Tag: Workforce Optimization

Most organisations today understand the significance of their human capital and the value of their talent to meet business goals and objectives. Talent management focus on providing strategic assistance to organisation in the accomplishment of long-term enterprise goals with respect to human capital. The term Talent management gained popularity in the late 1990s.

Having good talent means employing one with good skills, knowledge, intellectuality, and the potential to do well. If someone has all the competency skills and are good at what they do, the company would like to retain them forever. Most employees are either satisfied with the job they have or if not, they go out and look for better opportunities. Finding capable and potential candidates is not a challenging task, but making sure that they stick, contribute and are loyalists- willing to stay in the same business for a longer term, is the real challenge.

Talent management involves development (both organisation as well as individual) in response to changing and complex operating environment. It includes the creation and maintenance of organisation culture.

Talent management brings together a number of important human resources and management initiatives. Organisations that formally decide to “manage their talent” undertake a strategic analysis of their current HR processes. This is to ensure that a co-ordinated, performance and oriented approach is adopted.

1. Competency frameworks

A competency framework is essentially the lingua franca of capability in the organisation. Competency frameworks (easy to develop with the right agile performance management tools) help drive consistency within the business when recruiting employees, managing their performance and developing them. It can perform a pivotal role in ensuring everyone understands what is expected of them in a specific role and for a given context. An effective talent management strategy should begin with competency framework development that will serve as the foundation for future talent management initiatives.

2. Culture of learning

A job should not solely be filled based on past experience and performance, but on the employee’s potential and aptitude to adapt to a new role. That’s why ensuring continuous informal and formal learning and development is key to help develop new skills and prepare for a new role. Personalised learning will also create better engagement and will likely help retain talent.

3. Performance management

The managing of talent in the organisation reaches into agile performance management. To implement a talent management strategy it is important to understand performance. Analytics and comprehensive talent management system solutions that have a performance capability will help with this as it brings the data into one place and provides managers with clear indicators on talent strategy implementation and performance issues.

4. Succession planning

Succession planning is all about knowing the needs of your organisation and developing the capacity to address these needs when and even before they arise. But how do you anticipate your future talent needs? The key to effective succession planning is to be aligned with your overall talent management strategy, which then includes your training initiatives, performance management, career development and recruitment. Collecting all these statistics will help you figure out who is competent for a role ready to be filled or who needs to improve their skills. Combining the data from all these initiatives in one place will help build one central talent pool, where you can easily spot the high potentials ready to step into a key role.

5. Career development and career pathing

While performance management is all about developing the skills and competencies of your workforce to meet the organisation’s needs, career development is about supporting your employees to develop and realise their potential. Understanding their strengths, skill gaps and interests is the first step in the career development process. While learning and training will be fundamental parts of your employees’ career development, structured coaching will give them the necessary feedback they need to grow professionally. By facilitating conversations with their manager on a regular basis, the employee will gain insight into their performance and skills to work on.

It is important for employees to understand what opportunities exist within the organisation and how they can work towards them. A robust talent management system will facilitate this and give a clear development path for employees to follow based on their aspirations. This is also a clear signal to employees that the organisation is willing to invest in them which is proven to improve employee retention and motivation.

Four Steps to making talent management a core competence

Step 1: Identify Key Roles: Analyze the key steps in the talent life cycle (identification and attraction, hiring and inculcation, motivation and development, appraisal and reward, building and sustaining relationships) and map the key players, their roles in each stage.

Step 2: Take an Inventory of Your Talent Management Skills. Identify the critical skills needed to play the key roles.

Step 3: Measure the Right Things. Assess the measures to evaluate the performance of your talent management process at each life cycle stage.

Step 4: Set Up a Process-Wide Feedback Loop. Everyone managing talent needs to understand the big picture and to connect their role and responsibilities to the overall objectives of the process.

An effective talent management process will ensure employees’ job satisfaction, safeguarding the company from high employee turnover rates.

Ongoing performance management is vital for keeping employees happy, engaged, and motivated to succeed. Because employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation are essential components of employee retention, establishing an effective performance management strategy that cultivates these components will promote a positive work environment of employees who continue growing with a company.

Importance

Attract top talent Having a strategic talent management gives organizations the opportunity to attract the most talented and skilled employees available. It creates an employer brand that could attract potential talents, and in turn, contributes to the improvement of the organizations’ business performance and results.

Employee motivation. Having a strategic talent management helps organizations keep their employees motivated which creates more reasons for them to stay in the company and do their tasks. In fact, 91 percent of employees shared that they wanted more than just money to feel engaged and motivated, as revealed by Chandler and Macleod’s survey.

