Strategy execution is vital for business success. It is what bridges the gap between planning for success and achieving it. However, without the right talent, business strategy execution can be challenging. It is essential for organizations to have motivated employees with the right skills to help them meet goals and objectives. For this to happen, hiring professionals need to successfully align business and talent strategies.
This is often easier said than done. Organizations have to learn to balance short- and long-term needs, stay open to change, and communicate consistently about strategy. Additionally, leadership teams must see alignment as a constant conversation instead of a one-time event.
Business and talent strategy alignment has many benefits for organizations, but it must be done right. With a deep understanding of how these strategies work together and the key steps, tools, and frameworks to get leadership and hiring teams moving in tandem, organizations can achieve sustainable growth and success.
Leadership teams understand the importance of setting goals and objectives. However, direction isn’t the only important element in business success. How the business gets to the goal also matters. This is what business strategy — the company’s concrete plan to achieve goals and objectives — is all about. All business strategies need the following components:
Talent strategy refers to how the company sources, hires, develops, and retains top talent. Its key elements include:
Business and talent strategies involve different vital elements, but they are interdependent. Business goals and objectives should always inform talent acquisition, as this ensures hiring professionals secure, develop, and retain the talent necessary to execute the business strategy.
Well-coordinated business and talent strategies positively impact the business in multiple ways. When a business possesses the talent to move forward, it can execute strategies quickly and without compromise. This quick movement leads to greater adaptability to sudden market shifts and enhances the organization’s ability to meet initial goals and objectives.
Additionally, alignment between business and talent strategies can improve employee engagement and productivity. It often results in hiring candidates who are passionate about their role and understand how it connects to broader business outcomes. Research shows that just a 10% increase in employees’ connection with the organizational mission and purpose results in an 8.1% decrease in turnover and a 4.4% profitability increase.
Finally, aligning business and talent strategies is about long-term value creation and sustainable growth. It helps hiring professionals look ahead to the future and make decisions based on larger motivations than just having someone to fill a role. It leads to a better focus on future outcomes and what is needed to sustain success over the long haul.
To align talent and business strategies, hiring professionals should first clearly define and communicate the business strategy. They should also obtain a strategic roadmap from the leadership team and understand what type of talent is needed to execute it.
The second step in coordinating strategies is assessing employees’ skills and identifying gaps. Then hiring professionals can develop a talent strategy that focuses on upskilling and reskilling current talent and acquiring new talent to support business objectives.
Before executing the talent strategy, talent acquisition professionals should create talent profiles that match with business needs. This means working to understand what each role entails, how it fits into the bigger picture, what success in the role looks like, and what competencies are needed to achieve it. Recruiters can then implement talent development and acquisition programs with these profiles in mind.
Leadership and talent acquisition teams should ensure that concrete data drives all strategic decisions. Talent analytics platforms like Recruitics’ Vision ProTM can provide context for this decision-making with regional labor and benchmark data as well as more granular candidate analysis.
Vision Pro offers customized data visualizations that allow hiring professionals to quickly measure ROI as they align recruitment marketing efforts with organizational objectives. With this end-to-end analytics solution, hiring professionals benefit from cross-contextual analysis for a more comprehensive picture of all talent acquisition activities and an AI-powered chatbot to deliver insightful responses to natural language queries.
Along with data and intelligence platforms, it’s a good idea to consider an organizational alignment assessment. This can involve assessing teams to figure out how well current skill sets and activities align with the goals and objectives the company is working toward. It also assesses hiring practices, policies, and strategies to understand whether they are producing the necessary outcomes to further business growth.
Strategy alignment has some unique challenges, such as addressing resistance to change on every level. Organizational leaders may be wary of new strategies because they aren’t sure they will work or may have concerns about the costs associated with the shift. In these cases, presenting robust data favoring the change can sway attitudes and create buy-in.
When teams seem to oppose the change, it’s important to address their concerns head-on, showing how it will positively impact business outcomes and tying upskilling opportunities to each employee’s professional goals. It is also crucial to ensure consistent communication across the organization—this results in more coherent change and long-term results.
Balancing short-term needs to fill a role with long-term strategic goals creates organizational alignment. This will require data-driven workforce planning; hiring professionals should create a talent pipeline ready to fulfill immediate needs and provide development opportunities that ensure employees’ future success.
As always, talent acquisition professionals should remember that strategy alignment requires continuous monitoring and adjustment. External market conditions will change, triggering shifts in goals and strategies. Staying ahead of the curve through data insights and trend spotting will allow hiring professionals to pivot when needed.
It’s not just the hiring team that needs to be involved in aligning talent and business strategy. Leadership has to create a culture that invites and supports strategic alignment as well. This often involves ensuring talent acquisition professionals have a seat at the table where decisions are being made and intentionally considering talent needs and strategy when setting business goals and objectives.
Additionally, leadership teams should consider building their pipeline through succession planning. Long-term success requires developing leaders who have a keen understanding of future business goals and can execute on the aligned strategy. Business leadership should also prioritize fostering collaboration between recruitment teams and other business units, as this ensures strategic cohesion and long-term success.
It's necessary for recruitment professionals to set, measure, and monitor key performance indicators to know if coordinated strategies are working. These may include:
Though these metrics can provide more quantitative data, it’s also important to build regular qualitative assessments and feedback loops. This can be done through surveys and interviews, which allow hiring professionals to assess trends in attitudes over time.
However, talent acquisition professionals can also collect and assess feedback through interviews and town halls. Measuring success in these ways creates a long-term positive impact on business value, as it ensures current strategies are working and helps pinpoint areas for growth.
Both business and talent strategies are fundamental to achieving organizational goals and objectives. However, for either to be effective, they must be in agreement. Otherwise, the organization won’t have the talent and necessary skill sets to execute the business strategy, and new employees won’t bring the ROI the business needs to thrive.
Hiring professionals will become even more important to make strategic decisions based on concrete data, including assessment scores, satisfaction surveys, and talent acquisition KPIs. Having data in hand allows recruitment professionals to track and assess trends and respond quickly to changes in the marketplace.
–-
Recruitics can help organizations looking for an easier way to collect and assess hiring data. Contact us today to see how our data analytics solutions can help secure success in strategy alignment.
