Talent Mapping for Recruiters in 2024 – Complete Insights

Thanks to the pandemic, there are two tectonic shifts that are changing the way we look at work and the way we work: the Great Resignation and the remote work. These are massive changes happening in the recruitment landscape and they are only gaining momentum with time. 

According to the most recent data from the US government, around 4.3 million Americans quit their jobs in August 2021 as part of the Great Resignation. 

Companies have pretty much used the same principles and assumptions to think about work since Ford created assembly lines, 5-day work weeks, and 8-hour shifts. But all of this was challenged by the pandemic. To navigate these challenges, companies are increasingly undertaking a talent mapping exercise to realign their hiring strategies and goals. 

With a shift of “power” from companies to candidates where candidates are increasingly more driven by factors like work culture, diversity, flexibility, and brand reputation, it’s crucial for organizations to rethink their talent strategy to attract top talent and retain their existing workforce. 

With that said, we created this guide to help define what talent mapping is, what responsibilities a recruiter has, how to create a talent mapping strategy, and a whole lot more. 

What is Talent Mapping?

If you google the term “talent mapping”, you’ll see a bunch of different definitions. One might tell you talent mapping sits in the internal talent operations; one might tell you talent mapping sits with an executive search firm. 

Talent mapping aligns a company’s recruitment strategy with its business goals. It takes a long-term approach, rather than meeting monthly hiring goals or immediate requirements. Moreover, it helps companies understand their competitors and get insights into critical information such as size, structure, organization design, top talent, and employer brand reputation. This helps hiring managers make strategic decisions and use recruiting best practices for hiring top talent. 

Why is Talent Mapping Better Done By Executive Search Firms Than Internal TA Teams?

An organization may have an excellent talent acquisition team internally perfectly capable of doing the talent mapping exercise themselves – however, oftentimes it’s a much better idea to engage an executive search firm to do this for them. 

For a simple reason – alignment. A talent acquisition team has its own requirements to fill and doing an exercise that’s not going to bring immediate gain but can rather be strategically helpful in the long run might just hamper their current hiring goals and thus performance metrics of their team members – and that’s why they won’t be so enthusiastic in taking it up! 

Market mapping in recruitment isn’t always easy. Most organizations struggle with challenges like capturing the attention of top talent, keeping up with compliance, employee turnover, and streamlining their hiring process efficiently. 

In addition, talent mapping requires dedicated time and effort, which comes at the expense of cost and lost business value when done by the internal talent acquisition team. A solid digital adoption strategy can streamline this process, but the expertise of executive search firms often exceeds internal capabilities.

Talent mapping requires thoughtful planning and actionable strategies. When companies hire an executive recruiter from a staffing agency, they have a dedicated professional, or even a team, that takes a proactive approach to their talent mapping process. 

There are three main reasons why recruiting firms are critical for talent mapping:

1. Stronger ability to hire top candidates from the marketplace

Recruiters have access to a large talent pool of candidates with varied backgrounds, skill sets, expertise, demographics, and preferences. This puts them in a better position to hire the top candidates from the marketplace. Also, they have a greater ability to identify talent to fill your niche and more senior positions quickly.  

2. Streamlined hiring process with the latest technology

Okay, let’s be honest here. While companies might be stuck with a legacy system, a small executive search firm will have dedicated tools to do this better. An executive recruiter uses recruitment agency software like an ATS and recruitment CRM to automate and streamline the hiring process. This reduces the likelihood of manual errors and delays in communication, and allows for a smooth candidate experience. 

Also, check this – The Magic Of Recruitment CRM In A World Of Virtual Work

3. Intelligence on your competitors and what you can learn from them

Companies heavily invested in uncovering their competitors’ marketing strategies, business processes, and whatnot. But they miss out or rather underestimate the importance of conducting competitor analysis when it comes to recruiting strategies. An executive recruiter can capture valuable information and help you identify strengths that can act as counterpoints to your competitors’ weaknesses. This way, companies can compete for quality candidates and strengthen their own recruitment efforts.  

