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How Talent Intelligence Provides the Software Industry a Competitive Advantage

Talent Management February 10, 2022
How Talent Intelligence Provides the Software Industry a Competitive Advantage
Kishor Venkatesh R

Content Developer

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Talent intelligence in the software industry is the key to making better hiring decisions to gather data and analyze what makes workers happy. The market is an increasingly competitive and ever-changing place where there’s more pressure than ever for organizations to operate at a faster pace.

Talent management must use talent intelligence to collect competitor data, including who they have on board, what positions they are hiring for, and what benefits they offer. It can also identify the highest and lowest-performing employees and get to the root of any gaps in skills and productivity.

Software Industry Can Derive Business Advantage with AI-Driven Internal Mobility and Skills Assessment

As per research, replacing a good employee can cost up to 150% of the person’s cost to the company. Not only does AI-driven talent intelligence save money on talent acquisition, but talent management teams can find hidden internal expertise.

Case in point, IBM AI can predict with 95% accuracy which employee is about to quit their jobs. AI has saved IBM nearly USD 300 Mn in retention costs.

Today, internal mobility is more about skills. Companies need systems to continuously assess employees’ skills, match these skills with corresponding positions, and systems that can help individuals develop themselves with reskilling and upskilling.

As per research, 96% of employees want regular feedback, and 72% of respondents believe that their performance would improve with corrective feedback. 69% of companies still rely on annual or bi-annual performance reviews that fail to capture the complete picture. AI-powered assessment tools can tell managers what skillsets are currently available, including specific proficiency.

It also helps managers to give timely feedback and find the best fit. Software enterprises can use machine learning algorithms to grade and rank applicants’ job-ready skills, identify the skillset a person needs to excel in their role, and then connect learners with related training programs.

Skills-Related Challenges in the Software Industry

While software companies are desirous of taking advantage of AI, adoption still has constraints. The problem is with people due to which unforeseen talent gap emerges.

  • Skills shortage is a defining factor of enterprise competitiveness. Technology can become a great equalizer, exposing established companies in developed economies to disrupt domestic competitors and coming from developing markets where players can leapfrog development stages and avoid the burden of legacy systems and processes.
  • Since the half-life of skills has shrunk dramatically, the number of people impacted is vast, from finance and R&D to sales & marketing to supply chain. In hindsight, this accounts for tens of millions of people or more.

While talent management fights these issues, workers indicate that they would become more comfortable with AI if they understood it more. 80% of employees in the software industry are willing to learn new skills to take advantage of AI in their job.

Software enterprises providing reskilling opportunities have increased to 53%, up from 38% in 2017. Despite that, only 21% of respondents say they participated in training from those who say their company provides reskilling.

Talent management must work with the learning and development team to create a process that curates, crystallizes, disseminates, and enhances knowledge, thereby generating a collective intelligence architecture of an intuitive enterprise.

Matching Skills with Talent Intelligence

67% of talent management professionals say they lack skilled and high-quality candidates to meet their business needs. Each software job role requires specialized skills, and talent intelligence can identify potential. So, instead of letting employees go to seek new challenges, they can provide challenges internally.

AI-based talent intelligence allows employees to explore internal career opportunities based on skills matching and help talent management rapidly transition talent. For instance, while looking for an Information Security Analyst, talent management can see how many candidates match the job requirements based on their skills, how strong the skills match is, and what skills gaps employees have that prevent them from transitioning to that role.

Employees can see a role that matches their skills and why they are a match when they upload the resume, giving them confidence. They can apply if the open positions match skills requirements and cross-functional projects.

Reskilling the Software Industry Talent at Scale

While 9 out of 10 talent management executives in the software industry expect to see skills gaps within the next five years, under 50% know how to deal with the problem. However, talent intelligence shows how their workforce’s skills stack up to the business strategy and objectives.

They must change the approach to reskilling groups of people to increase their collective intelligence against educating every individual through learning and development. The management must avoid portraying learning and development as ‘compliance’ or ‘mandatory,’ instead, educate them on importance of mastering new skills.

  • Use design thinking for the learning process – Get key personas to create a personal experience to disseminate knowledge at scale and intensity with a master/apprentice model.
  • Enable learning with work – Finding time is challenging. Talent management must create nuggets that can be learned ‘in the flow of work.’
  • Utilize existing knowledge – Identify key individuals possessing skills to leverage them.
  • Eliminate knowledge barriers – Unobstruct knowledge flow between learning and development, knowledge management, and SME groups.
  • Contextualize new knowledge – Identify links between existing and new knowledge as retaining concepts is easier.

Adopt an agile development approach – Create a reskilling process that quickly disseminates, enables fast feedback, and delivers early value to internal customers.

Draup conducted a comprehensive industry analysis for critical job roles. Our findings provide insights into acquisition and talent management, top in-demand skills, talent cost, future job roles, location intelligence, and gender diversity.

The below image shows the distribution of talent in the software industry and the critical in-demand roles that talent management must know. The report has detailed reskilling strategies into a few below-mentioned in-demand roles impacted by technological disruptions and digitalization.

Reskilling

Enterprise-wide reskilling is easy when talent management and executive teams are in sync. It is essential to have clarity into mapping employees to their ideal roles, identify disrupted functions, and shift employees from disrupted roles.

Draup’s talent intelligence platform assists talent management with reskilling initiatives. Its Reskill Navigator enables talent management to address the skills gap and delivers insights on hard and soft skills, talent pool, and devising reskilling initiatives.

Lead the future with talent intelligence. Get in touch with us today.