In today’s competitive job market, the success or failure of your business depends on the individual and collective roles played by your team members.
However, it’s very easy for your entire workforce to become so disengaged that your organization begins to lose talented people.
Moreover, it’s an open secret that the absence of proper employee management skills by HR managers leads to poor employee retention, which eventually spells disaster for a company’s bottom line.
Effective talent management ensures your enterprise has the right people at the right place for your business to achieve growth and thrive.
Whether you’re trying to create a talent management strategy from the bottom up or you’re trying to optimize an existing one, understanding the talent management process at the highest HR level will help you create an effective approach.
This guide discusses the talent management process that every HR manager needs to develop a pool of highly talented staff that will stick with the organization no matter what.
Talent Management: An Overview
Talent management refers to Human Resource (HR) practices comprising processes, strategies, and tools enterprises use to attract, engage, commit, develop, and retain employees.
Employees are the lifeline of every business, significantly contributing to a company’s productivity, team collaboration, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth. As a result, talent management becomes an integral part of any process to achieve a company’s long-term business objective.
Among the most important elements of the talent management function are hiring, onboarding, strategic workforce planning, training and development, and engagement and retention. Other features include compensation and benefits, performance management, and succession planning, to name a few.
The person or team overseeing talent management functions in a company may vary based on the size and internal organizational structures. For example, a small business owner could easily manage their talent management functions until the business grows and they can create a dedicated team.
Most large businesses have dedicated human resources and talent management teams to run the functions. In most cases, such teams will include recruiters, talent acquisition managers, human resources generalists, and learning and development experts.
No matter what business you do, implementing a practical talent management strategy aligns your employees with your overall business goals and vision, which is the key to success.
Importance of Talent Management in an Organization
Talent management is a significant factor in an organization’s success as it encompasses strategic practices that help attract and develop the right employees who meet the company’s objectives.
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According to Gallup, in one of their past studies, only 13% of employees felt engaged at their workplaces, while disenfranchised employees were said to cost U.S. businesses a whopping $350 billion annually.
Another recent survey found that companies that deliberately made it their business to improve employee engagement improved their productivity by 21%, underscoring the importance of an effective talent management strategy.
Some direct benefits of investing in talent management include:
#1. Employee Motivation
An effective talent management scheme gives employees reasons like a high purpose or meaning that makes them continue being attracted to the organization. Research has shown that employees who feel engaged and motivated look beyond just money in an organization.
#2. Attract Top Talent
With a strategic talent management program, you can attract and recruit the crème de la crème of skilled and talented employees in the market. This happens because you can develop an employer brand that spontaneously attracts ideal employees who, in turn, contribute to your business’ higher performance levels and long-lasting results.
#3. Cover Critical Roles
Your company will be prepared to identify and quickly fill in gaps in critical skills and a plan for addressing any highly specialized critical roles within the organization as and when they arise.
As a result, your enterprise will have a constant flow of talent to address critical roles, guaranteeing the seamless flow of operations resulting in satisfied clients and stakeholders.
Moreover, you’ll also have happy employees as they’ll not be pushed to shoulder extra workloads that mostly lead to burnout.
#4. Enhance Employee Performance
A talent management strategy helps organizations pinpoint ‘good fit’ employees instead of making random recruitment decisions that don’t align with the company’s overall organizational strategy.
The result will be fewer grievances or performance management issues while ensuring that the top talent you acquire sticks longer with the organization.
#5. More Involved Employees
Your enterprise will be able to make more dependable and methodical decisions regarding staff development, and by acquiring the staff with just the right skills, you’ll save money unnecessarily used to develop missing skills in new employees.
Furthermore, you’ll engage your existing employees in fair staff developmental processes, meaning they’ll feel more engaged, increasing worker retention rates and ensuring your company meets its operational requirements.
#6. Hold Top Talent
Talent management avails well-structured onboarding practices proven to create higher retention levels. As a result, your organization will have a lean recruitment and performance management budget in the long run.
#7. Value-added Business Performance
Well-engaged, motivated, and skilled employees are the best catalyst for a business that wants undivided attention toward their business goals. Employees with such qualities result in increased client satisfaction and better value-added business performance.
#8. Greater Client Satisfaction
A well-implemented talent management action plan leads to an organizational-wide integrated achievement due to a consistent management approach.
The result is improved general communication that helps eliminate information silos within the business, with such integrated systems always leading to higher client satisfaction rates as they’ll deal with fewer employees who meet their needs faster.
Principles of Talent Management
A sweet marriage between employees and the company’s processes is one basic characteristic running across all successful organizations in an ever-changing global economy.
This means that besides creating well-defined work processes geared towards fulfilling corporate goals, the companies deliberately focus on their employees, from acquiring the right ones to continually engaging them as the main drivers of the company’s success.
Like all other concepts, guiding principles are involved in finding and retaining the right people for the job.
The following are talent management strategies to support and enhance talent development processes:
Align with Overall Strategy
The launching pad of any effective strategy is ensuring talent resources are aligned with your organization’s big picture. You may want to re-orient any existing recruitment processes, so they align with your larger organization goals and become a leader within your industry.
Internal Consistency
Another significant factor in the creation of a talent management process is ensuring there’s a degree of consistency so it seamlessly facilitates the existing process and future organizational goals.
Since talent management practices can’t operate in isolation, ensuring internal consistency makes all the company’s rules fit in.
It’s an open secret that as organizations consistently invest in high-potential employees, they must concurrently employ practices that emphasize career management, competitive compensation, and employee retention so their efforts will have a synergy effect.
