For many organisations, attracting, developing and retaining top talent feels like an ongoing challenge. But what if the real problem isn’t the talent itself – but the unseen gaps in your strategy?
Workforce agility revolves around three critical gaps: skills gap, expectation gap, and visibility gap, says Lorinda Ellis, chief sales and marketing officer at LRMG. These gaps, if left unaddressed, create significant obstacles to talent development, mobility in the organisation and retention.
“You’ve got to always consider what the skills gap is. What is the expectation of the talent in your organisation? You can close the skill gaps, but if the expectation gap with the talent experience in your business is not met, people are still going to exit, and you’ll constantly have to bring in new employees, retrain or upskill. And then there is this big issue around the visibility gap.”
One of the biggest mistakes organisations make, she says, is relying on outdated methods for gap analysis.
“We have done quite a lot of work in the last 15 years in our country around gap analysis, and it’s still an expensive exercise. However, there are not enough companies using technology for that, and there is technology available for that, which can give you a dynamic reading on gaps instead of these big projects where you conduct a gap analysis, and then 10 months later, we have a report whereby by that time, the market has already moved, and there are new gaps required.”
Beyond just identifying skill gaps, she notes businesses must tackle expectation and visibility gaps as well. According to her, without a clear view of existing talent, redundant roles and emerging skill needs, organisations struggle to make timely decisions.
“So not being able to see where the skills are – to create that visibility – where are redundant skills? How do we pull latent and tacit skills up into the organisation where they are needed? How do we sunset redundant skills? And if you had to go and do that without a big talent technology and talent management platform, it would take you a year or two, and we don't have a year or two anymore in any market.”
To bridge these gaps, Lorinda stresses the importance of working with trusted global partners in talent technology.
“We have two of the world’s best partners in the world of talent. One is Cornerstone OnDemand, who, if you look at the analyst reports, are by far the most important player in talent technologies. That’s a technology that can read your skills gap, your expectation gap, and can create dynamic visibility gap reports and dashboards.”
“We also partner with SkillSoft, which has been our content provider for talent development digitally for the last 25 years. If South Africa is going to remain so locked into old ways of talent development, we’re also going to fall further and further behind.”
While technology can play a crucial role, Lorinda mentions that organisations cannot overlook the human aspect of talent management. This includes shaping an employee value proposition (EVP) that enhances the overall talent experience.
“We provide all of that,” she says. “Along with advisory services that examine your EVP, talent experience, and how people experience your organisation. It’s not just about offering a yoga programme for wellness, but really understanding what wellness means in terms of work-life balance. We also help organisations define their talent brand.”
Listed organisations are starting to also realise that they have to create a talent brand that attracts some of the best talent in our country, or in the world, in some cases, because we’ve moved into times where you can employ some of the best people in the world working out of other countries. Companies can now hire top talent from anywhere.”
As organisations start to integrate new technologies into their talent strategies, she explains the need for a collaboration between HR and IT. However, bridging the gap between these two functions can be challenging.
“We’ve learned that CHROs typically have someone in the IT department managing their tech stack and integration points. But when choosing a vendor, it’s crucial to work with one that understands both HR and IT. As HR, we are skilled at speaking to HRDs, but we also need to communicate effectively with IT teams, as they speak different languages. Often, they aim for the same outcome, but the conversations are completely different.”
“The CHRO influence is growing nonetheless. For years, HR has been criticised for not keeping up with the business, but I think that’s changed very fast. Workforce agility is something that keeps CEOs awake at night. They’re smart enough to realise tech alone can’t solve these problems – but a combination of talent and technology that will solve them.”
LRMG’s approach to talent agility goes far beyond technology, as it also focuses on user experience, adoption and strategic guidance.
“We only work with the best in the world. So, we have chosen our partners because they’ve got user experience sitting at the centre of their development methodologies. We also have our own homegrown services around user experience so that we can look at talent experience holistically. This allows us to come in and do specific customised user experience journeys and install user adoption systems to help an organisation integrate new tech quickly.”
“This holistic and specialised approach to solving our client’s problems has led to global recognition, with LRMG now being asked to implement its solutions for international clients in America and Europe. We provide services and act as a thinking partner around the whole EVP instead of just tech stack implementation – so we look at it much more holistically. What makes us unique is our ability to bridge the gap between the tech talk and the people talk, or talent talk.”
“We want to help lift organisations and people up where they belong – that's why we get up in the morning. That’s why we work so hard. It comes through doing and really listening into the market to understand their struggles and desire for progress, and connect the dots to business strategy and tech stack strategy. Then we help the organisation look at its own maturity and guide it on its journey. At the end of the day, we want to ignite performance, economies, terms of economic growth, which is good for the people and for business.”
