Talent Mapping for 2025 in Five Simple Steps

What skills does your team require in 2025? How many new hires are needed to fill the gaps? And how might competitors be beating you to the best talent? Talent mapping will find you the answer to these questions and so much more.

The goal of talent mapping is to light up the smoothest pathway to the people your teams need the most. This gives your organisation the best chance to achieve its long-term goals.

In this quick-fire guide, we’ve condensed the process down to five simple steps. This will help you to focus on the key actions needed to successfully grow headcounts in the year ahead.

1. Agree on the long-term talent requirements

The first and most crucial step is to agree on what talent is needed to take your organisation to the next level. This means meeting with stakeholders across various teams to understand what resource gaps are holding back operations and progress.

This could include both future capabilities and knowledge that will be required, as well as the more immediate vacancies to fill.

For example, you’ll need to know:

• Which functions of the business are under pressure and need more resource?
• Where is investment available to support the expansion of teams?
• What roles make up your peak hiring requirements?
• What are your ‘hard-to-fill’ roles that consistently take most time and expense to fill?
• Is there a plan to expand into new services or create job hubs in new locations?
• Are there organisational goals around diverse hires, especially relating to seniority or target areas such as digital and engineering?
• What are your early careers targets? How many apprentices, interns and graduates are you looking to bring into the organisation across the upcoming year?

Once each of the questions above have been answered, you’ll have a complete list of the essential areas to prioritise in 2025.

2. Explore possibilities for internal initiatives

Hiring can be intensive on costs, time and more and it doesn’t always lead to people who are the right fit for your organisation.

Therefore, it’s worth considering how the proven people already onboarded, engaged and making the difference for you might benefit from opportunities to advance or try new skills.

Equipped with your talent requirement findings, your organisation should consider the people already embedded in teams. Could your talent requirements be partially supported by internal initiatives, which could also increase job satisfaction for current employees?

Initiatives to explore could include:

• Employee referral programmes
• Internal training and development support
• Secondments or job rotation programmes
• Management Fastrack programmes
• Internal job marketplaces and opportunity platforms
• Targeting alumni talent networks and boomerang talent

3. Conduct candidate and market research

Carrying out the right research can often be the difference between securing top talent and falling short on your hiring goals.

Comprehensive studies into the following will help give you the edge when it comes to attracting the right people for the job:

• The market – How many qualified candidates are there around target locations?
• Candidate personas – what are the common traits and behaviours of an ideal candidate?
• Benefits – what motivates these people most when it comes to the perks?
• Barriers – what aspect of a role is most likely to put off your target audience?

Having this information at your fingertips can be crucial to your success, as you draw up job descriptions and ads.

4. Carry out competitor research for target roles

Once you are confident about external hiring requirements, you should also turn your attention to your competitors and how they’re winning over talent in the marketplace.

By carrying out in-depth research into competing employer brands, you can find out:

• Where do they advertise similar roles?
• How do they word job descriptions for relevant positions?
• The salaries and perks they offer to attract the best talent
• How websites and social media content promotes their offering

Gathering this invaluable information can then feed into your own strategies for talent attraction. For example, you could identify unique benefits to set your offering apart from other competing employers.