Specialized knowledge with improved future hiring strategies

Recruiters often specialize in certain areas of business. They’re able to map out the current marketplace as well as strategize for future hiring needs for your company. So, you can rely on them for hiring good candidates – whether at junior levels or executive levels – and be rest assured of the process. 

As an executive recruiter, it’s important to have a deep understanding of the talent market and ensure that they: 

• Create an appropriate talent strategy and positioning
• Carry out competitor analysis to build a strategy 
• Make sure the company has all the necessary knowledge and resources to attract new candidates 
• Offer data-driven insights and analytics into hiring workflows 
• Build an actionable talent mapping strategy that remains scalable as the company grows.

Here we see how to create a talent mapping strategy that doesn’t come at the expense of cost or quality of hires, all while remaining scalable for a company’s future hiring needs.  

How to Create a Talent Mapping Strategy?

As a company grows, its hiring needs are bound to change. In this section, we’ll look at how to create a talent mapping strategy that sits at the intersection of a company’s existing and future hiring needs, and also dive into specific strategies that recruiters can use to take it to the next level. 

Build Your ICP (Ideal Candidate Personas) 

An ideal candidate persona will look different depending on the company’s industry, their existing job positions, requirements for experience and skillsets, and salary range. A good way to get started is by conducting an intake meeting with the hiring manager. The more you know about their expectations and requirements, the easier and faster you can hire the right candidate for them. You can then brainstorm these qualities on a digital whiteboard and save your notes to create your ICP.

A candidate persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your candidate pool. For recruitment purposes, you need personas to help you create strategies that will be most useful and relevant to sourcing ideal candidates for a vacancy.

Here’s an example of an ideal candidate persona: 

Once you have the initial ideal candidate personas in place, talent operations teams can always come back, tweak things, and move ahead as requirements change.

Moreover, there are various ways to create a candidate persona. Here is a very simple breakdown of the key steps you need to take to build your ideal candidate persona: 

At the core of it, an ideal candidate persona serves as a benchmark or guideline to help your team of recruiters and internal HRs hire better candidates. 

You then have various roles and responsibilities you could create an ICP. In addition, you need to get involved in competitor analysis, track their hiring strategies, as well as identify key industry trends to create ICPs.   

Again, this is a generic overview to create ideal candidate personas for an organization. This will vary depending on your client’s company size, budget, existing workforce, talent gaps, and future hiring needs. 

Use our free candidate persona template to create your own personas and source candidates effectively.

Identify Key Industry Players 

Understanding what an organization’s competitors are doing differently can help set your talent mapping strategy in the right direction. As a result, you can make your strategy more lean and more effective. This means you’re better equipped to position your company as an employer of choice and attract top candidates.  

Here’s a simple breakdown of how you can identify what’s working for a company’s key industry players:

Analyzing competitors is not only about identifying their patterns or workflows. It’s also about assessing your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to hiring. You can uncover opportunities to improve specific processes like making the application process more seamless, using automation to make sure candidates stay updated, and even improving the onboarding process.  

Create a Database Of Target Passive Candidates

Developing a pool of top potential passive candidates is a must today. Companies can no longer have a response-based approach where they start looking for candidates only after the need arises. And when you’re creating a talent mapping strategy, building this pool of candidates is a primary step that will help you find the perfect candidates with much better efficiency. 

“Passive talent makes up 70% of the global workforce”, according to a LinkedIn report.

It’s important to understand that creating a pool of passive candidates isn’t just a checklist in your to-do hiring process. It’s what will set the course right for a company’s future hiring needs, align their existing sourcing strategy to the market, help you hire better candidates, and recruit top-level executives in an easier and quicker manner. 

