There’s little doubt that one of the greatest ongoing struggles faced by modern organizations is finding and retaining the best possible workforce. It’s a highly competitive market, one where the best and brightest candidates are quickly snapped up when they enter the job market — or even if they are not in the job market.

That said, the next generation of the workforce seems to be more aware of the value and the opportunities available to them than ever before, and this generation has evolved into a highly mobile group less likely to settle in one organization. According to Deloitte, two-thirds of the millennial workforce expect to have moved on from their current role by 2020.

Figures such as this can be both a blessing and a curse for organizations looking to recruit the best talent. On one hand, there’s the indication that we shouldn’t face a shortage of people looking for work. On the other, hiring someone can be tough if you suspect they’ll be willing to jump ship after a relatively brief tenure.

Could integrated talent management be the solution?

In such a challenging environment, having the right tools for attracting, retaining and managing talent is incredibly valuable. An integrated talent management solution could be just the platform your organization needs to keep tabs on the activity of both potential candidates and current employees.

There are a number of aspects of integrated talent management that could have a significant part to play in your HR strategy, so let’s take a look at some of the key features:

Analytics

While it may seem little more than a buzzword of the digital age, analytics is in fact a highly important tool that savvy HR departments are leveraging into their talent management strategy. Research from Cornell university has identified three important areas in which analytics can offer insight into how talent circulates through an organization:

• Collect and analyze employee data – Through gathering information about the movements of its workforce, an organization can set the foundation for employee forecasting.
• Forecast the supply and demand – Using the data accrued at the previous step, an organization can gain a better understanding of the workforce as a whole and predict areas where shortfalls in talent will need to be addressed in the future. 
• Predictive analytics – Once a significant catalog of past data has been gathered, patterns of performance can emerge allowing leaders to predict future successes.

Interoperability and usability

Filling your integrated talent management system with all that valuable data is just one part of the story, however. To be truly effective, you need a solution that makes interacting with that information as easy as possible. Modern digital innovation is seeing large numbers of organizations across the globe turning their attention to the cloud when it comes to their software needs. 

In the Asia-Pacific region, for example, research from IDC has found that 33 percent of organizations are expected to adopt a “cloud first” strategy in 2016, dedicating more than a quarter of IT budgets to cloud services. With a study from Exact showing organizations willing to embrace cloud services are as much as doubling their profits, that uptake is only likely to gather steam in the coming years. Similarly, the US federal government’s Cloud First policy mandates that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing.

With talent management solutions accessed through the cloud from anywhere, analyzing and gathering valuable insight from your workforce data has been simplified. From acquisition and onboarding to performance, succession and development, today’s most innovative solutions have been developed and refined to not only integrate with the various talent management pillars, but also with any technology platforms your organization may be using.