Leveraging Talent Solutions to Build a Future-Ready Workforce

Which talent solutions and approaches are effective in helping you build a future ready workforce? The answer is, all of them when they’re applied as part of a strategic workforce plan. The last Solugenix post on talent solutions for digital transformation focuses on the upskilling and training approach. This time we’ll take a broader view to show some important tools and frameworks for building that future ready workforce.

In the digital age, HR collaboration integration, and partnerships across technologies functions and groups is a necessity to meet future ready workforce needs. This broader approach encompasses learning and development (L&D) trends, as discussed in a recent McKinsey eBook.¹ The needs and approaches for a future-ready workforce go far beyond this. Seventy percent of leaders surveyed see HR’s role shifting from standardization to being boundaryless as orchestrators of work and blended resources, according to the Deloitte Human Capital Trends Report.

All organizations struggle to unlock human performance and potential internally while also finding the talent with the skills to move into the future. Four in five companies struggle to fill roles, according to a recent Manpower Group Survey. The constant shift of technologies, markets and consumer demands drives the need for a future ready workforce. This ability to attract and keep talent requires every business to define a path that holistically integrates:

Digital transformation
Employee learning and development (L&D)
Automation assisted talent lifecycle support focused on skills agility (more on this later)

It takes a variety of talent solutions to achieve these goals as part of strategic workforce planning. They must all align with long-term business goals to meet changing needs.

Strategic Workforce Planning

There are three crucial steps an organization must take to develop a strategic workforce plan that leverages current and additional talent solutions. Every business must develop a picture of where they are now, where they expect to go in the future, and what technologies they need to get them there.

Step 1: Conducting a workforce gap analysis

A Skills Gap Analysis compares current employee skills they have today with the skills they need for current and future roles. Stakeholders and internal /external experts must define the parameters based on business and market alignment. There are many tools and platforms like ServiceNow that provide this functionality using AI.

Step 2: Develop workforce scenarios for future outcomes

These parameters guide data collection and analysis from a wide variety of historical and forecasted sources to assess the gaps and the development of different workforce scenarios. These scenarios are based on different future outcomes that consider factors, such as:

Market trends
Technology advancements
Labor market changes

This enables your organization to build resilience by preparing for various potential outcomes.

Step 3: Choosing workforce planning tools & tech

Most organizations have some combination of tools boasting automation for workforce planning as part of HR. They often lack integration and compatibility beyond traditional job title and related skills-based assessment and recruitment tools, such as:

Workforce analytics
Talent management software
AI-driven tools for succession planning

It’s difficult to find, nurture, and keep talent if the organization’s tools don’t fully integrate AI and automation in ways that analyze skills beyond just specific job titles. The goal is to see skills in ways that look at current and potential future needs that go beyond a static job title.

This skills-based approach enables the organization to leverage tools in ways that balance time savings of AI and automation/RPA with the ability to cast a wider net for talent. The chosen talent is then better positioned to focus on projects, tasks, problems to be solved, and achievable outcomes across the business. Organizations can then deploy these employees more fluidly based on changing needs, their interest, and business priorities.

A Deloitte Survey defined this approach as follows:

Skills become more broadly defined beyond hard technical skills (coding, accounting, etc.) and human skills (critical thinking, emotional intelligence, etc.). These integrated tools and compatible technologies can now look at latent qualities, abilities, or adjacent skills that may be developed and lead to future success.³

The result is a skills-based organization that can:

Decouple skills from job descriptions to enable a more fluid workforce to meet changing business needs
See everyone within the workforce as a portfolio of skills that can be improved and used across the organization
Create an engine of skills data, technology, governance, and more to power these decisions³

It takes the right tools and change management culture to match the current workforce with upskilling paths and opportunities. Strategic workforce planning must also drive talent search, identification, and onboarding mechanisms to meet project, task, and operational needs across the organization with fluidity.

This will often be a mix of recurring project hires (contract and contract to hire) and permanent employees. The mix gives an organization greater flexibility and the ability to tap into broader talent pools by moving beyond functional job silos to skills-based approaches.

Tools Integration & Compatibility Beyond HR

Talent solutions are a mix of tools such as platforms and application that support methodologies, governance frameworks and analysis for defined outcomes. It all starts with the business stakeholders and managers understanding what each employee brings and their interest beyond current skills.

They can then leverage these solutions to create a holistic path for digital transformation while building the future-ready workforce they will need. This is where the concept of a borderless HR comes into lay where tools integration and compatibility go beyond HR to the broader workflow technologies of the business.

Organizations apply this when upskilling, reskilling and skills-based talent recruitment all work together as part of a skills-based organization. HR then has access to integrated talent tools that can work alongside the broader technologies of the organization, such as cloud, automation App/Dev and ITSM, among others.

An example would be to implement process tools for broader operational use and those specific to HR that enable low code/no code automation and RPA. This can free HR to hire talent with broader skills (without coding being one) while also supporting HR process automation. Developers and IT talent can then come from a broader pool based on project needs (Contract or support/training) to permanent (contract to hire).

While this approach is a multi-year journey, it can yield the ability to increase:

Operational speed, agility, and faster time to market
Customer service
Workforce growth, change and career opportunities
Cost reductions, retention, and talent use based on project and business needs

These types of talent and business-wide digital transformations can start small with a single talent practice and digital transformation process or workflow and grow from there. Having a services, talent, and technology support partner like Solugenix can help define and pave the path to implementation and defined business outcomes for a future ready workforce.

How Solugenix Helps Build & Support Your Future-Ready Workforce

Attracting and keeping a high-performance workforce requires an integrated approach to training, upskilling, recruiting, and digital transformation. Digital transformations like cloud, automation and application development initiatives affect the broader workforce as well as IT. Leveraging Integrated talent solutions and these broader technology transformations require support in terms of:

Consultation
Implementation
Expertise expansion (both temporary and long-term)
Training and upskilling
Ongoing change management support

Too many organizations see these as separate projects, which can lead to silos between IT, stakeholders, HR and department managers like finance, accounting, and beyond.

Implementing, managing and updating these platforms require specialized skills and experience that are difficult to cultivate in-house for real-time change. The combination of hiring, upskilling and third-party support becomes the ideal way to move the business forward with these advanced technologies.

Having a partner like Solugenix can help your organization to plot and follow a path to a future-ready workforce by leveraging staffing (contract, contract to hire, direct hire), technology implementation and support services for IT, accounting/finance and support center services. For a unified path to digital transformation and talent solutions, we specialize in providing skilled ServiceNow talent recruiting and implementation to transform and automate processes and workflows across the business.

More business across all sizes and sectors are turning to ServiceNow to support integration of talent solutions with ServiceNow HR Service Delivery with current HRM solutions. Solugenix can help with these and other ServiceNow modules that can provide compatibility or integration with existing solutions across the business to support the path of your future-ready workforce.

There are plenty of case studies that show how Solugenix has helped businesses with ServiceNow module integrations that transform the business. The goal of moving towards an integrated and automated approach to everything from HR, finance, and accounting to ITSM and other management operations and workflows should be part of a digital transformation plan. This gives your business the speed, agility, people, processes, technology, and workflows that help you adapt, grow and lead in a changing business and technology ecosystem.

To learn how Solugenix can help you define and implement that plan, take a look at our services page and schedule a consult here.