I was thrilled to finally unveil Stratigens to a group of HRDs at our launch event in London last week. Stratigens is our new platform that helps businesses become a ‘people-first organisation’. It gives HRDs external people data and insights to support strategic business decisions – something I’ve felt has been missing for a long time.

What does it look like? “It’s like Zoopla for businesses” said one of our guests which hits the nail on the head! Stratigens gives users access to information such as skills supply and demand, salaries, area trends & statistics and HR & business environment data globally. It helps commercially minded leaders put people at the heart of every strategic decision.

Whatever the scenario; skills, trends, behaviours and activity outside your organisation are influencing your chances of success. Whether you’re entering a new market, consolidating locations, launching a new product or expanding your business horizons, Stratigens’ analytics platform provides the intelligence you need to make an informed decision.

The talent mismatch

In this age of transformation, every organisation has its own market disruptors and all of them have demographic impact. All the organisations we hosted at our launch event are going through a cultural shift in terms of where they are looking for talent, how they attract and how they adapt. These examples illustrate how solving the talent mismatch is crucial to business growth:

• I heard Bristol Myers Squibb speaking at a recent event. “We used to make drugs, now we grow them”. This has a huge impact on the people the business needs -so how do they find them, attract them and ensure they stay?
• Geopolitical changes in recent years have led The International Committee of the Red Cross to shift so they can not only provide medical aid on the ground, but also have surgeons who can show others how to perform operations via Skype. The way we work is changing, and no industry sector is exempt.
• Philips is a business that most of us recognise as a manufacturer of household electrical goods. However, as a leading manufacturer of CAT scanners and ECG equipment, Philips has fast transitioned into the health tech space - and needed to transform its talent strategy too.

How do these organisations source the external people-data they need to inform their decision making? I hope that in future, the answer will be Stratigens.

Becoming a data-driven HR function

We know from multiple sources of research that HR needs to be more data-driven. Access to this data needs to be more systematic, it needs to be set within a wider context than organisation-wide and needs to relate back directly to business outcomes.

As we discussed at the launch, more and more HR teams are taking a data-driven approach to tackle talent challenges. In fact, people data is the number one global HR trend. About a third of participants at our event already have a data analytics team. This compares with 69% of large organisations globally.

From my experience with Stratigens so far this is the advice I’d offer to HR leaders:

1. We need to think more like strategy teams. Whenever I demo Stratigens to strategy directors they’re already much more data savvy and used to informing decision making based on data. They have a hunger for what lies behind the data and want to drill down and explore it.
2. You need to be able to put a financial value on growth as well as downsizing. Winding down operations is an essential calculation and data will help you cost it accurately.
3. The data you use needs to be not only credible, unbiased and from multiple sources, but available in real-time. Without this, HR leaders are questioned over data credibility. Stratigens compiles millions of data points from more than 1380 sources weekly and monthly. Speed is really important to your stakeholders.
4. Some (good) data is better than no data. Stratigens provides a confidence index so HR leaders can still make use of data in markets or industry sub-sectors where data is scarce. Data doesn’t always need to be ‘big’ to be credible.
5. Don’t hide in HR. The data you need will come from multiple sources – across functions and beyond your own organisation. The data you can access through Stratigens can impact all functions and strategic decisions – a proactive approach to people problems prevents a reactive solution.

At Talent Intuition we believe that data must be at the heart of decision making. To see a demo of our new platform, Stratigens please get in touch here.