What is Talent Management?

The importance of talent management

Employees are the key asset of any company. Talent management helps in keeping them at their professional best and creates an environment that maximizes or optimizes their performance. There are ample reasons why talent management is game-changing, here are a few:
 

1. It enables employees to achieve their potential best

Talent management not only identifies hidden potential but it paves the way for that potential to be tapped, nurtured and maximized in a way that mutually benefits the employee and the organization. It identifies who your employees can be if they are given the right organizational superpowers. For some, it could be training on new technology, for others, an internal move, leadership coaching, etc.

2. It optimizes the available resources for business goals

Through talent management, you can identify untapped potential across the different teams in your organization, provide the necessary coaching or training and maximize the average potential of your employees. When employee potential is maximized, business goals become easier to achieve. The productivity curve remains at its best.

3. It provides a platform for innovation

If you can help the right people find the right skills, knowledge, technology, and team at the right time, innovation just becomes inevitable. Talent management enables organizations to orchestrate this.

4. It favors retention

A study by Payscale reveals that 27% of people leave organizations because they don’t find work meaningful. Talent management ensures that your workforce is motivated, challenged, and assigned the right kind of work. As a consequence, your employees experience high morale and growth in their roles which in turn leads to higher retention rates.

5. It helps build a truly robust employer brand

Sense of purpose is a key differentiator when it comes to attracting the cream of the crop. Candidates are attracted to companies where they can learn, experiment, thrive, and contribute. The kind of training programs you run, the technology you adopt, and the learning benefits you offer, etc will all speak for themselves in the job market.

6. It creates an aura of inspiration

When you take efforts to motivate and inspire your employees, they motivate and inspire each other. Iron does sharpen iron. Collectively it creates an atmosphere of positive professional energy where exceptional work happens.

7. It becomes the backbone for career and succession planning

Talent management enables you to envision who’s been doing what, where and how long in the organization. It helps your plan career progressions for your employees and as you do it, you can also start your succession planning for strategic roles. This ensures that you have experienced and capable employees who can fill in critical roles as and when they become available.

The 7 steps in the talent management process
 

#1 Identify and define business goals and the equivalent HR goals

Talk to your leaders to understand the business goals clearly. Accommodate new projects, expansions, or any other change which might affect hiring. The next step is to define the skills and abilities you will require in the organization to achieve the business goals. Once that’s defined, you can start raising requisitions for the newly open roles.

#2 Broadcast your jobs and get ready for sourcing

This might include posting on multiple job boards, sharing via social media, email campaigns, LinkedIn campaigns and so on. Sourcing from multiple places can be tiring but with an ATS software, you can manage multiple sourcing platforms from a single place. An ATS also helps you manage the whole recruiting process, that’s right from sourcing on a single software.

Don’t forget passive candidates. Most often the best talent is employed elsewhere and may not even be actively looking for a job. Events, employee referrals, and networking can be very fruitful when it comes to attracting passive candidates.

#3 Screen and interview your candidate base

Once the candidates start flowing in, you can start screening, interviewing and selecting the talent you want to rope in. The criteria you use while screening, the objectives of your interviewers while selecting or deselecting candidates and the overall candidate experience through the process are key to bringing in bright people. It’s important that all stakeholders are aligned with your talent acquisition and management goals.

#4 Employee engagement

Your employees' first few weeks or months set the tone for the rest of their stay in your organization. A good onboarding process is essential to connect with them and engage them.

Apart from onboarding, there are 4 factors that influence employee engagement:

1) Meaningful work, which includes autonomy, job fit, empowered teams
2) Scope for growth which is a result of training, talent mobility, on the job learning
3) Trust in the leadership’s vision, their methods, which comes as a result of investing in employees and being transparent with employees 
4) A positive work atmosphere is a result of good working conditions, values, inclusiveness, etc

#5 Promotions and performance appraisals

Clear paths for growth and on-time recognition can go a long way in an employer-employee relationship. Be transparent about your goals, offer the necessary coaching and make standards for promotions clear to all.

#6 Succession planning

Understanding and identifying upcoming strategic roles and developing or investing in your people so they can fill those roles is called succession planning. It’s proactive and intentional.

#7 Measuring the success of talent management

Track and measure your talent management effort and how it impacts your business and revenue goals. The business-critical metrics include time to hire, ROI on training, Exit interview metrics, talent mobility, high performing talent and so on. We have covered these metrics in detail later.

Talent management metrics

• Talent mobility - the metric that reveals how often employees move from one role to another within the organization (internal mobility) or out of the organization (external mobility).
• Talent turnover - the metric indicates the percentage of high-potential employees who leave your organization in a given span of time.
• Talent distribution - the metric shows how well distributed your talent is across demography, age, gender, etc. The metric is key to promote inclusiveness, diversity, and innovation.
• High-potential talent - the metric indicates the high-performing talent in your organization. Some organizations make this a definite number. Say, for example, top 100. This forces them to select only the top performers.
• Cost to hire - the metric keeps track of the costs involved in hiring top talent which includes agency costs, ad costs, interviewer/HR salaries, infrastructure costs, etc.
• Time to productivity - the metric measures the time a new hire takes to become fully productive on the job. One of the goals of talent management is to keep this at a minimum.
• Training spends - The metric reveals the training spend on developing top talent which covers the number of days or resources spent on training, money invested, hardware/software costs, trainer costs, etc.
• Return on training investment - the metric measures the impact of training on an employee’s performance by comparing their performance before and after the training.
• Exit interview metrics - These metrics include numbers such as the number of voluntary exits, forced terminations, people leaving to pursue a better job, retirements, etc. These numbers throw light on why people decide to leave your organization.