Business Modeling: Your Ally In The Talent War – Part 2

You have an ally in in your battle to win the talent war. It’s business modeling and it quite literally provides you with a strategic tool for making transformative and positive changes in the way you attract and retain high performing candidates and employees.

In part 1, I made the case for using business modeling, establishing that it’s a powerful tool for gaining victory through a winning talent strategy.  In part 2, I’m suggesting a specific weapon that you and your team can begin deploying immediately.  In this installment, I show you how this tool can help you build agile talent scenarios to take advantage of rapidly changing business developments and better align human capital with organizational needs.   The tool is called SWOT, an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.  Just the name suggests its value in helping you fight the talent war battles now and in the future.  In the context of agile talent management, its very structure compels you and your team make a thoughtful analysis of your competitive environment and is operationally defined as follows:

• Strengths: Current talent profile including demographics, key knowledge and skills domains possessed by your existing employees; positive reputation as an employer, active engagement with employees and prospective employees, etc.
• Weaknesses: Knowledge, skills or other gaps that hinder achievement of business plans.
• Opportunities: Chances for improvement or acquisition of your company’s human capital with the required knowledge, skills and experiences key to creating innovation and exploiting market opportunities.
• Threats: Circumstances including technological changes or industry trends that pose risks to your organization’s competitiveness and worsen weaknesses identified above.

To use SWOT, you can create a simple table with four quadrants with a label for each.  Here are some examples which you can use to develop your own SWOT matrix:

Strengths

• Positive employer reputation, actively engaged with current and prospective employees using social media
• Effective performance management program

Weaknesses

• No social media presence that connects with employees and prospects
• Negative reputation

Opportunities

• Ability to use strengths to acquire talent from competitors
• Other trends on which to capitalize

Threats

• Identified personal weaknesses that, if unaddressed, could threaten your human capital
• Other trends that will degrade your talent pool

As you complete your SWOT matrix, a framework is developed that outlines what is needed to enhance/maintain strengths, correct weaknesses, seize opportunities and counter threats.  By giving your talent management/human capital development program a SWOT, you are activating a planning process that will pay dividends now and in the future and be a key ally in helping you win the talent war.

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