Talent Mapping From Scratch

I had a chance to virtually attend SourceCon a few weeks ago.  I love SourceCon for so many reasons and it’s the group that really got me excited and educated on sourcing! The theme of the overall event was centered around AI in recruiting and interesting tools to level up your current recruiting practice. I was really interested in the Talent Mapping session which was a great overview of a specific tool many organizations use to build recruiting strategies based on real time labor market data. You might be able to guess the tool's name if you are in the talent analytics space. :)  But, if you are like me and don’t have access to a Talent Intelligence standalone product, I wanted to share my process for building a Talent Map and Sourcing Strategy from scratch to help you add this process to your recruitment strategy. *Shout out to the SourceCon Community and Jonathan Kidder’s Talent Mapping book which have contributed to my success as a sourcer building Talent Maps for my hiring teams. 

1. Define the need

Whether you are mapping talent for a specific role OR just wanting to pull general labor market data together for a specific location and job family, gather all the required information. I do this for specific roles by attending the job kick-off meetings with my recruiter and hiring manager to really hone into the hard skills, soft skills, years of experience, location, target companies, job titles, etc. that enable me to get an accurate picture of the desired candidate persona.

2. Scan the Market

 I will take all the candidate persona info and plug it into our sourcing tools to identify the available talent pool. Sourcing tools can be LinkedIn Recruiter or HireEz or Seekout, but I use HireEz to view their Talent Insights, but I will also check out the BLS, DataUSA.io, and other sites. From this data I can see available talent, percentage of job seekers who have changed roles in the last year, top job titles, diversity data of available pool, top represented companies, top past companies, top industries, years of experience, location, salary data and so much more. I usually focus on the top job titles represented and remove any nonrelevant titles, then look at current companies, diversity information and location data. I don’t put a lot of weight in the compensation data reported because I have found this usually only tells part of the full compensation story and don’t use that as a guide post. 

I will also do a sweep of relevant GitHub repos, Slack Channels, professional organizations, etc that could be sources of prospects for our search. 

3. Research Industry Trends

 I also utilize a variety of other labor market data sources, such as government databases, industry associations, academic journals, online job portals, and surveys. Collecting data from diverse sources ensures a holistic view of the labor market. I like using tools like Levels.FYI, Blind, X, StackShare and The Information for this research. 

4. Assess the Competitive Landscape 

Once I have my talent insights info, I will then go to LinkedIn and search for current similar job postings. You can drill down in the search filters to further refine your search results because I find a lot of random job posts in my results that aren’t relevant so you do have to review the results before reporting the number of postings. I will copy competitor postings into a Word doc and compile the information with a Table of Contents to make it super easy for my recruiters and hiring managers to easily review specific company postings. 

I love that more and more organizations are reporting salary ranges (looking at you Pay Transparency Laws) in their postings because this is great info to review as well for my recruiting partners.  I also do a Google Search for similar job postings and any relevant competitor hiring trends and news like recent layoffs or restructures that could be competitive intel for sourcing. I love tools like LinkedIn, Slack, https://progression.fyi/, The Org, Apollo.io, Crunchbase, Datausa.io, Payscale and more for relevant competitor information. 

5. Make it Visually Appealing

Organize the research findings into a well-structured visual report of the overall findings to include the methodology, key findings, data analysis, trends, recommendations, and a conclusion. 

I like to do this through a PowerPoint or google presentation doc with high-level information and visual charts to tell the labor market story for a specific candidate persona including a chart view of top companies represented, the diversity of the available talent pool, the supply and demand ratio (Available Talent Pool/Number of Current Openings). I also like to highlight some of the top competitors hiring for similar roles and their reported salary range, to include any relevant industry findings. 

This info is shared with the hiring team before sourcing kicks off. The overall process of talent mapping and labor market research helps our hiring teams understand the competitive landscape for particular roles and empowers our hiring teams to intelligently make informed decisions that drive growth and success.