1. Our talent, your results
www.workspend.com
3 Perspectives on Enterprise
Talent Capability That Every
Talent Leader Should Know
Actionable Insights
for Talent Leaders

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Preface
Workspend (www.workspend.com) is conducting a study of Talent
Leaders to better understand their requirements for ‘actionable Insights’.
In this presentation
• Background to this research
• what we believe are the 3 perspectives that every talent leader should
know based on our discussions with talent leaders so far
Important note: At this stage in our study there is insufficient data to build a
factual conclusion. This is our work in progress.
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Challenges Facing Talent Leaders
• To meet the current, known aspirations of the management
team against its stated strategy and plan
• Realize the potential of talent - wherever it comes from
• Harvest and bring on new talent - and sources of talent
• Educate senior colleagues on the unmet potential that is
the reward of investing in talent and seeing it as a strategic
lever for growth and prosperity
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The Back-Story
• The talent discipline has emerged from an administrative back-drop
• Most reporting systems today measure ‘widgets’ of activity or key
points of a process pipeline such as:
– the number of current and net change in vacancies unmet
– the averaged time taken to fill vacant positions.
• While these measures can reveal comparative performance of
vendors/sourcing engines (etc.) they do little to harvest details of ‘soft-
measures’ so important to talent leaders – such as ‘Are candidates
happy to be working for us – and if not, why not?’
• Neither do traditional measurs expose a deeper appreciation of the
VALUE of the talent sourcing capability to serve the short, medium and
long-term needs of the business.
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The Four Main Types of Insights
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1. Daily Operating Reports (operational insights)
• Inform managers of progress against targeted outcomes
• Many Vendor Management Systems (VMS) and Managed Service
Provider (MSP) services deliver this information as a bi-product of their
function
• About keeping the core processes working to their optimal level and
being aware as and when under-performance exists - notifying
managers and giving them time to do something about it!
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2. Performance Scorecards (strategic insights)
• Measure the onward performance of the talent management function
against strategic objectives.
• Present results of activities against key performance indicators to
measure progress against strategic ambitions of the enterprise.
• Advanced systems include ‘lead indicator measures’ of performance –
suggesting whether the strategy is on-track – as well as ‘lag measures
that measure the rear-view mirror of ‘what HAS happened’ report
when it’s actually too late for managers to act.
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3. Predictive Analytics and Community
• Predict what might happen - when performance may be impacted by
scarcity of resources, external market factors etc.
– If organizations have a succession plan and have a clear picture of
when managers are likely to leave or retire, they could predict
talent requirements based on current levels of operational needs
into the future.
• Should managers have any indication of the kind of growth or shrinkage
they can expect moving forward, together with an appreciation of the
types of roles needed when their business adapts to market needs
(perhaps more sales people, or more market researchers etc.), they can
plan for requirements well in advance of the needs being exposed
through internal budgetary requests.
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4. Actionable Insights
• Actionable insights prompt managers to take action and intervene in
the way processes work to ‘get the job done better’.
• Typically sourced from insightful measures that not only qualify how
well business units are performing but also help managers to answer
‘so what?’ questions and create new questions that emerge through
analysis of the insights.
• Only recently have the technology tools become available to make
actionable insights accessible to the people that need them most:
leaders that exist at all levels of the enterprise, not least the talent
leader.
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Getting Back in Touch With Our Emotions
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Getting Back in Touch With Our Emotions
• Business is not solely about measurement and facts; it’s also about
emotions and relationships.
• When people purchase products and services they may conduct a
logical review of their buying options but the last 9-yards is an
emotional response (i.e. ‘Does it make me feel happy buying this
product?’ or ‘Will it make my partner love me all the more?’ etc.).
• Focusing too much on slide-rule measurement of process efficiency
leads to inwardly focused enterprises whose managers lose touch with
their customers and staff; defaulting instead to a ‘scorecard’ as the
answer to every question.
• Talent leaders looks across the enterprise AS A WHOLE rather than a
specific business function. They can promote the rewards of investing
in better appreciating the business rewards of soft-skills – the
economic power and influence of emotions and relationships.
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• A big part of the reasons why actionable insights are so important to
business, particularly in the HR field, is that all too often the ‘X Factor’
that differentiates exceptional from good - the aspects of performance
that really matter to the success of an enterprise – normally happen on
the fringe of operational activity (i.e. ‘What’s new or different about
the market?’, and ‘What soft-skills do our leaders need to encourage
followership?’ or ‘How do we turn on-the-job know-how into a
corporate asset?’).
• While businesses should never be run exclusively by numbers, access to
effective customer, performance and other actionable insights can be a
key growth enabler. Organizations that lack such insights operate in a
culture of “What we can’t see can’t hurt us” which is dangerous if not
unprofessional. Business leaders know it’s better to know and to act
than not know and hope.
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Getting Back in Touch With Our Emotions

