One thing that is certain in this economic climate is that talent matters. This is what Michael Gregoire, chairman and chief executive of Taleo solutions Company asserts in Personnel Today. Currently, there are various challenges in the talent field. A lack of leadership skills and lean workforces are just two of the many obstacles that talent managers have to overcome. There is definitely one thing that is clear for everyone; social media and mobile technology feature prominently on the agenda of future talent strategies. These could be the new tools by which companies may overcome such obstacles.

Recruitment

Tagging the location of one’s company is now a possible option across many social media platforms. This location tagging allows the jobseeker to find jobs closer to home and the prospective employer to bring a potential employee right to their doorstep. Taleo has created ‘Radar,’ a new mobile application that does just that. It simply allows recruiters to locate nearby jobseekers on a map, along with their skills, experience, photo and contact details (this obviously depends on how much information the individual wishes to disclose).

Jason Blessing, executive vice-president of products and technology, explains that ‘Radar’ shows a shift in the way people consume technology. “In the 1980s, technology was used in the business world and then expanded to the consumer world until we became more confident with technology in our personal lives. Now, the opposite is happening. Consumer innovation is migrating to the business world."

The concept is simple. The jobseekers need only turn on their location when they are out, maybe grabbing a coffee, and nearby employers can spot and talk to them through this application about any potential job vacancies. This means that the searching power will somewhat shift from the candidate to the recruiter. In other words: "In the future, jobs will find you."

Those looking for a new job will be drawn by this technology, as jobseekers will want to make themselves as visible as possible, explains Gregoire. He further explains that anyone looking for a job wants to be found. Of course, there are some privacy issues but according to Gregoire, the key is to do something a little bit different and be very transparent about turning it on and off.

Social networks in the workplace

An internal social network in businesses is not a new idea. These tools allow colleagues, who perhaps have never met, to exchange ideas and knowledge with each other. Many organisations use these networks to hold forums through which workers can interact and share their expertise on a topic and their know-how on certain projects.

This recruiting platform is already integrated with ‘LinkedIn’, thus allowing members to copy their information directly from this professional networking site. Gregoire believes that this will be a key difference in their internal social networking platform. This would mean that employees wouldn’t have to spend ages filling out yet another profile for yet another site. He further comments that: “There is no reason why we have to be operating like that today because it is very easy to aggregate and 'mash up' data. That happens all the time in the consumer’s world”. In today’s world, there are big consumer sites that have data from all kinds of different stores plugging in. Therefore, Gregoire stresses the fact that there is no reason why that shouldn't be the case in enterprise software, especially in something as important as a person’s profile. The design principle of this new application is to provide something useful for the employees whom they will use, continued Gregoire.

This tool would also be useful for an employee to integrate goals and networks. Workers could see a tree of colleagues connected with their individual goals, whilst also tracking how they themselves are progressing in their project. They could see how other workers are doing with their goals, which directly affects their project. So, for example, if one colleague is struggling to complete a task on which another person is reliant, the latter can see and tackle this before it becomes a problem. With the help of this software, one can chat and find other people in the company who may have the required skills to help.

Blessing further explains the thinking behind this idea: "Success factors are all about very rigid top-down goals, but I've never worked on a goal that wasn't dependent on somebody else doing something. If you can't see those dependencies, and if you can't react in time, it's too late." Furthermore, he points out that this network map representation allows employees to identify problems whilst helping them when they need feedback.

Not having this visibility may lead to losses. The employee who's the weak link ends up with a performance issue, whilst the rest of the team can fail. Using some of these technological approaches could show how interrelated and dependant on each other we are to achieve success, concluded Blessing.

The future

So what else does technology have in store for the future of talent? While Taleo Company is using location mapping to aid recruitment and social networking to encourage collaboration among colleagues, it seems that there could be few other, rather more extreme, ideas. For the time being, however, HR and location tracking seem to be the ideas that are being tested. Such a combination is anticipated to empower both employees and managers in order to effectively manage careers.

Dulcie Brincat Peplow is a researcher at the Foundation for Human Resources Development