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If you follow business news, you know it can be exciting to watch a start-up make plans to improve or expand their products or services. Leaders make plans and promises that require an entire workforce to perform well, often under the spotlight. However, if recruitment efforts are misaligned with the company roadmap, goals are missed, delivery dates are pushed and things start to devolve.
What’s the plan?
Say your company is working towards the second generation of an app. Each stage of the product roadmap will require different talent. From marketing to development, tech support to sales, there are going to be several departments requiring change at different times.
While creating the overall plan is the project manager’s job, they will need input from each department to assess talent needs. The project manager believes five more IT pros will be enough tech support for the release in March. It’s January and the last IT worker your company hired took four months to recruit, hire and train; this will put you several months behind.
Constant Dialogue
The product roadmap should be communicated to and built with HR and recruiting. A constant dialogue requires both parties both speak and listen. This communication allows the organization to effectively recruit based on the lifecycle of their products and services.
Everyone has a chance to set clear expectations and limits when deadlines and numbers are discussed openly. It might be unclear to management that hiring 10 sales reps this month is simply not possible. To prevent a negative chain reaction, recruitment could simply say, “To successfully recruit that talent, we need this amount of time.”
Communication allows all goals to be set with relevant perspectives. An organization can be prepared for talent they will need 6, 9, or 12 months from now. If a team of leaders who have little frame of reference creates the roadmap, it can quickly become a wish list of action items that simply won’t happen.
Tracking Progress
In any rollout or launch, there are going to be an incredible amount of moving parts; leaders can only do so much. Especially in times of growth, companies need the right technology to keep their workforce on track, as well as successfully recruiting talent that will be able to stay the course.
In a start-up, regardless of the product or service, talent is going to be the primary success factor. Talent alignment is a precious company resource. Tracking progress on the individual level is how the big picture is attained – how launch dates are met.
Technology can't do it all. What good is a talent alignment platform if it simply delivers unattainable, untimely goals? The planning, communication and tracking of the product roadmap are only going to be effective with complete transparency.
That’s where we got our name – ClearCompany. We believe in the power of transparency to accelerate organizational success. We can prove that it’s not only possible to achieve talent/goal alignment on the individual level to reach big picture goals; we also make it easy. Interested? Learn more about our goal-centric talent management platform!