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Defining Enterprise Talent Capability
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“WHAT the talent organization
does to bring value to the
enterprise”

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Sample Selection of Client Feedback
“We’ve several VMS systems and they all report differently. It’s a struggle
to gain consistent data to source the analysis we need to evidence poor
performance.”
“Our systems and partners are good at reporting statistics of throughput
but many of these stats tell us what we already know, or could easily find
out.”
“Sometimes one has an instinct that something is wrong, or performing
pretty badly, but it’s next to impossible to source the evidence – even if we
had the time and resources to do so.”
“It’s difficult to know what GOOD looks like and so we can only compare
our operational effectiveness with what partners tell us is ‘acceptable’
performance. This is nowhere close to a satisfactory way of driving
improvement.”
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Sample Selection of Client Feedback
“We know we have some poor performing vendors but we can’t prove it.”
“When we measure characteristics such as averaged time taken to fill
vacant positions we can encourage the wrong behaviors in our partners
because – yes – they can hit our SLAs but we end up with poorer quality
talent, or worse people are placed and leave quickly; so we incur the
upfront on-boarding costs without the benefits. We need measures that
encourage the right behaviors from contributors and the best short,
medium and long-term outcomes for our business.”
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3 Perspectives of Enterprise Talent Capability
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• From discussions with talent leaders Workspend has
identified job outcomes and constraints that prevent talent
leaders from ‘getting their job done better’.
• Analyzing these issue areas we were able to classify all of
the actionable insights that talent leaders have so far said
they needed into three perspectives. These are:
1. Sourcing
2. Candidate Fit
3. Workforce Effectiveness
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1. Sourcing
It’s about measuring the short, medium and
long-term effectiveness of talent sourcing
approaches; questioning whether the current
model/approach is a good way, the best way
or neither.
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2. Candidate Fit
It’s about measuring whether the right calibre
of talent is being sourced and whether the
people being recruited are happy and able to
achieve their fullest potential.
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3. Workforce Effectiveness
It’s about measuring the impact that the talent
capability has on the enterprise, whether it
has reached an optimal level, or whether the
way the organization thinks and acts is
prohibiting the enterprise from growing in a
way that it could if alternative
strategies/approaches were adopted.
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JOB OUTCOMES
What talent leaders say they want to achieve
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These are a few of the key outcomes talent leaders
say they want to achieve…

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Sourcing Talent Outcomes
• Minimize the time taken to find the best talent and the best
rate in the right place at the right time
• Minimize the cost of talent (including departmental
overhead and sourcing costs)
• Minimize risk of litigation to the enterprise resulting from
how talent is sourced and managed
• Maximize productivity (i.e. the return per capita) of talent
• Maximize learning of what works when it comes to talent
provisioning to drive improvement
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Candidate Fit Outcomes
• Maximize quality of talent – its potential to make effective
contributions to operational performance and bring game-
changing value to the enterprise beyond the anticipated
role deliverables
• Maximize the ‘happiness’ of talent – to create a positive
working environment and give something back to the
communities served by the enterprise
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Workforce Efficiency Outcomes
• Maximize profit per head (minimize spend on talent)
• Minimize unbudgeted spend on talent
• Maximize derived value from third party partnerships
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JOB OUTCOME CONSTRAINTS
What talent leaders say holds them back!
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These are a few of the key outcome constraints
talent leaders say they want to achieve…

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Access to Data
“Data is not captured”
“Data is inconsistently held”
“Reports are inconsistent across systems/operations/regions”
“Data takes a long time to harvest and repurpose into
meaningful reports”
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Understanding data
“We don’t create or manage data that we’d need for the most
interesting things we want to measure”
“We don’t create or manage data that we’d need for the most
interesting things we want to measure”
“It’s difficult to drill down to source data to understand what
reports are showing”
“There’s too much data and too little insight”
“There are so many measures; we spend more time sourcing
the reports than we do analyzing it”
“It’s difficult to get benchmarking data to know what good
looks like”
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Cultural/behavioral inhibitors
“We get the data we’re given by vendors/partners”
“Talent is not seen as strategic – reports are more administrative
than anything else”
“We don’t have time to analyze or blue-sky”
“We’re happy enough when people get paid on-time”
“No one role is responsible for talent: We struggle to gain
consensus on the important things to measure”
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We’re conducting a survey of talent leaders
We’d be grateful of your perspectives if you have a moment to
complete the 6 questions in our survey.
The first 100 talent leaders that complete it will get their own
copy of our analysis (if they enter their contact details so we
know how to get it to them!).
Find the survey at:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JMRWSH9
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30. Thank you.
Workspend Inc.
101 Hudson Street
Suite 3715
Jersey City, NJ 07302
T: +1 800-770-5973
www.workspend.com