GPI: Optimizing Talent Management in an Evolving Audit Landscape

The IIA’s new report, Global Perspectives and Insights: Talent Management, explores the evolving challenges organizations are facing when trying to recruit and retain top internal audit talent. It discusses factors like the expanded ground internal audit is charged with covering as well as issues that compound the situation, like technology advancements and tech-based risks.

If you are an internal audit candidate with a background in IT, data analytics, or related tech-based specialties, congratulations. You are the unicorn audit leaders across the globe will be bidding on just for the privilege of basking in the breadth of your knowledge. Life is good, and you will soon have the bank account you have always dreamed about. 

One person’s dream, however, is another person’s nightmare. In today’s talent market, audit leaders are losing sleep over how best to maintain functions capable of fulfilling an expanding list of obligations company stakeholders expect of them. As the business risk landscape continues to shift at an ever-increasing rate — driven by emerging technologies, macroeconomics, geopolitics, and more — internal audit functions are tasked with somehow navigating a talent market that is spread thin and demands financial compensation far beyond what some audit functions can offer. 

However, no challenge is insurmountable, and this multi-faceted one can be resolved with a comprehensive talent management strategy that spans the entire lifecycle of talent, from recruitment to development to long-term retention. What is needed is an understanding of the factors that have created such a volatile environment for talent, and an informed evaluation of what a talent management strategy should entail.