What Is Talent Management?
Talent management is a term that describes the ways organisations recruit, attract, onboard and develop talent. It represents a holistic approach to HR and encompasses everything from building a strong employer brand to offering competitive compensation packages.
Talent management covers the entire employee lifecycle from recruitment through onboarding and development to the employee’s eventual offboarding and exit. It also uses data and analytics to determine the organisation’s future workforce needs and adjust processes to meet them.
The Benefits of Talent Management
Taking a strategic approach to talent management has many benefits for an organisation and its employees. For example, talent management:
Improves business performance: According to a 2018 McKinsey survey, 99% of the organisations that reported having effective talent management programmes in place said they outperformed their competitors, compared to 56% of other respondents.
Drives innovation: The ability to attract the best talent (and develop talent internally) gives an organisation the best chance of innovating and developing new ideas.
Decreases turnover: Effective talent management helps employees to feel valued by their employer, making them less likely to look for opportunities elsewhere.
Improves employee engagement: A good talent management strategy should encourage employees to use their strengths — which can result in a 6x increase in engagement.
Enables workforce planning: Through talent management, you can plan for the changing needs of your organisation and ensure your workforce is flexible, and strong employees are ready to step into leadership or critical roles when the time comes.
Motivates employees: Seeing their peers being promoted can inspire other employees, encouraging them to seek opportunities for development and motivating them to grow within their roles.
What Is the Talent Management Model?
The talent management model is a way of describing all of the different functions and processes that form your talent management strategy. There are many different ways to design a talent management strategy, as it should be matched to the needs of your organisation. However, the traditional talent management model encompasses the following five broad areas:
1. Planning
As well as considering your company’s current HR needs, your talent management strategy should also take into account the ways those needs will evolve in the future. This way, you can ensure your talent management strategy is in line with the company’s overall strategy.
It’s a good idea to use data on your current workforce to help you make plans for the future. For example, if you notice that employees from a certain educational or professional background tend to do well, receive promotions and stay at your organisation for a long time, you might consider hiring more of the same type of employees.
2. Attracting Talent
Attracting talent means actively targeting the right people for open roles by crafting effective job ads and posting them in the right places. It also means developing your employer brand so that candidates are more likely to apply to work for you.
Another important aspect is improving the candidate experience (CX) for job applicants. Even if a candidate is not successful in securing a role, they’re more likely to recommend your company (or apply again in the future) if they had a positive experience of your recruitment process.
3. Talent Onboarding
A strong onboarding process can improve retention by 82% and productivity by over 70%, according to one study. Getting new hires up to speed and on board with the company culture quickly is a vital part of any talent management strategy.
4. Retention of Talent
Hiring new employees is both expensive and time-consuming. So naturally, once you’ve onboarded a new hire, you want to ensure they’ll be around for a while. Developing strategies for improving retention should be a key part of your talent management plan.
This might include providing a competitive salary and benefits package, offering opportunities for personal and professional development, and building a positive company culture that puts employees first and encourages them to succeed.
5. Transition of Talent
Planning for movement within your organisation is a key part of talent management, as it helps you to anticipate your company’s future needs. Showing employees that you have a plan for their future also lets them know that you value them and their work — which can help with engagement and retention. You can do this by identifying promising employees and supporting them as they learn new skills and gain the experience needed to move on to the next stage in their careers.
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How to Build a Talent Management Strategy
Building an effective talent management strategy is a long and complex process. Here are some basic steps to follow to help you get started:
1. Align On Strategic Priorities
The very first stage of designing a talent management strategy should be to seek clarity on the company’s strategic priorities so that you can use your HR and recruitment efforts to work towards them. You may need to liaise with the company’s senior leadership or board of directors to develop a concrete list of goals that the organisation is working towards.
2. Connect This With Talent Management Practices
The next step is to connect these key priorities with HR and talent management practices. For example, if a company’s strategic priority is to increase innovation, that might translate to a need for better-quality candidates or more refined internal development processes. Or, if a company is focusing on achieving international expansion in the next three years, you might decide to focus on recruiting candidates with the right skills to facilitate that expansion.
The important thing is to spend some time determining how your organisation’s overall strategy can be achieved through talent management practices — which might not be in the way you expect. For example, if a company needs to increase sales, you might assume the best idea is to recruit highly skilled salespeople. However, providing targeted training to your existing team (who already know your product well) might be a more cost-effective solution.
3. Define The HR Processes Required
Once you’ve completed the steps above, you’ll need to determine the exact HR processes that you’ll need in place to achieve your goals. This means analysing your current processes to spot areas for improvement.
This will help you to identify the training, staffing and technical resources you’ll need to succeed. For example, you might need to deliver training to managers on effectively developing employees, or invest in a software solution that will help you to track progress or automate certain HR tasks.
It’s also a good idea to determine the metrics you’ll use to measure your efforts. What will success look like for your talent management strategy? Introducing HR and recruitment KPIs based on relevant, measurable metrics can help to keep you on track and ensure that you recognise success when it happens.
4. Analyse, Regularly Adjust And Plan For The Future
A talent management strategy is never finished, and it’s important to regularly analyse the results of your efforts based on the targets you’ve set. This means that you can make adjustments to your strategy when things aren’t going as expected — giving your company the best chance of meeting its talent management goals.
It’s also important to remember that a talent management strategy is not a quick fix: it can take many years to fully execute a strategy. This means it’s important to work with key stakeholders to ensure that you have the right resources to meet your organisation’s needs over the next 3–5 years (or even longer).
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The HR function encompasses many different tasks, processes and people. And effective HR teams need the right tools to tie everything together.
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