Enterprise Talent Intelligence - Changing The Way Your Organization Operates

By Josh Bersin and Kathi Enderes

As with every technology, advances come quickly. In the case of talent intelligence, the expanded capabilities of enterprise talent intelligence technology mean businesses can accomplish so much beyond simple recruiting projects. This tech creates an integrated set of sophisticated talent intelligence tools across the entire enterprise, allowing the organization to leverage talent intelligence across many HR functions.

Enterprise talent intelligence, by definition, is a data-rich, AI-powered system with a deep data set of a company’s employees, coupled with labor market data, job insights, candidate capabilities, and many other sources of insight, which can be leveraged and analyzed for sourcing, decision-making, strategic planning, and other work. The data is acquired globally across all talent profiles, updated every minute, and retrained with each new data point.

Companies can use enterprise talent intelligence for many applications. For example, Coca-Cola created a corporate career system with Eightfold AI, and Novartis leveraged Gloat to build an internal talent marketplace.

Using this powerful technology results in better operational efficiency and improved access to the skills of your employee base and can enable deep integration of HR groups—creating Systemic HRTM.

Use Cases

In our report Enterprise Talent Intelligence: Applying Skills Technology and AI at Work, we define several distinct use cases for this disruptive approach, which cover everything from skill-based HR and personalized employee learning to workforce planning and leadership development. Here is a look at selected use cases and the challenges that can be overcome with enterprise talent intelligence. For full examples and detailed cases in point, download the complimentary report.

Creating the foundation for skills-based HR

Tagging, identifying, and mapping employees’ skills needed in each role, as well as the constant changes to the data, is a difficult endeavor. Skills are dynamic and change with every new project, course completed, tech used in the role advances in tools, and personal aspirations.

With enterprise talent intelligence, companies can see trending skills, competitors’ skills, emerging skills for existing and new roles, and the skills needed in a variety of management, sales, and administrative positions.

Because the enterprise talent intelligence system is updated in real-time, it creates a dynamic system of record for skills and becomes the lifeline of the entire skills strategy. Refer to page 8 of the full report for real-world examples of companies in the consumer banking, semiconductor, and manufacturing industries implementing this approach.

Fueling Personalized and Targeted Employee Development

Employee development is constantly evolving. Training on each new function, program, and technology requires a new set of learning resources. This often results in massive training libraries that constantly expand and may easily include outdated materials because it’s hard to keep them current.

Think, for example, about AI upskilling and training. The disruption of business by AI has required everyone to learn new skills to understand it and then learn the skills necessary to use it in their work. The rapid pace of development of the various technologies using AI means that the skills required to use it are also expanding constantly, requiring new training. That can make for a complicated, heavily layered set of materials.

Across a business, because enterprise talent intelligence can make sense of the thousands of skills needed to perform all roles effectively, it provides a clear view of skills currently required, as well as the adjacent skills that people can leverage as a springboard. Training on these skills can be delivered dynamically and seamlessly with logical segmentation, enabling managers to support the varying upskilling needs of employees and enabling employees to seek out micro-learnings on a topic related to their needs.

Supporting Career Planning, Internal Mobility, Gig Work, Mentoring, and Coaching

Our Dynamic Organization research shows that companies with a high degree of internal mobility and strategic career development have up to 7 times more success in innovation and are 17 times more likely to adapt well to change.

These organizations provide employees with transparency about opportunities within their organization for internal mobility, special projects, and adjacent roles. Recruiting is easier, retention of legacy knowledge is exponentially more valuable, and the time required to ramp up in a new role is diminished. Internal mobility, team-based work, connecting with mentors, and strategic career development are wildly beneficial yet not always easily achievable.   

Enterprise talent intelligence enables companies to understand their internal supply and demand for skills and talent and then act based on talent availability and business priorities. AI-based internal talent marketplaces have helped companies like Mastercard, BNY Mellon, and MetLife master internal resourcing and project management, facilitate team development, handle people scheduling, and provide full transparency on required skills and certifications for roles, thereby aligning skills and talent to the most important business priorities.

Powering Strategic Workforce Planning, Location Planning, and Competitive Analysis

Effective workforce planning is an integrated process focusing on four key areas: recruiting, retention, reskilling, and redesign. We define this strategy as the Four R Framework™, which we refer to in several reports.

In today’s labor-constrained environment, you can’t hire your way out of a skills shortage. With enterprise talent intelligence, companies have the power to understand the roles and skills in demand, the internal talent available, and which lever to pull from the Four R Framework™ to close skills gaps.

Healthcare companies are using this approach to redesign nursing roles and foster more team-based work, to address the massive nursing shortage. Manufacturing companies can use enterprise talent intelligence to see skills and talent by geography, city, and metro areas to determine ideal locations for a new plant.

Using global labor market data within enterprise talent intelligence aids companies in identifying talent pools, understanding salary demands, and monitoring market changes worldwide, which benefits talent acquisition and L&D strategies.

Take Action

Each of these use cases, along with the remainder of the use cases, can be found in Enterprise Talent Intelligence: Applying Skills Technology and AI at Work and are made possible because the tech operates differently than any other tech we’ve seen. The insights with enterprise talent intelligence are AI-driven and created in real time using internal and external data. By nature, it is updated almost minute-by-minute. And it’s not a transactional system, it’s a data system that gets more and more intelligent with more data, using AI to find connections, correlations, and adjacencies that are impossible to see by a human.

Enterprise Talent Intelligence: Applying Skills Technology and AI at Work is available to the public. Download it now to dive deeper into the details highlighted here and read first-hand experiences of companies, including The Coca-Cola Company, HSBC, BNY Melon, Bayer, and more, using enterprise talent intelligence systems with great success.