Poor talent management is resulting in businesses wasting about Rs 2,330 crore on recruitment costs. This, according to a joint survey by LinkedIn and PwC, can be saved through better talent matching.
The survey by professional networking site and PwC across 11 markets, including India, revealed that the inability of people to upgrade for new skills or switch industries would be costing as much as $150 billion globally. In India it is about Rs 53,300 crore.
The study, Adapt to Survive, analyses interactions from LinkedIn’s network of 277 million professionals, of which 24 million are in India. This analysis is cross referenced with information on 2,600 employers from PwC’s Saratoga database, one of the world’s largest and most robust resources of people and performance metrics, to understand which countries are better at aligning talent with opportunity.
The research found a strong correlation between the adaptability of talent in a particular country and the performance of its companies. It said that if India was better at matching talent with the right opportunities, this could unlock as much as Rs 50,800 crore in increased productivity.
Lack of access to the right talent is driving up the cost of recruitment for employers today as it is taking longer time to find the right candidates combined with the increased likelihood of mismatched talent leaving jobs.
Each market is assigned a Talent Adaptability Score based on five key behavioural factors, which includes the average number of time professionals in that market switch industries, the average number of different positions held in a professional’s career, the average number of internal promotions in that market, the average number of employers a professional has had in each market and the average number of open vacancies divided by the market’s population.
While India ranks tenth with talent adaptability score of 34, China is at 23. The Netherlands with a multilingual workforce and as an international business base tops the chart. Emerging markets such as, India and China have lower scores because they have fewer mature sectors and their geographic size limits talent mobility.
Irfan Abdulla, Director of Talent Solutions for LinkedIn India, said “Raising the level of talent adaptability in a market will go a long towards enabling economic success for everyone, from job-seekers to recruiters and the economy. We hope the findings of the study will also arm everyone in the talent ecosystem with insights to enable them to better address the skills gap in the workforce today, so that jobs and talents can be better matched in future.”