Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
Competitor talent mapping identifies the best recruiting targets at your competitors. This competitive intelligence approach’s strength is identifying top talent at your competitors before you need to recruit them. So that there is time to assess thoroughly, and in some cases, build a relationship with them.
This extra pre-hire time will improve both your quality of hire and the business impacts from your recruiting. But despite its many benefits, it’s inexplicably rare to find it used in corporate recruiting today.
What Is Competitor Talent Mapping? (CTM)
Competitor Talent Mapping (CTM) is a low-volume, high-quality strategic sourcing pipeline and recruiting tool. It effectively identifies, assesses, and continuously learns about the best competitor employees who are currently working in your mission-critical jobs. Competitor talent mapping is routine in the NFL and MLB because it is an effective sourcing tool. It also provides insight into your competitors’ current and future talent capabilities. Knowing those capabilities will also aid you in estimating your competitor’s future business and product direction.
Under CTM, multiple approaches are used to identify the targets that you will be tracking. These name-capturing approaches range from searching LinkedIn profiles for your target job titles to proactively gathering names from your well-connected team members, hiring managers, and recruiters. Under most CTM approaches, one of the relevant team’s top employees is assigned to track and attempt to build a professional (non-recruiting) relationship with them. And only when your company has a relevant job opening does anyone attempt to recruit those being tracked.
The talent mapping process also continuously assesses each target’s growth (in order to determine which prospects are continually growing). So the CTM process might use LinkedIn profiles to identify which tracked employees were promoted (as well as the other top employees who were not promoted and are now disappointed). This continuous assessment of your targets will also allow you to determine which ones are also leaders, mentors, innovators, and talent developers.
The Many Benefits Of Competitor Talent Mapping (CTM)
While this CTM approach doesn’t require a recruiting budget, it provides numerous benefits to both the recruiting function and the business, including:
- You will hire better performers and have fewer hiring failures – because you will have already slowly assessed these recruiting targets and determined them to be exceptional. The CTM process will increase your chances of hiring top performers and innovators. At the same time, the extended assessment will dramatically reduce the risk of a hiring failure.
- CTM hiring will hurt your competitors – although many in HR have no interest in hurting your company’s competitors. Most of your executives will love the idea. So even though your current hiring process isn’t likely to have any negative impact on your competitors. However, because under the CTM approach, you directly poach key current employees away from your talent competitors. You will be directly hurting your competitors by lowering their talent capabilities, while you will also be growing your own capabilities. And by directly hiring away their key talent, you will keep your competitor’s managers busy replacing their lost talent and fighting to retain the rest of their team. Note: You can learn more about hiring to hurt here.
- CTM will improve your chances of actually hiring your competitors’ best – because the most effective CTM processes track top candidates for months. The process gives your recruiters and managers time to learn more about your recruiting target and to build a relationship. And with that long-term trust relationship, combined with your in-depth knowledge of their expectations. Taken together, they will dramatically increase your chances of actually closing your target after they become your finalist.
- Being viewed as a talent magnet will attract other quality applicants – as a result of your CTM process success. The best talent in your industry realizes that your company has become a “talent magnet. Primarily because it has been able to attract so many of your competitors’ top talent, and because the number of applications received from other industry employees will grow measurably.
- CTM will increase your hiring speed – because a significant portion of your recruiting targets will have already been identified, pre-assessed, and presold. Your time-to-fill for your tracked candidates will become measurably shorter.
- Others will follow them – once a top candidate from your competitor joins your company and learns about its many strong points as an employer. Each of your influential new hires will likely make employee referrals for at least 3 of their former colleagues.
- Hiring your competitors’ employees will help your team learn – when you hire a key employee from your competitors. Not only will you get their individual capabilities. But you will also gain their knowledge of their former company’s best practices, problems, and plans.
- Your executives will notice your competitive advantage in recruiting – because in many cases you will be the only company in your industry that will be utilizing CTM. Your executives will notice your innovativeness has been providing your company with a competitive advantage and some of the best recruiting results in your industry. And together they will raise your standing among your own executives.
- The CTM process may also increase your retention rate – as your employees see that the best from other companies are being attracted to your company. Not only will your employees enjoy working with and learning from this new talent, but they will also benefit from it. Many will also stop thinking that the grass is greener on the other side. And that will increase your retention rate.
- The amount of mapping required will be limited – because CTM only maps competitor top employees that are currently working in your critical job families. You may end up tracking only a few dozen competitor employees. As a result, identifying and tracking them will only require a limited amount of time.
- You’ll learn the talent strengths of your competitors – because talent mapping your competitors identifies their most talented employees. Your overall talent map will help you more accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of each of your competitors. And that information will allow you to adjust your recruiting strategy so that your talent capabilities remain ahead of your competitors in all critical areas.
Illustrating How CTM Can Ensure That You Hire The Perfect Candidate
Imagine that the head of your AI team suddenly announces that she is quitting. Obviously, you will need to find a quality replacement that can be hired fast and get up to speed even faster.
Because you can’t afford an average performer in this critical role, you must use sources dominated by top performers. It also means that you must rule out hiring unemployed AI experts, because their skills would be too rusty. It would further mean that you must rule out hiring employed AI experts from outside of your industry. It would take them too long to learn the nuances of your industry. Finally, because you couldn’t wait for them to develop their leadership skills. You would have to rule out hiring AI experts who were not already successful leaders.
And, taken together, these elevated requirements for filling this job would mean your sourcing pool would need to be limited to current AI team leaders within your industry. Of course, that means that the CTM process would be the ideal recruiting solution for hiring those top-performing AI team leaders who would get up to speed with little delay.
Final Thoughts
If you haven’t heard about the competitor talent mapping (CTM) process before, you should realize that it isn’t a new recruiting tool. Its origins can be traced back to the 20th century, when recruiters routinely purchased paper corporate telephone books from anyone who had one. More recently, leading companies like EA, Cisco, and Meta have used variations of it to track industry recruiting targets. And fortunately, today, you no longer need to rely on a spreadsheet to map your recruiting targets. There are now numerous talent-mapping software packages available.
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Notes for the reader
This is the latest article from Dr. Sullivan, who was called “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company.
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