects and proactively sought only the candidates who could contribute meaningfully to those elements?

We’ve tried to level the playing field in hiring and promotions by focusing on the job requirements. But just like job descriptions, those job requirements are often steeped in bias: 

  • Looking for graduates from the top universities, where underrepresented groups often struggle to gain admission.
  • Looking for experience that can only come from being well-connected.
  • Requesting unnecessary degree requirements that prevent the economically disadvantaged from being considered.

If skill requirements replace job requirements, we remove those biases and open new opportunities for talent we hadn’t considered before. 

Extend that further to look not just at where someone has been in the past, but also at what they’re capable of in the future, and we can remove many of the barriers that prevent us from connecting with talent that could propel us forward.

RELATED CONTENT: Ready to take a skills-based approach to hiring? Learn how talent-centered design can get you started.

Stop forcing talent to climb a leadership ladder 

In talent management, we can’t seem to move past the concept of pushing talent up a ladder, so we continue to rely on rigid performance reviews and succession paths that only move employees up into management and leadership responsibilities, regardless of whether that’s a fit or desire for the individual. 

This approach is designed for workplaces of the past, where men came into the office and worked their way up from the bottom, promising greater money and influence as they climbed the corporate ladder, slowly taking on more responsibility in the form of direct reports. 

Today’s society looks very different, and so does the workforce. It is more diverse than ever, bringing together employees with unique backgrounds, aspirations, and definitions of success. 

Some prioritize flexibility and purpose-driven work, while others value stability or opportunities for growth. This shift challenges organizations to move beyond one-size-fits-all approaches to engagement and career development. 

Our workforce practices need to evolve, with a greater focus on highlighting a variety of forms of career mobility, including, but not strictly limited to, paths into leadership. This can come in the form of lateral career moves, but it can also come in the form of advancing proficiency as a way to earn more and contribute more value to an organization.

Focus on the human in the employee experience

Lastly, consider the employee experience. We often liken employee experience to employee sentiment—how people feel about their work experience, which often relates to how they feel seen in their skills, goals, and the purpose behind the work. 

Organizations invest significantly in architecting digital experiences that eliminate work friction, build community and portals, and think it’s enough to improve the employee experience. 

In reality, the employee experience comes down to leaders understanding their employee’s capabilities, then pairing them with the right, challenging work to keep them engaged.

It’s less about insights into workers and more about harnessing intelligence to architect employee experiences that drive sustainable talent. This allows people to move and migrate throughout an organization in ways that benefit and fulfill the needs of  employees and serve the greater organization.

Turning mindset into action

Regardless of how much influence the systems of the past have on your organization today, you can still start to right the ship and modernize your approach to talent.

In professional sports, the scout identifies talent and then passes them on to the general manager, who builds the team, and introduces the players to the coach, who is then responsible for developing that talent into something the organization needs to win.

Talent acquisition leaders have long been the  scouts of external talent, handing them over to the talent management team and their managers. 

Imagine if we turned talent acquisition into talent strategy and intelligence. Organizations and employees would have teams that were hyper-focused on identifying and sustaining talent, supported by digital talent intelligence tools.

Intelligence has to start somewhere, so start by understanding your current talent or state. A foundational understanding of who your people are, what skills they possess and want to develop, and their personal goals can form the baseline data and insights the organization needs to help employees understand the opportunities that already exist within your org. 

Maturity then comes in the form of transforming the way you architect your talent management, employee experience, and internal mobility to move closer to talent sustainability.

Exploring your organization’s appetite for skills structure and enablement can also help you unlock greater skills maturity

Consider questions like:

  • Do your leaders believe reskilling will be critical to the business?
  • Do you understand the bench of skills you have today, and where the relative strengths and weaknesses lie?
  • How confident are you in your ability to compete externally for the skills you need?
  • Do your employees understand clearly how to advance within your organization?
  • Are your learning and development assets aligned to skills and easy for employees to find?
  • Are your employees actively developing their skills? More importantly, do they know what skills to develop and how that will impact their future?
  • Is ownership of skills a shared responsibility for talent, learning and rewards disciplines inside your organization, or are you facing skill siloes?
  • Are you effectively using technology to help you identify skills and manage skill advancement?

Activating talent intelligence

Activating talent intelligence is more than just a trend—it’s a transformative strategy that can redefine how organizations connect with their workforces. 

Organizations can cultivate a culture of agility and inclusivity by moving away from static jobs and embracing a more flexible understanding of employees’ skills and aspirations. More importantly, this helps organizations move toward greater talent sustainability. 

This shift boosts employee satisfaction and drives organizational success.

The journey toward unlocking talent intelligence maturity is vital for any organization that wants to thrive in today’s competitive environment. 

But not every organization starts from the same place—talent intelligence maturity grows over time, so it’s essential to consider talent intelligence strategies and technologies that meet you where you’re at and help you evolve. 

It’s time to create a future where talent isn’t just managed but truly activated and sustained.

Ready to better understand talent intelligence and shift your talent strategies? Learn more in this conversation between Eightfold and Mercer.

Head of Luminate, Mercer | Leapgen

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.

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