The Power of Talent Intelligence in Building a Strategic HR Team

In its ideal state, your HR team should operate in perfect alignment with each of your broader business goals and objectives. In reality though, lots of things get in the way of this flawless state: the demands of daily work, the often reactive mode of many HR orgs, and the overload of admin tasks. 

So how can you create a truly strategic HR team, one that nails that long-term thinking and business alignment? Talent intelligence is the answer. But while it sounds like a simple solution, there’s a lot that goes into creating both a strategic HR team and one that’s based on a foundation of talent intelligence. Here’s what you need to know. 

How Talent Intelligence Helps Build a Strategic HR Team 

While having a strategic HR team is better than a non-strategic one , that fact is difficult to transfer into action for many teams. 

For example, even though the labor market is shifting fast, only a scant 15% of companies engage in strategic workplace planning, according to Gartner research. Even with the skills gap that exists, and is getting wider, most companies are not addressing these needs proactively and strategically. That’s a big opportunity area that companies are leaving on the table because they lack a truly strategic approach to HR. 

That lacking doesn’t typically come from ignorance or laziness. It’s because bridging that gap—knowing what needs to be done, and what it will take to get it done—is genuinely still difficult for most organizations. Even with all the data that’s now available, that abundance can be overwhelming, and leave HR teams and leaders alike unsure where to start and what to tackle first. 

Talent intelligence helps leaders turn the ideas and plans they have into meaningful action that makes a difference in their organization, thanks to the data-driven insights it puts at leadership’s fingertips. 

What Talent Intelligence Can Help Leaders Accomplish 

From making data-informed hiring decisions to identifying skills gaps and beyond, talent intelligence has many benefits and uses for every organization. After all, a strategy isn’t effective unless it has data behind it that confirms what the organization needs and what addresses those needs effectively. 

Talent intelligence helps your HR leaders unlock those insights and create a stronger strategy that drives real results for your company. Instead of drowning in large amounts of unusable data, you’ll have access to action-oriented, real-time information that is the foundation of a more proactive, results-oriented HR function. 

For example, it can help your organization tackle that strategic workforce planning that 85% of companies aren’t doing by giving you insights into your current workforce’s skills, gaps, strengths, weaknesses, and potential career development paths. A talent intelligence platform can tell you where you need to focus efforts on hiring, upskilling, and reskilling so your organization is future-ready, based on your own data.

Why You Need a Strategic HR Team 

HR teams are busy these days (to say the least). Many are overworked and understaffed, or at least being asked to “do more with less.” In these circumstances, it’s easy to get caught up in the daily tasks like admin duties and employee communications and to let the big picture thinking wait for another day. 

But that’s exactly why having a strategic HR team, where goals for the department are clearly aligned with the goals and long-term objectives for the entire organization, is critical. It gives you a guide for tackling those often overlooked strategic activities that make all the difference to your company and the people in it. 

How Strategic HR Benefits Your Whole Organization 

A strategic HR team asks themselves what business need is driving each project, each action item, and each plan that they’re implementing. They aren’t doing things because that’s the way they’ve always been done. They aren’t focusing on the little things and doing a whole series of one-off projects. And they’re using talent intelligence to pinpoint exactly which areas and actions are driving results that align to those business needs, instead of simply hoping that something works. 

In practice, this can mean using a talent intelligence platform to look at your new hire retention rate, for example. If it’s low, you can dive deeper into the data to investigate potential causes, like a poor onboarding experience or low quality of hire, and develop a strategy to meaningfully improve retention and hire quality at the same time.

Strategic HR management helps you work smarter and more strategically, not only within your HR team but throughout the company as well. You can use talent intelligence to back up your new HR strategy with data points that the rest of the org’s leadership team will find compelling enough to make the changes you’re proposing. 

Want to approach your company’s HR work with a more strategic approach, using the power of talent intelligence? Give Cangrade a try today and see how our platform can help.