Older readers might remember a time before LinkedIn. In this distant, sepia-tinted world, recruiters used to identify candidates by such arcane methods as networking, cold calling and leafing through enormous directories.
So thank goodness for LinkedIn, right? Well, yes and no. There’s no doubt the world’s leading professional networking site is a huge help to anyone trying to target candidates. And if that’s all you’re trying to do, then fair enough. But if you’re trying to understand your competitors’ organizational structure, reporting lines and headcount, well, let’s face it, LinkedIn is a limited toolkit. The biggest problem is that users don’t update their profiles.
That means you could deduce there are far more people in a certain team than there really are. And even when people do update their profiles, they rarely tell you their upward reporting line. It might look like this Manager-person here reports into that Director-guy over there, but, be honest, you’re guessing.
At Armstong Craven, we don’t guess. We research. We validate. We provide our clients with comprehensive, fully verified data. That’s because we think about org design & talent mapping differently. Here’s how you should think about it:
1. Talk to people
When it comes to technology, we’re a market leader. Our proprietary Webbtree platform is the fastest, most comprehensive talent sourcing tool available – and it was all imagined, developed and designed in house. But sometimes the best tech is old tech. Like, for example, the telephone.
By picking up the phone and talking to people, you can guarantee your understanding of a team’s structure is correct, complete and up to date. Did we say guarantee? Okay, your source could be lying. So talk to another source in the same team. Then a third. Then a fourth . . . the more you engage with real human beings instead of their LinkedIn avatars, the more powerful your data and the more nuanced your insights.
2. Form a hypothesis… and then test it
The question clients ask us most often is, Why do people talk to you? The answer is that lots of people don’t talk to us. Even those that do, are usually time-poor, so it’s vital that we come to each call prepared. Rather than expecting a source to answer your questions from scratch, you should do your desk research, form a hypothesis and then test it during your scheduled conversation.
Think about it. Which question is more likely to propel a dialogue forwards: either (a) “How many people in your team?” Or (b) “It’s my understanding there are about 10 people in the team – is that right?”
The answer is (b). In the first scenario, you’re simply asking a favor. In the second, you’re building trust, inviting challenge and, most importantly, sounding like a human being instead of a talking spreadsheet.
3. Find out the why, not just the what
The other thing spreadsheets don’t tend to do is ask follow-up questions. That’s because they’re not interested in the why. Let’s go back to that hypothetical question – supposing the source replied “Ten? Where did you get that idea? There are 50 of us.”
The answer is so at odds with what you’d been expecting that it demands an explanation. What do all these people do? Why is the team so much bigger than equivalent teams in other companies? Do they in fact need 50 people or does your source think they could afford to lose a few?
This sort of insight helps you learn from your competitors’ successes and failures. In fact, the same applies even if that imaginary source had said, yes, 10, exactly right. Just because every team is structured identically, that doesn’t mean that’s the optimal setup. A good researcher should always be asking, Does this actually work in practice?
4. If you can’t be complete, be certain
As with most pursuits, it’s possible to be a little too perfectionist when it comes to talent intelligence. Nowhere is this more true than team mapping. While we always strive to find every last person in any talent pool, the reality is that some tasks are simply too huge ever to complete. Software engineers at Google? It’ll be easy to find the first few hundred, but identifying every single one is probably near-impossible.
Instead, focus on the achievable and make it robust. Structure, reporting lines, dotted lines, total headcount, information flows, process, peer-to-peer relationships – these are all things you can find out from sources. That way, you end up with information you can really depend on.
More importantly, this is the sort of insight that allows you to make crucial business decisions about your own organization.
Far better to be doing this than fretting over the last few missing names in a
talent pool of thousands.
5. Find the data in the data
When we present our talent mapping, it’s not just a list of names and job titles. We also take the time to scrutinize our findings. What’s the gender split? How long has each person been in role? Where did they work before? How often do they move jobs? By sharing these insights, we help our clients determine which individuals are the likely best targets.
And we make hitting those targets that little bit easier too. Using Webbtree, we can often provide you with mobile numbers and email addresses. In short, we find the data within the data. And all because we think about talent mapping & org design differently.
