The skills to lead in M&A
Our customer - a global professional services company - is growing their Private Equity business fivefold. With such aggressive growth targets, they knew the same talent sources, learning programs and skills wouldn’t cut it.
They partnered with Simply to pinpoint the skills they needed and understand the skills they have today. With this foundation, they could decide with evidence how best to build and how best to buy the people and skills to close the gap.
Using artificial intelligence to define critical capabilities and skills
To effectively recruit, retain, engage and develop, the company adopted a skills-based approach. This meant taking a different lens to their business priorities and workforce strategy, so that they could optimise their approach to fill critical skill gaps.
Simply’s Rightskilling Platform helped by firstly translating the Private Equity team’s growth strategy into the underlying capabilities and skills required to deliver the strategy. This was done by firstly deploying Simply’s algorithms to automatically infer the required skills from strategic documents shared by the customer. Then, a competitive analysis was undertaken using Simply’s labour market data to identify the key skills competitors are looking for in similar areas.
The competitor analysis helped the Private Equity leadership team to check how their targeted capabilities and skills were distinctive, or the same, as their competitors. Note: companies listed are not the competitors used by the case study customer.
Forming a skills taxonomy organised around business outcomes
Together, this insight helped the HR Director and Business Leader to ensure the skills they were targeting were sufficiently distinctive and differentiating against their peers. The results were consolidated into a skills taxonomy; a comprehensive, targeted and future-focussed list of the skills that matter to achieving their stated business goals.
Hire and grow
This clarity helped drive actions across their talent acquisition teams, who could now source, with high confidence, the specific skills required for the business. Using Simply’s talent profiles, they could explore new, more diverse talent pools than those they had previously been searching (i.e. the same old ‘Big 4’ accountants and top Private Equity companies). Likewise, their Learning & Development team used the skills insight to refine their learning pathways, reducing the choices and focussing content on the areas which mattered most.
The Simply Rightskilling Platform uses labour market data from over 140m job adverts a year to define the most popularly required skills for every role in your organisation. In this example, the customer used the skills by each role to ensure their skill taxonomy was fully representative of core skills.
Simply. The rightskilling platform.
The strategy-led, data-driven way to conquer skill gaps.
Simply uses data and machine learning to define your skills strategy, build the skills architecture you need to make it happen, and pinpoints how to rightskill your workforce, fast. Learn more here, follow Simply here or get in touch at info@simplygetresults.com to discuss your needs and book a demo.