As the Vice-President and Managing Director - Global Talent Supply Chain at Kelly Services Inc, John Healy is responsible for integrating data analytics with strategic workforce planning and supply chain principles to drive proactive management of workforce strategies across directly-hired and outsourced labour categories. BusinessLine caught up with Healy during his recent visit to Bangalore. Excerpts:

What is the ‘next practice’ in employee engagement that organisations should adopt to manage talent?

Talent supply chain management is what organisations should adopt to manage talent. HR departments usually engage with those that are currently on their payroll. So, as an HR manager, if 50 per cent of my workforce is on my payroll and the other 50 per cent is on a temporary staffing company’s payroll, am I engaging with the temporary workforce? HR managers must look beyond engaging just their full-time employees. They need to maintain relationships with temporary workers; with retirees so that the retired workforce can come back some day and mentor employees. Engaging with future employees is also very important to maintain a steady pipeline of talent for the company.

Then, there is the boomerang workforce – these are workers who were once on the payroll who left and who came back as the grass was not greener on the other side. If those workers were highly talented and wanted to come back to the organisation they had left, are HR managers in a position to bring them back at some point? Globally, two of the most under-leveraged populations of workforce who are talented people and underemployed are – 1) the disabled who have incredible depths of knowledge but have struggled to find opportunities. 2) Women with knowledge who have returned home to look after kids and the elderly. While there are speciality organisations that are forming communities to engage with these kinds of workforce by giving them work online, organisations must make an effort to reach out to them too.

Should organisations build, buy or borrow talent?

That’s a very complex question without a single answer. It is not just a company’s strategy that matters but also what the workforce in that country dictates. For instance, in Australia if you wanted to hire SAP talent to build a team of full-time SAP talent, your talent acquisition team will have zero success because the workforce of SAP talent in Australia has decided that the way they engage is as independent contractors. Globally, 50 per cent of the workforce in organisations are full-time and the rest are temporary workers unlike in India where organisations prefer to hire full-time employees.

The India market is a build-and-buy market for talent. Here, the requirement is more skewed toward full-time talent; therefore, organisations focus on building full-time talent and are going into Tier 2 and 3 cities to build a talent pool. They are building an environment and creating loyalty in the community of campus freshers where they are perceived as the employer of choice. So, every fresher who has demonstrated a level of intelligence wants to work for these companies, because these companies have created something special. The second company that moves into that market (Tier 2 and 3) will not build talent but, they will buy talent by poaching talent that the first company has already built, by offering higher salaries, perks and so on. Companies are constantly shifting their talent strategies based on market dynamics and their position.

Where is the Indian market lagging behind in its talent acquisition strategy?

The entire online talent community is what India is underestimating right now. In India, you have exceptional talent. There is also a focus on repatriating people back into the country, which means there are more people in India with skills that are in high demand as they have experience in international business having worked in different countries across the globe. Many of them may not, for instance, want to brave the Bangalore traffic every day; they may want to work from home, instead. If HR managers are only worried about the company next door that has been poaching its workforce, that’s not enough. I would challenge that and tell them they have more competition than they realise. The war for talent will only get worse as HR managers now have more battlefronts that they are fighting on, and not just with their local competition. They could lose their employees to other organisations from India and abroad that offer opportunities to work online for them. The online talent community is growing, and the people that HR managers are competing with for talent are not all in India, they are all over the world.

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