Also, read our blog on sourcing vs recruitment

There are many ways you can target these passive candidates. One of the key channels is social media. Platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook groups help you leverage advanced search functionality, use industry-specific keywords, skills, and experience, and refine your search based on location and other important factors to look for in passive candidates. 

Recruiters often rely on executive search software to perform these actions. Sure, you could perform these actions manually, but when you’re a growing executive search firm, you need systems that are scalable. And as your company grows, you want to implement flexible and efficient ways of sourcing. 

At Recruiterflow, we’ve made sourcing extremely simple and fast. With our LinkedIn Chrome extension, recruiters can simply fetch all important information about candidates directly into their dashboard. Then you can run automated recipes, add candidates into different hiring pipelines, automate interview scheduling, and hire the top talent right for your client. 

Choose a Recruitment CRM Tool That Fits Your Needs 

When you’re a growing staffing agency, there are two priorities: speed and scalability. We’ve already talked about scalability in the above sections. So, we’ll take a look at how speed can actually impact your sales and revenue. 

First things first. Speed is driven by two major factors: ease of use and user adoption. 

It’s no secret that using a recruitment CRM tool like Recruiterflow can have a knock-on effect. The challenge is that your recruiters (the end-users) have to configure the system, put it in place, and use it every single day. 

Evidently, you need software that’s easy to use and adapt. A common scenario we see in B2B is that recruiters often take several demos, like recruitment software, and buy yearly plans, only to realize it has poor adoption rates and their recruiters just don’t like using the software!

Sometimes, features come at the expense of speed, efficiency, and user adoption. That’s no good news for a recruiting agency aiming to scale its business X times in the next year or so. 

How do you choose the right recruitment CRM tool for your staffing agency? What features should you look for in your recruiting CRM? Should you prioritize features over speed? What’s the budget you should keep aside for a recruitment tool?

There are plenty of recruitment solutions available in the market. But you need to choose a recruitment software that fits your needs exactly. 

Recruiterflow is one of the highest-rated recruitment CRM tools in the industry. We’ve helped executive search firms scale their business by automating their hiring processes. With features like full email sync, automated calendar scheduling, alerts and notifications, rich reports, and more, recruiters can manage both – candidates and clients – in a single dashboard. 

Sign up for a 14-day free trial and explore the features for yourself. Use our LinkedIn Chrome extension, build a talent pool, automate email campaigns, and increase your hiring speed!

BONUS: Talent Mapping Templates for Recruiters

We’re constantly working to improve hiring processes for recruiters. And one of the key differentiators that truly enhance the speed and efficiency of recruiting is using templates.

Check out these talent mapping templates from Creately.

Final Thoughts

Today, recruiting continues to evolve as organizational demands and job seekers’ expectations change. With trends like the Great Resignation and remote work, companies need to constantly upgrade their hiring strategies to align with their business goals. Talent mapping plays a pivotal role in these transformations. 

To end, here’s a quick recap of what we shared:

• Talent mapping is the process of evaluating a company’s existing talent gap, identifying high-potential candidates in their industry, and creating a strategy that meets its future staffing needs.
• Recruiters in executive search firms come with a strong experience, skillset, and access to technology that internal HRs and hiring managers don’t have. Getting specialized professionals like executive recruiters is always a game-changer! 
• Create a candidate persona to set the direction right for your talent mapping strategy.
• Analyzing key industry players in your industry helps reveal hidden opportunities, weaknesses, and strengths to build a better, more effective talent mapping strategy. 
• Use a recruitment tool to build a pool of passive candidates instead of doing it manually. 
• Make sure you choose the right recruitment tool that not only prioritizes features but offers speed and drives user adoption. You don’t want your recruiters to struggle with the software they need to use every single day! 

We hope this article helped clear your doubts about what is talent mapping, what you need to get started, and what it should look like. 

For those of you who want to check out Recruiterflow, sign up for a 14-day free trial and see for yourself how easy it is to use and increase your hiring speed.