Talent Planning For the Post-Coronavirus Rebound

Most organizations addressed two business imperatives at the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak: They developed a work from home strategy to ensure the safety of their employees, and they created a business continuity plan, formally or informally, to keep operations going as best as possible.

Now is the time to be preparing for what happens next: The post-coronavirus rebound and the inevitable hiring that will need to happen as a result.

Here are four areas of talent planning you should be addressing now to prepare for later:

1. Assess your organization’s workforce, both contingent and full-time resources, as well as your talent pipeline. Where can you drive efficiencies in your recruiting, interviewing and onboarding processes? How can you nurture your talent community today to create brand enthusiasts who will be interested in a job with you when you are ready to hire? 
2. Consider your own talent first. Training and upskilling your current workforce are two incredibly powerful ways to prepare for the rebound curve. Your own people are also the best source of available talent you have. How can you develop their hard and soft skills to minimize any talent gaps that exist in your organization? Providing career mapping and opportunities for advancement pays off in employee engagement and retention while also better positioning and preparing the organization for what’s to come. It’s a win-win. 
3. Your succession plan likely includes a list of incumbents for existing leadership positions. If you don’t have this mapped out, now is a good time to identify future leaders and those with high growth potential. Recruiting for key roles will become more and more important as business picks back up, but, similar to training and upskilling, knowing who can step into senior-level leadership roles will be important. 
4. Lastly, conduct an audit of your performance and reward systems, for short- and long-term as well as individual and team-based goals. Can you make improvements to your performance-driven incentives? The market will be ripe with opportunity again soon and it will be important to ensure you retain critical employees, especially during the rebound when there will be work to be done and other companies will be hiring.

If you need talent planning assistance for the post-coronavirus rebound, get in touch with us! Our local experts in Atlanta, Charlotte and Dallas are standing by.