It’s all too easy to allow positivity and corporate expansion potential to steer business growth plans, but jumping into opportunities too quickly without the appropriate planning can limit success. We all know the statistics on the number of organisations that fail, and rapid growth without due research and thought is regularly listed as one of the key causes of business failure. It is easy for your organisation to lose focus once sales start booming or when demand is noted in other territories. If you recognise a growing need for your business’ services, then why would you not rush out to meet that demand? However, as we are about to explain, in order to avoid your company failing when expanding, or when investing in new geographies, you have to put the data ahead of the growth, and not allow growth to dictate the shape of your business.
Talent matters
While the world is becoming more process led and automated, for the vast majority of industries and sectors, people still drive everything. Without the right people, particularly at the top of your organisation, you do not have a chance. Ensuring you have the appropriate senior team in place is particularly important when investing in new areas when your leaders can really dictate goals, culture and direction and ultimately make or break the success of the organisation. This should make the availability of the top talent that you need, and your ability to recruit them, both in the long and short term, a priority when moving into new territories.
The only truly effective way of doing this is to embrace talent mapping, in conjunction with the various other obvious factors that dictate business strategy, and allow it to contribute to the shape and direction of your organisation. Put simply, if you are going to invest in operating in a new territory or geography, then you also need to invest in developing research-led, data-driven, robust talent pools of recruitable senior level talent before making the move.
There are plenty of examples of businesses not doing their due diligence and suffering major issues. Take Mazda, for example, which rushed out to meet the growing Spanish market that was crying out for a convenient, reliable family hatchback. Unfortunately, the Japanese firm did not invest in a translator and released their short-lived LaPuta model in Spain. We will let you Google the translation of that name for yourselves. Or, Kodak, who after a period of falling sales following the growth of digital photography, decided to ignore all available market research and instead - largely due to the major investment made in paper and chemicals -focused on traditional film over the growing digital market. And we all knowhow that one worked out. While these two examples do not highlight the lack of research into talent, they do show that even the biggest firms are guilty of not allowing data to, at least partially, dictate their direction of travel.
Data-led talent management
Letting the data do the talking has never been more important than when it comes to people and the availability of top talent. Without due research – in this case, talent mapping – you could quite easily spend significant time, and likely huge financial sums, investing in new geographies, and then not be able to follow through on promises you have made to customers. Even if you are able to recruit the senior talent needed, you may not be able to retain them, and you will not have as clear an idea of where future skills gaps may lie, or working knowledge of the ins and outs of the respective country’s recruitment market. And, as we know at the moment, talent is not as readily available as it once was, and you can make no guarantees that you will be able to secure the people you need, or that your employer brand will resonate with local workforces, without first establishing a long-term talent strategy based on thorough talent mapping.
Look internally
The same principal applies with your existing talent. You may have all the skills and leadership capabilities needed to move into new territories right underneath your nose, but without that clear understanding of the people within your workforce – that can only be truly provided with a thorough, data-led talent mapping process – you may never know and could end up spending more on recruiting externally when you do not need to.
There are of course some ways around not having talent in place before investing in new territories, or not being able to recruit from within, but they do not come without their potential flaws. There has never been more global mobility within the workforce and, Brexit and pandemics notwithstanding, it has therefore never been easier to recruit people from different countries. Tied into the concept of the international workforce is the growth of ‘digital nomads’, who have the ability to work remotely across a range of countries depending on the availability of relevant visas. However, these approaches are naturally more costly; whether you are paying for talent on a contract basis, or enabling people to move countries to work for you, it will set you back considerably more than it would to do the research in advance.
Here at Research Europe, we also recognise that unintelligent mapping process is more complex than just building a list of potential candidates. We use a comprehensive portfolio of online and human sources to build an in-depth profile of available talent, and their suitability and fit for a particular role or employer. We search methodically and energetically for potential market intelligence and analyse candidates’ careers so we can advise you in the most detailed way possible with key information that can feed both your talent management and wider business strategies. We recognise that this work is critical to the success of your business, and nevermore so than when expanding or investing in new places. Don’t allow your organisation to rush ahead without having a thorough understanding of the key foundations of growth; your talent. If you are in doubt about your organisation’s talent mapping approach, then get in contact before it is too late.