Overcoming skills gaps. Reducing turnover. Managing changing workloads.

If you’re in HR, these are just a few of the myriad challenges you face. And as you well know, the way your business attracts, employs and develops people dramatically influences your ability to meet these challenges.

Regardless of your industry, talent is your company’s biggest asset. In today’s post, we review three ways smart talent management can be used as a source of competitive advantage to create a more agile, profitable and successful business:

Challenge: Skill Shortages

Find people with the abilities you need by:

• Recruiting more proactively. With time-to-fill near record highs, organizations that start their search for skilled workers sooner win the war for talent. Your staffing partner can help you identify current and future skills gaps – and create a comprehensive plan to overcome them.
• Relying on qualified temporary and contract employees. Contingent workers with the right skills can help quickly plug the gaps, shorten learning curves or train your core employees on new skills.
• Upskilling your current workforce. To help your employees obtain the skills your organization needs, offer flexible work hours, tuition assistance, continual training and mentorship programs.

Challenge: A Revolving Door of Turnover

While a certain amount of churn is healthy for your organization, chronically high turnover stresses out your employees, wastes time and money, and exacerbates knowledge loss. Smart talent management can help you stop the revolving door:

• Meet employees’ need for a work/life satisfaction. Achieving a healthy work/life equilibrium increases retention, especially with younger generations. Provide the flexibility and balance employees want to improve job satisfaction and guard against the burnout that drives great people out your door.
• Staff high-turnover positions with temporary workers. A qualified staffing agency can ensure you always have the skilled, resourceful people you need to complete jobs with notoriously high turnover rates.
• Keep employees growing. Career stagnancy is a primary driver of turnover. Make sure your organization is a place where employees have continual opportunities to learn, challenge themselves and advance their careers by: promoting mentorship; providing both formal and informal skill-building options; assigning promising employees “stretch” assignments; and building a culture that tolerates reasonable risk-taking and occasional failure.

Challenge: Cyclical, Seasonal and Volatile Workloads

Tired of the time and expense required to post jobs, recruit, screen, interview, hire, onboard and train employees – just for a few weeks or months of work? Smarter planning – and help from your staffing partner – can get you off the rollercoaster.

With a planned staffing model, you can seamlessly flex your workforce by using temporary employees to handle surges in demand. When things slow back down, you can let contingent staff go – and keep your workforce lean and flexible.

Struggling with HR Challenges?

Smarter talent management provides the greatest opportunities for overcoming them – and Exact Staff is here to help. To design the best solution for your organization, we invite you to schedule a free workforce consultation with us. Together we can examine your challenges and goals, brainstorm options and design creative talent management strategies for building your ideal workforce – one with the people capabilities to meet your goals and sustain competitive advantage.