Principle of Talent Management

Principle 1: Reduce the Risk of Being Wrong

In manpower anticipations for future an organization can ill afford to be wrong. It’s hard to forecast talent demands for future business needs because of the uncertainty involved. It is therefore very important to attune the career plans with the business plans. A 5 year career plan looks ridiculous along with a 2 year business plan.

Further, long term development and succession plans may end up as a futile exercise if the organization lacks a firm retention strategy.

Principle 2: Avoid Mismatch Costs

In planning for future manpower requirements, most of the HR professionals prepare a deep bench of candidates or manpower inventory. Many of the people who remain in this bracket start searching for other options and move when they are not raised to a certain position and profile. In such a scenario it is better to keep the bench strength low and hire from outside from time to time to fill gaps. This in no way means only to hire from outside, which leads to a skill deficit and affects the organizational culture.

Such decisions can be taken by thinking about the ‘Make or Buy’ decision. Perhaps questions like – How accurate is the demand forecast? How long is the talent required? Can we afford to develop? Answers to these questions can better help the talent management to decide on whether to develop or buy talent.

Principle 3: Recoup Talent Investments

Developing talent internally pays in the longer run. The best way to recover investments made in talent management is to reduce upfront costs by finding alternative and cheaper talent delivery options. Organizations also require a rethink on their talent retention strategy to improve employee retention.

Another way that has emerged of late in many organizations is sharing development costs with the employees. Many of TATA companies for example sponsor their employees’ children education. Similarly lots of organizations use ‘promote then develop’ programs for their employees where the cost of training and development is shared between the two. One important way to recoup talent investments is spotting the talent early, this reduces the risk. More importantly this identified lot of people needs to be given opportunities before they get it elsewhere.

Principle 4: Balancing Employee Interests

How much authority should the employees’ haves over their own development? There are different models that have been adopted by various corporations globally. There is ‘the chess master model’, but the flipside in this is that talented employees search for options. Organizations can also make use of the internal mobility programs which are a regular feature of almost all the top organizations.

Principle 5: Alignment with Strategy

Corporate strategy is the natural starting point for thinking about talent management. Given the company’s strategy, what kind of talent do we need?

Principle 6: Internal Consistency

There also needs to be internal consistency when it comes to talent management. The talent department cannot run on its own without taking into account the other areas of a company. For example, there has to be a basis for competitive and fair compensation in the company. The talent department cannot just hire people for the same position at all different rates of pay. It also has to focus on retaining employees. If there is no consistency, then it will be difficult to retain high-performing employees.

Principle 7: Integrating Culture

The third principle is to integrate the culture into the talent management process. It is important to keep the culture in mind when hiring and retaining employees. Every company has a culture that is embedded into its workforce. For example, Google has a unique company culture; it has been known to look for ‘Goodliness’ during the hiring process. This ensures that the new candidates will be a good fit into the company culture.