The need for companies to acquire and retain talent is the one constant through market cycles. Organizations globally will collectively spend over $100 billion this year to ensure they have the right staff to effectively compete and grow.

While the perception remains that talent is scarce, the reality is that there is more talent available now than at any time in history. Therefore, the challenge faced by organizations is not a talent shortage, but rather an inability to reliably assess talent. This is fundamentally a talent alignment problem.

The decisions companies make regarding talent have direct impact on the ability to achieve their goals. While the downstream economic costs of these decisions are measurable, the information used initially in these decisions is based on intuitive, qualitative approaches. This leads to inconsistent and counter-productive results.

Solution

WingSpread brings clarity to corporate decision making by providing a measureable, quantitative, and consistent approach to assessing and managing talent. Using the foundation of skills, defined as a specialized body of knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge, people in any level of an organization can be evaluated on the basis of what they can do in a way that is intrinsically objective.

Skills become the key metric of human capital, one that can be clearly understood and evaluated. By scaling the approach through the sequencing and mapping of skills across an entire organization, a repository of skills is created that provides a unique perspective of the total human capital available to an organization.

The Corporate Genome is the definitive blueprint of skills across an organization. The Corporate Genome allows leadership to make more informed human capital decisions to achieve corporate growth targets, assess potential acquisitions, and plan long-term strategic direction. By linking corporate goals to positions through skills, and leveraging a web-enabled “SaaS” technology to gather individual skills assessments, WingSpread is able to quickly provide insight that is immediately actionable.

Furthermore, as the Corporate Genome is being continuously updated, an historical human capital record of the organization is generated. This record enables executives and board members to assess the results of their strategic and tactical plans over time as related to skills across the organization.

Conclusion

The Corporate Genome becomes the corporate leadership’s archive containing the plans for each type of employee, the master program for generating a global company from a single thought, and the life cycle instructions that guide it from birth to adolescence and maturity. Understanding and guiding this “organic corporation” and its knowledge workers is the frontier of computational human capital and the unleashing of a new era of organizational productivity.