External Talent Strategies for a Global Talent Pool

External Talent Strategies for a Global Talent PoolWhy Having an External Talent Strategy is Becoming Increasingly Important

The old way of winning the talent wars was to search for and hire the very best talent and keep them inside your own four walls by offering them competitive compensation, benefits, and perks. Your hope was that your talent is better than your competitors’ talent. But over the last couple of decades, companies have increasingly found that employees who pursue what they do with passion will outperform an employee with a gun to their head every time. Circuit City learned very publicly that people are not commodities and went out of business from treating them as if they were. At the same time, we know that diversity is very important and hard to foster internally. And so it is to get to this diversity of thought in order to accelerate product launch and innovation timelines that companies must open up – it is a global economy with a global talent pool.

The question becomes: what is happening at the micro level with this global talent pool? Well, the world continues to move away from being a place where employees expect to have jobs for life, and fight against any change to this paradigm, to a world where portfolios, personal branding, and project-based work will become more common in an increasing number of industries. The evolving world of work is becoming a world in which individuals will need to be really good at collaborating and playing well with others, while also honing their skills at standing out from the crowd. At the same time, the external perception of your network value will expand from a focus on internal connections to also include the talented minds you might know outside the organization that can be brought in on different projects or challenges.

At the macro level, we are also confronted by an economy right now that is characterized by high unemployment – especially for the young. And for those that have jobs, many are underemployed. Meanwhile, at the other end of the age spectrum, many baby boomers will continue to look to make money and stay involved in the workplace in significant numbers. And for those not retiring who still have jobs, many employees now are doing more work but feeling less engaged. When you combine the macro and micro pictures, you can see that there is an army of talent out there looking to build their resumes or their balance sheets by working on interesting challenges and projects.

As your organization opens up and crafts a formal external talent strategy, there are several ways external talent can help benefit your organization.

Increased Speed:

  • External talent networks can form an expanded rolodex of experts that you can consult with to expand your knowledge on a particular search area or market and give you a running start instead of a standing one.
  • You can use your external talent strategy to find existing solutions from outside your industry. One example of this is a tire company adapting existing technology for cutting cheese to cutting rubber. Another is InnoCentive client OSRI, who used concrete construction principles for the purpose of oil spill cleanup (see sidebar).
  • To accelerate innovation and product development timelines, many companies strategically partner with external talent to advance their projects and help fight through roadblocks or work on other components when the lead team is off the clock. Dissecting work and distributing it to the individuals, groups, or partners that can best complete the work is an essential component of open innovation strategy.

Increased Success:

  • You can form a relationship with a particular expert and work together to solve a problem, to evaluate a range of potential solutions from internal folks, to tap expertise you lack currently
    in your organization, or to add diversity of thought.
  • You can use your external talent strategy to engage a large number of potential solvers on a tough problem. Through open innovation and crowdsourcing, Roche found a solution to a problem it had been struggling with for fifteen years by engaging the InnoCentive global solver community. At the same time, the company validated that the approaches it had already tried were the logical and correct ones.
  • When you engage external talent, you can collect lots of little ideas from outside, and connect them internally, uncovering some really big ideas that properly applied and executed can lead to some great new breakthrough innovations.

Increased Learning:

  • An under-appreciated and under-utilized benefit of working with external talent is to use it to learn new problem solving techniques by analyzing how the external talent solved the problem, to learn new technical skills not held internally by having external talent train internal talent, and by encouraging information sharing from the outside-in from external talent working in different disciplines.

Teamwork and Collaboration:

  • An increasing number of problem solvers are working together to solve challenges posed by organizations and this collaboration and teamwork is yielding higher quality solutions. Research by EMC into their own internal innovation challenges has shown that teams were more likely to successfully create winning challenge entries. InnoCentive, for instance, has responded to this behavior by creating more collaborative features for its global solver community to use in responding to challenges.

Consider scale for a moment. A person delivering a ton of value does not need a ton of headcount anymore if they are employing an effective external talent strategy. In an era where organizations are focused on increasing productivity and output without changing the number of headcount (focusing on revenue or profit-per-head), smart employees and business units will increasingly focus on being a force multiplier – getting more work done with the same number or even less headcount.

Two of the most important job skills in this new world of work will be the ability of the individual and the organization to deconstruct the work into portable units that can be executed by a mix of internal and external talent, and construct a project plan for distributing, aggregating, integrating, and executing the component parts to achieve the overall project goal.

But to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your work with outsiders – as well the output – you need to be strategic in your approach because the speed of adaptation (your ability to adapt and integrate work from outside into the inside) will become more important. And the flexibility you show as an organization and the ability of your employees to execute under immense market and customer pressures will become increasingly important as well. You must be strategic because ultimately you want to design scalable external talent strategies, policies, and processes.

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Braden KelleyBraden Kelley is a Social Business Architect and the author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons. Braden is also a popular innovation speaker and trainer, and advises companies on embedding innovation across the organization and how to attract and engage customers, partners, and employees.

Braden Kelley

Braden Kelley is a Design Thinking, Innovation and Transformation Consultant, a popular innovation speaker and workshop leader, and helps companies use Human-Centered Changeâ„¢ to beat the 70% change failure rate. He is the author of Charting Change from Palgrave Macmillan and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire from John Wiley & Sons. Braden has been advising companies since 1996, while living and working in England, Germany, and the United States. Braden earned his MBA from top-rated London Business School. Follow him on Twitter and Linkedin.

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No Comments

  1. Luke W on April 3, 2012 at 4:30 pm

    Excellent analysis Braden, as a young millennial myself a lot of your comments ring especially true.

    Interesting for me is how this idea of the distributed workforce entwines with the concept of social business building tightly integrated, highly collaborative and social teams at the core of an organisation in order to run more efficiently. Whilst there are many advantages to businesses and individuals collaborating and working across a geographically distributed network, it’s my view that communication tools as they presently stand significantly hinder the relationship and rapport building process which is essential to build a strong, trusting and nimble team. Whilst salary can be enough of a motivator to get people working, I think it will be a long time before we can replace the efficiency and innovation advantages that stem from the camaraderie of being in the same room.

    Thought provoking stuff for an uncertain future. Thanks very much for sharing,

    Luke W
    Community Manager
    OneDesk

  2. Thomas Sutrina on April 6, 2012 at 5:46 pm

    I am a baby boomer so I have worked in life time and short duration environments. Life time job is a myth and the bubble has burst for me decades ago. It was not for the lack of talent and skills. I am talking about skill that make money vs apple polishing. I have a place in the global talent pool. Braden seem to be to be standing too far back to realize that no efficient means of picking an individual out of the pool exist for the vast majority of swimmers. I have not seen or heard of talent networks. I am aware of internet efforts to form talent pools to solve problems. And have joined two and examined the problems presented. No one could make a living from the rewards offered for solving a problem. Basically you are giving away the solution. I have about 30 patents as an employee for companies in different businesses so I have a comparison. I know what it take to start with a problem and find a solution. I also find it interesting that he places value in breaking a problem up into pieces that can be given out to individuals. In the life time environment working on one type of piece was called pigeon holed. I have experienced employers seeking to hire people to fill pigeon holes. Maybe that is why they leave.

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