Skills needs and hiring challenges mean employers must rethink their talent strategies, but to what extent is this happening? ISE’s Stephen Isherwood shares our latest research.

Many reports have been written about the imperative need for organisations to adopt a skills-based approach to hiring and development, and one or two that it’s management consulting hype.

ISE has also written about why demographic pressures and higher skills needs will force employers to adopt broader early talent strategies.

So, we thought it time to question employers on the extent they are adopting and developing new skills-based approaches to talent management.

In short, we discovered that very few have fully adopted a skills-based future talent approach. But that doesn’t mean employers aren’t thinking deeply about it.

Three future talent strategies

We asked employers about their thinking on three strands of a skills strategy:

• Hiring – to what extent is your organisation working on future talent programmes that focus less on a person’s age or education exit point, hiring talent from a broader range of backgrounds, and relying less on external experienced hires?
• Development – to what extent is your organisation working to retain talented employees through upskilling and reskilling opportunities, placing a greater emphasis on retaining, retraining and redeploying people?
• Career management – to what extent is your organisation working to promote/create internal career pathways offering increased flexibility through an internal mobility offer, and offer a range of short and long form development/learning programmes to enable employees to progress in their careers?

On hiring, only one-in-ten employers have adopted the approach. But, 58% say they have partially adopted this approach and another 29% say they should. Only 3% of respondents aren’t doing anything at all.

More employers have strategies in place for retraining and redeploying people: 28% say they are and another 51% have partially adopted this approach. Only 5% are not.

On promoting and creating internal career pathways through an internal mobility offer, 21% are already fully on board, with another 51% doing so partially.

So, whilst few employers have a fully thought through future talent strategy, roughly half of our sample have partially adapted their approach and another significant percentage have strategies under development.

What attraction and hiring pathways do employers utilise?

Considering we asked ISE employer members, we weren’t surprised to see that over 70% have both apprentice and graduate attraction and recruitment pathways.

However, none we spoke to have attraction and recruitment strategies for older workers, and only 15% have recruitment pathways for career changers.

That doesn’t mean organisations don’t hire these groups. For example, Now Teach has a career-changers programme and Connectr works with Phoenix Group on its apprenticeship for the over-50s.

In fact, our survey found that approximately half of respondents hire these groups, just not through specific initiatives. Although 31% do have specific pathways to hire ex-military personnel.

What development interventions do employers utilise?

When asked about development initiatives, the responses were more mixed. The majority (over 80%) run school leaver and graduate programmes. But only 22% offer internal mobility programmes.

For the career professionals in our network, we were pleased to see how many employers provide career coaching and guidance to employees, 38%. If companies want to retain and redeploy their people, they are going to have to help them navigate new career pathways.

Future talent technology solutions

In the new HR model, ISE has identified that technology has a key role to play in mapping skills, providing skills training and promoting opportunities internally.

When asked, only 15% of employers have skills identification and mapping platforms but 42% are looking into it. 41% use career development software, but only 16% use agile working platforms. And only 68% have applicant management systems that work for both internal and external candidates.

The responses suggest that technology is not yet providing the solutions employers are seeking.

Future talent strategies are complex

When ISE has run sessions on the future of early careers, we have found that whilst the concepts are straightforward and compelling in practice, in multifaceted organisations the issues quickly become complex.

Organisations need to work through how they gather data and plan, reform their internal culture, and how they integrate across HR and the business to become fully future talent and skills focused. We also uncovered that:

• Only 26% say they do future talent workforce planning
• Only 30% have a future talent focused employee value proposition
• Only 23% use a skills-based hiring methodology

The knowledge gap

Skills needs and hiring challenges mean that employers cannot ignore the need to reform their talent strategies. But it’s clear from our analysis that many are only just beginning to develop their thinking and approaches.

We asked where respondents have a knowledge gap and where should the ISE focus its efforts. Here is what they said:

• How to build a future talent early careers approach and strategy
• How to do workforce planning
• What do skills-based-hiring methodologies look like?
• Are older worker and career-changer strategies viable?
• How can internal mobility be improved?
• What are the future talent early careers tech-stack solutions?

This is what we will work on over the coming months. We are also really keen to understand what this means for the education system and policy development (the focus of Skills England covers a similar agenda).

If you want to explore this with us, or have case studies or insights to offer, please get in touch.

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