Finding talent across global business units using AI

The challenge

A global Professional Services organisation needed to manage the sourcing of external talent across two of its global branches. The company needed to find highly sought-after experts in auditing, tax, consulting, enterprise risk and financial advisory services. It had no complete system to manage external talent and lead times were therefore very long. Contingent workforce engagement was poor, meaning that they weren’t able to respond to client needs rapidly enough.

To make things worse, as the organisation’s global branches grew, the systems the organisation was using failed to scale in line with the growth. Employee profiles were managed manually, meaning a lot had inaccurate and out-of-date information. Matching the right experts with the right projects was practically non-existent and there was no single overall view of all internal and external talent pools. A fact that made resourcing inefficient and ineffectual.

The solution

Over 20,000 internal and contingent profiles were created on the ProFinda platform. These profiles included the skills, expertise and experience of each individual. Algorithms intelligently matched people with projects and clients as needs arose.

Potential projects or requests for help were also uploaded to the ProFinda platform. This gave greater visibility of current and future needs to the organisation’s resourcing team, and also allowed employees to find projects that they might be interested in working on. Some of these projects matched skills that employees otherwise would not have publicised and allowed people to work on projects that matched their interests and career ambitions.

The results

A single view of all internal and external (contingent) talent pools was created that could be readily accessed for resourcing and project management needs. As a consequence, the time spent resourcing people onto projects has improved dramatically, in some cases taking mere seconds compared to weeks before. The organisation now benefits from a full view of what core, alumni and contingent talent they have in their network, including the skills, experience and motivations that exist within each group. This has had a positive knock-on effect on the overall knowledge and expertise sharing within the company.