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Competitor Talent Mapping

Competitor Talent Mapping is arguably the most potent weapon in the recruiter’s arsenal. It delivers the best of your competitors’ high-performing talent.

It entails mapping the requisite skill sets from your competitors’ talent pool, delivered in the form of organizational charts containing names, titles, and reporting lines. Once the pool has been identified, the key targets are systematically approached in a highly professional and confidential manner to assess both their capabilities and their potential fit.

The starting point is when a company recognizes that certain positions are becoming more difficult to fill, or that there are significant gaps in the succession plan which cannot be developed internally in the short to medium term. Either of these two scenarios will prompt the company and the consultant to identify individual skill sets for each position to be included in the mapping exercise.

We will then identify the best competitive target organizations. From there, we will identify the location of specific skill sets, and establish by geography and department where the best competitive talent is currently working. We ultimately will identify specific target people by name and job title, and where they fit in the organizational structure.

Once all of this data has been collected, we will deliver an organigram of the competitors’ organizational structure, including the name and title of all of the appropriate individual targets.

This is the first of three deliverables to the client.

To move on requires making an individual approach to each of the potential candidates to establish their skills, their career aspirations, their choice of work locations and their potential as future hires as well as their perception of our client as a potential employer at some point in the future.

This will establish which of the competitor staff represent high potential or best-in-class employees. It is quite different to a traditional recruiting call, the sole objective of which is to fill a current job requirement.

The second deliverable, then, consists of individual profiles which are written up and shared with the client for discussion of each as a potential hire, either immediately or in the future.

The next step is to address those candidates who truly represent high-performing individuals.  These would be defined as industry leaders or individuals who have been designated as “high potential” by their present employers, and are attractable.  These candidates are then regularly contacted and our relationship with them continuously updated using the very latest CRM technologies.

In this way, when they are ready to make a career move in the future, a path to the door of our client has been firmly established.

The third and final deliverable is thus a pipeline of high quality, high potential, pre-qualified and exceptional candidates. This will not only raise the quality of hires, but will also reduce the time-to-hire.

Competitor Talent Mapping can be used as part of a competitive intelligence gathering initiative. It also allows organizations to benchmark their talent pool in terms of experience, qualifications and skills against those of their competitors.

We can also conduct an employment branding exercise to assess a candidate’s perception of their attractiveness as a potential employer.  As well, we can benchmark competitive compensation, title vs role, promotability and other strategic metrics.

Organizations with highly specialized or critically important roles in their structure should engage in Competitor Talent Mapping. In order to achieve or retain your business advantage you must have the most talented people on your team.  Competitor Talent Mapping is not a new product, but there has been a surge in demand for this service in recent years as talent-related issues are becoming more acute.  It is a relatively low-cost means of managing the risks associated with key positions on which the company’s business depends.

Please call Laurie O’Donnell at 450-458-3532 or contact her via e-mail at lodonnell@alandavis.com.