A Recipe For Workforce Planning With Just One Ingredient
A cohesive talent operation starts with clarity and consistency. So when a multinational food and drink company needed to maintain its talent edge over competitors in a fast-moving industry, they needed a partner as committed to practical insights as the company was dedicated to delivering delicious flavors.
The consumer and packaged goods (CPG) industry is fiercely competitive, and even established giants can face competition from many directions—including workforce challenges.
Simply put, the company was asking how they could attract and retain talent, and what they could do to strategically position themselves ahead of the crowd, aiming to clearly articulate the work and prescribe learning plans to their people. They sought to pursue this along three key lines: talent acquisition, workforce and role planning, and employee development. They needed a skills-based solution, and they turned to Lightcast.
The Problem: Finding a complete strategy to align internals skills and talent with a fast-changing industry
To effectively plan their workforce and roles, the company recognized the necessity of identifying and cataloging the skills required for each job within the organization. This initiative aimed to create a comprehensive and detailed view of the specific competencies needed to perform the work successfully. By developing this skills inventory, the company established a foundational understanding that enabled them to measure both employee skills and identify any existing skill gaps.
Furthermore, this process of mapping skills to jobs provided valuable insights into how different skills were utilized across various functions and groups within the company. Armed with this knowledge, the company was able to make informed decisions about updating their job structure and enhancing or modifying existing roles to align with the evolving needs of the organization. This strategic approach to workforce planning ensured that the company had the right people with the right skills in the right roles to achieve their business objectives.
Employee development was a key piece of this puzzle, because providing training helps ensure the company can use its own existing workforce to develop the skills it needs in the future. To accomplish this, the company wanted to refine learning content to ensure it was relevant for an employee’s role, keep the entire company’s catalog of learning content up to date, deprecate old content, and provide a backdrop for effective development conversations for managers. Lightcast also aligned over 30 competency frameworks—which represented a lot of institutional knowledge and history—to a modernized, live, evolving, skill framework.
If the company were able to identify the most important skills for a given role, that would give managers a more robust way to engage in development planning with the employee, discuss gaps, prioritize the best way to gain those skills, and plan for internal career pathways.
Using skills in hiring is where they are heading and would enable the company to articulate more clearly what they needed in their new employees, opening the door to an expanded talent pool and allowing them to make smarter decisions about who to hire. A skills-based approach would also enable a streamlined and integrated way to keep postings consistent—which is a challenge for a company like this, working in many international markets and with brands in many segments. Skills also provide a common denominator to help the company compare their workforce with competitors and labor market benchmarks.
The Solution: Talent Transform
To address all three of these aspects of their people strategy, the company used Talent Transform from Lightcast, which can integrate into any company’s existing human capital management (HCM) system or send the data to any preferred system. With Talent Transform, the company could dive deep into external skill intelligence, skill profile creation, role comparisons, and competitor analysis, offering a broad perspective on current market trends and benchmarks.
Talent Transform takes every job title in the organization, shows what skills are associated with it, and identifies overall market trends and benchmarks associated with those roles and skills. When you can visualize those trends and see how your industry competitors are handling their talent, you can build for the future and maintain accurate skill profiles.
“This was really a fun and innovative organization to deploy Talent Transform on, certainly for the breadth of unique and technical jobs they had in their catalog, it’s not every day you see jobs for a software engineer next to a flavor and sensory scientist," said Mark Hanson, VP of Talent Strategy at Lightcast. “It’s been great to partner with them and continue helping as they continue to roll out Talent Transform to more jobs and continue to expose our data in more places in the company.”
Looking across the entire organization, leaders found there were many differences in the skills requested even for the same job title, creating miscommunication and inefficiency. For example, similar job openings in different locations would hire for different skills based on the preference of the hiring manager, which limited how cohesive the company could be overall.
Past Lightcast consulting projects have applied similar skills insights over shorter periods, but in those one-off situations, any updates need to be plugged in manually. Talent Transform always has the latest data, so now, the company can stay ahead of the curve; their people analytics team can easily monitor the external market changes for skills and keep skill profiles up to date.
"We continue to collaborate to make sure our data and products fit their needs as well as possible,” Hanson said. “We’ve also been able to facilitate learning sessions with their team and assist on key presentations. It’s been so satisfying to see how Lightcast’s Skill Transformation solutions have continued to grow more useful over time throughout the entire organization.”
