Digital talent platforms

‘Companies can transform their talent model— and business strategy—by using digital talent platforms to access highly skilled freelancers.’ HBR

Why Open Talent?

An open talent market provides businesses access to a global pool of talent with lower levels of risk. It enables businesses to create their own networked talent ecosystem.

This ecosystem integrates internal and external workers in teams put together to solve real work problems. Those could be selected from an open talent pool probably through digital talent platforms.

It blends full-timers with freelancers, independent consultants, or on-demand talent to form a dynamic augmented workforce.

And an open talent mindset shifts the fundamental understanding of how work is done.

Digital talent platforms are today well positioned to provide us access to a shrunken talent pool of highly skilled professionals.

Companies now shift their talent strategies to accommodate an on-demand, blended teams’ mindset.
This approach is suddenly becoming a major source of potential EVP enhancement, and even a competitive strategic advantage.

A company with an open talent system moves fast when new market opportunities arise.

Hence in the digital age, the ability to connect and quickly scale up are what differentiates market leaders.

In addition, it is fairly commonplace for large companies to have talent in their internal systems, but are unable to harness this quickly.

One of the largest telecommunication companies in emerging markets crafted their own internal talent system, just to allow them to move talent across their operating footprint swiftly to address specific needs.

With the fundamentals of open talent systems allowing for large potential benefits, there should be no obstacles for HR to be able to establish trust within their own teams digitally.

Therefore, a move away from only hiring local, full-time HR people is the way forward.

On the contrary, HR teams that do not embrace open talent markets essentially exclude themselves from engaging with the best available talent.

Transformational potential of digital talent platforms

Here are some insights into the Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of work and Boston Consulting Group. This is a survey of nearly 700 senior business leaders at US firms. They as well conducted interviews with representatives from talent platforms.

The research focus is on how companies were using digital talent platforms to access highly skilled professionals.

A close look at the results, shows most companies are using digital talent platforms extensively and were aware of their potential to transform the organisation.

Mainly, a business uses those platforms to fill a high-skills gap with high-skilled professionals accessed on-demand.

Here are some of those results as stated in the HBR report.

• 40% of the participants surveyed reported that accessing highly skilled professionals through new digital talent platforms helped improve speed to market, boost productivity, and increase innovation.
  
  
• More than 30% of business leaders reported using new digital talent platforms.
  
  
• 50% expected their use of digital talent platforms to increase in the future.
  
  
• Only a handful of companies used new digital talent platforms to improve the performance of current business models and to innovate and create entirely new nimble, talent-light business models of the future.
  
  
• 60% of leaders reported it was “highly” or “somewhat” possible that their core workforce in the future would be much smaller.
  
  
• 60% expected they would increasingly prefer to “rent,” “borrow,” or “share” talent with other companies.

Actions and recommendations as per HBR

As talent platforms use increases, we start seeing the true transformative potential because they address two pain points.

1. For companies, on-demand workforce models allow companies to find top talent for hard-to-fill positions.
   
   
2. As for highly skilled workers, these arrangements allow talent to find a way to stay productive.  And stay in the workforce while also managing their work-life priorities.

To build a blended, on-demand workforce model, you will need to:

1️⃣ Remake the culture of the organization, changing the definition of success to focus on attaining outcomes over generating new ideas or managing headcount

2️⃣ Rethink the employee value proposition, helping employees at all levels understand how they can benefit from arrangements made with new talent platforms

3️⃣ Redefine work into discrete components that can be tackled by internal or external contributors

4️⃣ Reassess capabilities within the organization to tap into the underutilized talent

5️⃣ Rewire organizational policies and processes, smoothing the path for teams to integrate temporary talent

Adapted business models and the on-demand workforce   

As leaders adapt their business models, they know they have an opportunity to think and act boldly.

They can put the learnings of the Covid-19 crisis to good use and use freelancers to offset the lack of skills and capabilities within their teams to grow exponentially.

However, by embracing flexibility in whom a business hires, internally or externally, it can finally speed up operations and deliver faster on strategy.

A key take-away is that to survive in a hyper-competitive world, especially post Covid-19, a business must first win the war for talent.
Digital talent platforms like One Circle can help you do just that. Here’s how.