India can improve talent-to-market alignment: EY-LinkedIn report

When it comes to improving the talent-to-market alignment, India is one of the countries that has major scope for improvement, according to a report by EY and LinkedIn.

The report, titled ‘Right People, Wrong Place’, which took into consideration 659 organisations of varied size and scale across 11 sectors, states that poorly matched workforce to the global sub-sector growth markets were “potentially leaving hundreds of millions of dollars of opportunity on the table.”

According to the report, firms that had headquarters in emerging market locations such as India, Central and South America and Africa had the largest scope to improve their talent-to-market alignment.

Sonu Iyer, Tax Partner and People Advisory Services Leader, EY India, said: “The findings of this research imply that companies have a huge potential of optimising their performance by rethinking their talent mobility strategy. Placing talent where the sector market opportunity is, instead of only the headquarter country or legacy markets can bring substantial gains for companies”.

As far as Indian companies are concerned, consumer products and retail (notably including the non-alcoholic beverages sub- sector) and banking sectors need to have higher talent-to-market alignment. Also, sectors such as apparel, footwear and insurance sectors had the most opportunity to improve in the talent-to-market alignment.

The report also states that organisations that increase their talent-to-market alignment over time, tend to grow faster. For example, organisations in the top quartile for improving talent-to-market alignment between 2013 and 2016 achieved profit growth that was, on average, 7.8 percentage points higher than those in the lowest quartile, it said.

Dennis Layton, EY Global Deputy Leader, People Advisory Services (PAS), said: “This talent-to-market alignment helps organisations that are currently running behind the pack see a clear opportunity to capture growth by focussing their efforts on more strategic workforce and talent planning.”