Complex global organizations are increasingly studying - and to a lesser extent adopting - a talent supply chain management (TSCM) mindset. As its name suggests, TSCM is much like traditional supply chain management: directing a network of suppliers and resources to ensure the optimal mix of price, access, and risk.

But even with the growing attention to talent supply chain strategies, most organizations are years away from deploying TSCM on a global scale. Most still focus on meeting today’s talent needs instead of forecasting and planning for those that await them three years from now. What’s more, companies seem to have a limited recognition and understanding of the talent supply that operates outside the walls of the organization, nor any way to leverage it.

The problem is acute because most organizations identify talent as the basis of their competitive advantage and growth strategy. Complex global organizations would never forecast raw materials, pricing and inventory turns using only a short-term outlook, but that’s exactly what most accept for their most strategic asset: mission- critical, strategic talent.

Talent supply chain management (TSCM) is still a relatively new discipline, uniting workforce analytics, strategic workforce planning, variable and full-time talent sourcing and managing supplier networks.

Talent supply chain leaders consider the global workforce in its entirety - regardless of employed vs. contingent vs. third-party labor - and deploy the right people at the right moment. And, well before making talent deployment decisions, companies understand how people want to work, assessing and planning for worker preferences field-by-field and region-by-region, particularly in high-demand areas such as engineering or IT.

In the future, talent management leaders will partner across disciplines - with operations, procurement, risk management, human resources and legal - to ask, ‘How do we access the best talent while minimizing risk and cost?’ Companies will identify where to be efficient (i.e. focus on cost-savings) and where to be responsive (i.e. focus on quality and speed). This efficient versus responsive strategy is one borrowed from traditional supply chain management, and will be a critical aspect of successful talent supply chain management.

We know this because this is what we do every day. Yet, we wanted to find out what kinds of shifts in thinking and planning were really occurring in the market. To what extent are organizations rethinking their approach to talent supply chain management, and what are top performers doing differently from their peers?

In collaboration with Inavero, we surveyed 267 talent buyers and 359 talent suppliers in August this year about their use of workforce planning approaches. Here are just three of the key findings from the survey (you can download the full report here):

1. There is a growing focus on contingent labor: While the majority of the current workforce is still made up of traditional, direct hire or full-time equivalent (FTE) employees (i.e. “traditional employment”), the percentage of companies that expect to increase their use of flexible talent (54 percent) is nearly twice that of those that expect to increase their use of traditional employment (28 percent). And what's more, best-in-class companies use a higher percentage of flexible talent (50 percent versus 26 percent of all others) and are much more likely to expect usage of flexible talent to increase.

2. The right skills are still hard to find, particularly for mid-sized companies: Half of talent buyers say their companies face shortages for key skill sets. Buyers responsible for the STEM fields were significantly more likely to feel the pinch of talent shortages (64 percent agreed their organization faced shortages for key skill sets). And more than three quarters of suppliers believe their largest customers face critical shortages. Mid-size companies, however, are hardest hit. Sixty-nine percent of companies with total revenues of 500 million to 2 billion face significant shortages, versus 49 percent for organizations with over $2 billion in revenues.

3. Even large organizations lack workforce planning discipline: Ninety percent of companies with revenues in the range of 500 million to 2 billion and 83 percent of companies with $2 billion plus in revenues say attracting top talent is a critical to attaining their strategic objectives. Yet these companies show fairly low levels of adoption of tools and strategies that would help them prioritize talent as a key advantage. Nearly half say current internal workforce planning lacks the necessary business impact, and just 19% of the largest organizations strongly agree that they appropriately budget and plans for attraction and retention of top talent through a variety of sources (e.g. traditional, temporary, contractors, freelancers).

Overall, it appears that even as large global organizations speak of talent as a key differentiator and source of innovation, most have not invested in the vision and infrastructure to support talent optimization.

To find out how your organization compares and what the top performers are doing differently regarding their talent supply chain management, download the full report here.