Cultural Embeddedness
A company’s existing culture can become an important source of its competitive edge. As a result, HR managers must deliberately integrate a company’s business principles and core values into the talent management processes.
This will mean incorporating the company’s culture into hiring methods, performance management systems, leadership development activities, and employee benefit and compensation programs.
By assessing a candidate’s value and personality compatibility with your corporate culture, you could easily predict their performance and retention potential. That’s because it’s easier to develop skills than attitudes, values, and personality traits.
Involve Top Management
Talent management practices must extend beyond HR managers to include managers at other levels and CEOs. That’s because an effective talent management process goes beyond recruitment to include succession planning and leadership development elements.
Broader ownership of the entire process to include other senior leaders introduces fresh perspectives that can contribute to making the other managers play a significant role in retaining key employees.
Balance of Local and Global Needs
Talent management can become tricky for relatively large organizations or those that operate in different geographical locations as they need to address local and overarching demands in their HR strategies.
A company must, therefore, create a tailor-made talent management process that addresses local needs without obliterating the organization’s overall global policy relating to talent management.
As technology brings the world closer and companies move towards the future of work where geographic boundaries are becoming less important, HR managers must work towards integrating global standards while adapting and making decisions at local levels.
Employer Branding and Disparity
There’s increased competition for top talent, meaning that every employer must offer a compelling value proposition to attract the right talent to join their organization.
Potential employers can present themselves as attractive avenues for people who desire to work and develop their careers in the process. One of the best ways to achieve this would be for employers to curate a unique brand.
Talent Management Process
Since you’ve now understood the importance of implementing a talent management strategy, we’ll look at the seven-step talent management process and how you can apply it to your company.
Step 1: Specify Your Skills Needs
The first step of the talent management process is determining the kinds of hires you’ll be looking for and the specific requirements they’ll be filling. Ask yourself whether it won’t be easier and cheaper to train your existing employees instead of hiring a new person.
Step 2: Attract the Right Candidates
Create well-targeted and HR-branded job adverts and ensure they reach the leading job sites. In the meantime, plan interviews and other processes that will help you filter the best from among many good candidates.
Go beyond your regular interview questions to include references, personality assessments, and other evaluations involving candidates performing in real-life situations.
Step 3: Onboard and Establish Work
Orient your new hires and help them feel comfortable when they join your ranks. Plan what tasks you’ll assign them, and organize and schedule training sessions without forgetting to give a current employee to help the new ones settle in seamlessly.
Step 4: Plan Learning and Development
Developing your current employees’ skills is always cheaper and easier than hiring new talent. Moreover, even when you hire new top talent, there will always be something new they’ll need to learn.
As a result, you want to create a system where your workers are continually learning and growing. You can provide courses and conferences or complete a learning management system that offers a learning environment.
Step 5: Implement Regular Performance Appraisals
Regular performance appraisals are the best way to discover hidden talent and potential for additional responsibilities within your regular employees.
This one practice could save you the additional costs of hiring new talent besides helping prepare employees for possible promotions.
Step 6: Strategize to Retain Top Talent
Create a reward system consisting of benefits, promotions, and motivation tactics that promote job satisfaction besides improving the company’s culture to ensure your employees are satisfied.
Step 7: Create a Succession Plan
Nurture your employees with leadership potential so you don’t find yourself at a crossroads whenever a senior staff member leaves for any reason or retires.
Avail continuous learning opportunities to facilitate your employees to perform at optimum level and become their best.
Whenever an employee chooses to leave of their own volition, endeavor to conduct an exit interview to learn about their grievances, if any, so you can help avoid a recurrence of the same issue in the future.
How to Implement an Effective Talent Management Strategy
Despite your best efforts and intentions, common barriers can hold back your best thought-out talent management plan. Whether it’s inaccurate data, disparate or manual processes, unconscious biases, or lack of executive buy-in, there are effective talent management implementation strategies you can employ to overcome these and other challenges.
🔷 Drive Goal Alignment and Determine Metrics: Since people and their skills are the lifeline of any business, HR and talent management should be actively involved in building a company’s goals and vision instead of operating in a silo.
🔷 Create a Robust Employer Brand: Modern-day candidates are looking for companies where HR departments have formulated talent planning that goes beyond salaries and benefits. People want places they can be proud of working at or those that align with their values.
🔷 Focus on Employee Experience: Employees today expect to be treated the way consumers are treated when they patronize online shops or e-commerce sites. Consider implementing cloud-based HR solutions with user interfaces that support today’s mobile workforce.
🔷 Promote a High-Performance Culture: Modern talent management practices infuse learning and development, rewards and compensation, and internal promotions to keep employees productive and motivated enough to perform at their peak and improve business outcomes.
🔷 Aim for a Flexible System: HR managers and employees prefer visible and consistent systems that are flexible enough to accommodate the needs of businesses in an ever-changing environment. Your system should have an end-to-end view of employees while allowing leaders to identify learning gaps and recognize employee potential via a single data source.
Conclusion
Acquiring, developing, implementing, and improving an effective talent management strategy is critical to your company’s broader management strategy.
While it’s important to consider it because recruiting, training, promoting, and retaining top talent is the main artery of business output and optimum productivity, it should not be easy.
Creating and correctly implementing an effective talent management strategy is HR’s best chance to draw and retain top talent.
If you fail to do this, you’ll leave your business to chance by not having an employee strategy that aligns with the organization’s big picture.
Next, check out how to improve your recruitment process with talent mapping.
