It feels recently as if the only thing that European economic commentators seem to be able to agree on is that the outlook is highly uncertain! There is no doubt that there are very plausible double dip recession scenarios. However, there is a good chance that when push comes to shove, the leading Eurozone countries will do whatever it takes to avoid a complete collapse of market confidence.

Below the headlines, the reality is extremely variable with some industry sectors and/or regions faring much better than others. It is an environment where it is challenging to underpin any business planning with confident macro-economic assumptions. So what is the appropriate response for business and HR leaders when they think about the implications for talent management?

One answer that seems to crop up a lot for Taleo customers in Europe at the moment is ‘agility.’ If you don’t know how events are going to unfold, then you need to be prepared to be able to evolve the size, composition, deployment, and focus of your workforce quickly and effectively. Now you could argue that in the modern world talent agility is essential regardless of economic uncertainty. And you would probably be right; customer demand patterns change fast, competitive threats evolve rapidly, and technology accelerates product innovation. But in addition to all of those factors the fundamental uncertainty of our times is putting an even sharper focus on talent agility.

So drawing on a number of recent discussions with Taleo customers and partners, here is my 5 Step Guide to Talent Agility:

Step 1: Know What You Have Got

A pre-requisite to being agile is to understand what you have to be agile with! And that does not just mean knowing how many employees you have in each location. You need to understand what skills, experience, and capabilities you have at your disposal within the workforce. You need ‘talent intelligence’ in exactly the same way you need business intelligence.

The ‘old school’ way of trying to capture this kind of talent profile information was to ask employees to manually enter it themselves. That approach has been proven not to work over and again. Typically you will get patchy data that is then poorly maintained over time. Far more effective is to make sure that you are capturing and consolidating talent data at the source. That process should start during hiring where you capture a wealth of current information about skills and capabilities. Then as the employee completes performance reviews, creates career plans, or executes development activities, you will naturally enhance their ‘talent profiles.’ This is one of the main factors driving organisations towards using a more unified style of talent management system that is underpinned by a unified talent profile capability.

Step 2: Build the Capability to Put People in the Right Places…

Once you know what you have got, you need the mechanisms (processes, systems, and policies) to put your best people into the roles where they will have the most business impact. Unfortunately, in research that Taleo conducted on in 2011, only 58% of growth companies in the UK indicated that they have the best people in the right places to drive growth.

The usual short hand for these programs is ‘mobility.’ But the key to agility is making your mobility approach highly proactive. Many companies rely on simply advertising roles internally and hoping that the right employees apply. A proactive approach to mobility entails having the recruiting team view employees as an internal candidate pool, looking for good candidates internally based on matching their talent profiles to open roles, and then proactively approaching those where there is a strong fit. Good proactive mobility programs are the core of effective agility as they allow the organisation to redeploy key skills fast.

Unfortunately, 74% of the 500 HR decision makers in our UK Talent Mobility study indicated that they experience some challenges in increasing talent mobility. The top three challenges were lack of visibility into talent gaps and opportunities (31%), lack of systems / technology to support talent mobility initiatives (31%), and the quality and reliability of employee talent data (30%). Robust talent profiles that draw on data from recruiting, performance, and learning and development can provide the talent intelligence needed to make proactive talent mobility one of an organization’s strengths rather than a weakness.

Step 3: …And Get Them Doing The Right Things

Whilst having the right people in the right places is a foundational element of agility, it also requires the ability to refocus what they are doing in those roles. Strategies can change fast. The underpinning alignment of goals up and down the organisation is a key to executing strategies effectively. A change in the strategy or goals at the top of the organisation needs to be quickly communicated and implemented as part of the goal plans in all relevant areas of the organisation. Otherwise misalignments will occur and inertia will creep in.

Step 4: Retain and Engage the Best Talent

It is hard to be agile when you have a lot of people who are still finding their feet and figuring out how things get done. That challenge increases exponentially if they are not high quality talent relative to the role, or if your talented people are disengaged. Retention and engagement of top performers is therefore a key element of any agility strategy. Knowing who your best performers are, making sure they have regular feedback and development, and providing opportunities to build their career internally – all of these practices help ensure that the best, most experienced people are in place to drive change on the front line when it is needed.

Step 5: Build and Buy New Skills

There will be times when the organisation needs new skills that you just don’t have within your existing internal talent pools. Rarely will there be a ready supply of these skills that you can recruit from the open market, and more likely the opposite will be true. That fact has two implications for an agility strategy. Firstly, the organisation must retain a highly competitive recruiting function, even if there is not a high volume of net new positions. It is not possible to rapidly acquire important new skills from the open market if you have run down your recruiting capabilities during low growth periods, and need to rebuild them as a pre-requisite to shifting the skills profile of the business.

Secondly, in a supply constrained environment for critical skills, it is unlikely even then that you will be able to hire in all the skills you need. It is essential therefore that you have the organisational capability to develop key skills groups internally as well.

The Bottom Line for Agility

It is my belief that either explicitly or implicitly, talent agility is going to be at the heart of many organisations talent strategies. The world is changing fast and talent management needs to be able to keep up. When you consider the five steps above, the institutional infrastructure required falls into two categories. The right information about talent needs to be available to the leaders of the business to ensure that they can make talent-related decisions based on facts and data. Then you need to have the capability to act on those decisions and affect change in the state of the workforce. Both of these elements require the appropriate processes, technology, and management culture to be in place to drive an intelligent approach to talent agility.