In the open talent economy, organizations will no longer rely on balance sheet talent. Instead, they will have to strategically utilize a variety of talent from along the talent continuum.
Traditional staffing involves what’s called Closed Talent – where salaries and labor are a staple on the balance sheet. What Matthew Kosinski recommends is that you broaden your idea of how talent is defined and incorporated into your company. Here are the four main talent types/categories:
- Balance Sheet Talent: This is the old talent that most organizations utilize today. It is the most closed form of talent.
- Partnership Talent: This consists of employees who are “part of a partnership or joint venture that are on a related balance sheet.” A good example of partnership talent would be outsourced talent, which we have seen happening more and more over the past couple of decades.
- Borrowed Talent: Deloitte defines borrowed talent as “employees who are part of your value chain or ecosystem, but who reside on someone else’s balance sheet.” These are people like contractors, consultants, and advisers. Deloitte itself would be an example of borrowed talent, as employees from Deloitte advise other organizations on an as-needed basis, said Liakopoulos.
- Freelance Talent: This kind of talent is a fairly recent phenomenon, stemming from the proliferation of social media and telecommuting technologies, and most organizations are already familiar with it. Liakopoulos described freelance talent as “people [who] can go out to openly bid themselves to work for organizations,” usually on a per-project basis.
- Open Source Talent: This is the most open end of the talent continuum. Open source talent is “similar to open source in technology, in that organizations are leveraging the masses to help them with everything from innovation to using blogs in lieu of help desks,” said Liakopoulos. For example, consider Proctor & Gamble’s Connect + Develop program, which the organization uses to crowdsource new ideas. Open source talent, like open source software, is free.
Read the full article at Recruiter.com.
