The world was stuck in recession when Sheffield Haworth was established in 1993. Unemployment was at record levels and expected to get worse. (It did.) The Internet had yet to arrive as the widespread social phenomenon that it would quickly become.
Thirty years later we may be entering another period of global recession—with two big differences from 1993. The first is that talent shortages are widespread in developed economies. The second is the power that digital tools give us to extract a richer kind of understanding about talent—what it is, where it is, how to engage it and how to hold it.
If it is true that organizations are only as good as the people in them then the way through this uncertain moment is talent intelligence, the emerging science of tracking where the best are going, what motivates them and how they fit into an organization’s strategic plan.
