Has ‘Total Talent’ Been a Success? Not Totally…

Full. Complete. End-to-End. Comprehensive. Entire. There’s a lot of weight behind a word like “total.”

When it comes before “talent,” it refers to attracting, retaining and managing an organizations workforce as one in its totality, for full-time roles or part-time and contingent opportunities, and making no distinctions between any of the related end-to-end processes, from prospects’ experiences with the brand to employee engagement.

“Total Talent” has long been viewed as the future of hiring. Skills shortages, cost control, reporting and compliance are just some of the headaches organizations have sought to overcome with a shift to such an approach to talent acquisition.

So, has adoption of this model been a complete success? If we’re being objective … not totally.  And that’s one of the reasons why we at Alexander Mann Solutions collaborated with SIA to interview and survey leaders in organizations across the US and Europe.

Together, with our heritage as a forerunner of the direct sourcing model for hiring contingent work and SIA’s unparalleled research capability and access to the world of staffing, we explored how talent acquisition and the development of total talent solutions is evolving.

Our findings represent insights from over 150 organizations, the results of which will appear in their entirety in an upcoming report commissioned by Alexander Mann Solutions.

The good news is that those survey respondents who either have some form of a total talent program, or are considering implementing one within the next two years, outnumbered those who responded that a program was neither in place nor were their plans to implement one.

PREMIUM CONTENT: Trends in Talent Acquisition Services across MSP, RPO and TTA — CWS Council Webinar

Still, we found that today, most organizations believe that they don’t have an optimized talent mix to meet their business objectives. How can that be? Organizational complexity, specifically in the form of silos, have remained a huge burden for organizations to overcome in their drive to fully embrace Total Talent.

While technology has been heralded as the answer to the dilemma, that’s not the ultimate solution, either – at least not entirely. Rather, a technology balance needs to be achieved that promotes personalization and human connectivity. Anything that can be properly automated to drive value, should be. But, as detailed in the report, we cannot fall into the trap of over-reliance on technology either. It gets complicated.

What has become completely clear is that to achieve full total talent success, organizations must recognize the strategic value of the non-employed workforce and create consistent organization-wide processes when engaging with all forms of talent. These trendsetters who embrace Total Talent are seeing significantly better talent outcomes than laggards.

After all, a significant proportion of all workers, approximately 50%, will be nonpermanent within the next 10 years according to projections. And even sooner, those trend-setting companies that are the leaders in talent acquisition will be positioned to directly source between 30% and 50% of their nonemployee workforce.

If ever the shift to total talent needed to happen, it’s now. Register to receive a complimentary copy of the completed research report.

Michael Wachholz

Michael Wachholz
Michael Wachholz is president of the Americas and the global head of contingent workforce solutions, Alexander Mann Solutions. He joins Alexander Mann Solutions with extensive industry knowledge and global expertise in talent acquisition and CWS.

Michael Wachholz

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