Continuous coverage of critical roles. Talent management equips companies with the tasks that require critical skills to plan and address the important and highly specialized roles in the workforce to its employees. This means that the company will have a continuous flow of employees to fill critical roles to help companies run their operations smoothly and avoid extra workload for others, which could lead to exhaustion.

Increase employee performance. The use of talent management will make it easier for the companies to identify which employees will be best suited for the job that can lead to less performance management issues and grievances. It will also guarantee that the top talent within the company stays longer.

Engaged employees. Talent management allows companies to make systematic and consistent decisions about the development of staff, which guarantees the employees’ skills and development. Furthermore, employees will feel more engaged when there is a fair procedure for the development, which helps in increasing the retention rates that helps companies in meeting their operational requirements.

Retain top talent. Well-structured on-boarding practices create higher levels of retention which saves the company on its recruitment and performance management cost in the long run.

Improve business performance. Talent management helps employees feel engaged, skilled, and motivated, allowing them to work in the direction of the company’s business goals, which in turn, increases client satisfaction and business performance.

Higher client satisfaction. A systematic approach to talent management means that there is an organizational integration and a consistent approach to management. When systems are more integrated, client satisfaction rates are usually higher, since they are dealing with fewer people and their needs are met more rapidly.

A requisite pool of qualified and talented employees can simplify the process of achieving the organizational goal and help focus on issues that really matters in the interest of the organization. Therefore, the overall purpose of talent management is to maintain a skilled and efficient workforce for the organization.

In modern-day organizations, the importance of talent management is second to none. Unless an organization has the required talented workforce, it cannot succeed in attaining its goal even if it possesses other factors such as natural resources, infrastructure, and technology. In fact, it is people who take an organization to its next levels of success.

The Talent Management Life Cycle ensures that both employee and employer gain the maximum benefit from their mutual association. In order to understand exactly how each stage of the employee life cycle can drive employee engagement.

• Recruitment

A challenge for this phase of the talent life cycle is whether the company is hiring for the long term, on the assumption that people want to pursue long-term careers within it, or alternatively, whether it aims to meet people’s desire for a stepping stone to opportunities elsewhere. The tendency is for both parties to engage in a fiction that this is a long-term career move, rather than discuss intentions honestly.

A different, more productive dialogue would explore a range of possibilities, with the outcome that people’s aspirations and job roles could be much more closely aligned. So, the psychological contract (or formal contract) would be that over, say 18 months, the employee will gain specific learning and experience and will make a defined contribution to the company.

Recognising that the aspirations of the employee and the organisation will have evolved, an equally honest review towards the end of the committed time avoids the disruption of unexpected departures.

• Selection

TALENT MANAGEMENT begins with an effective recruitment and selection strategy, but continues through the entire talent lifecycle.

• On-Boarding

Onboarding is a human resources industry term referring to the process of introducing a newly hired employee into an organization. Also known as organizational socialization, onboarding is an important part of helping employees understand their new position and job requirements. It’s the process that helps them integrate seamlessly with the rest of the company. There are many activities that go into the onboarding process, from the job offer to team training. Onboarding may last anywhere from a few weeks to a year, but the most effective onboarding usually lasts at least a few months. Ideally, employees will feel confident and competent when the onboarding process is complete.

Onboarding consists of multiple individual processes; however, it has no official definition and opinions still vary as to which processes fall under the umbrella of onboarding. As listed in the BambooHR Definitive Guide to Onboarding, onboarding can include the following:

• Job offers
• Salary negotiation
• New hire paperwork
• Policy and culture training
• Job training
• Employee handbook training
• Benefits paperwork
• Benefits education
• Facility tours
• Executive introductions
• Team introductions

Training & Development

Training and development refers to educational activities within a company created to enhance the knowledge and skills of employees while providing information and instruction on how to better perform specific tasks.

Training is a short-term reactive process meant for operatives and process while development is designed continuous pro-active process meant for executives. In training employees’ aim is to develop additional skills and in development, it is to develop a total personality.

In training, the initiative is taken by the management with the objective of meeting the present need of an employee. In development, initiative is taken by the individual with the objective to meet the future need of an employee.

• Performance Management

Performance management (PM) is the process of ensuring that a set of activities and outputs meets an organization’s goals in an effective and efficient manner. Performance management can focus on the performance of an organization, a department, an employee, or the processes in place to manage particular tasks. Performance management standards are generally organized and disseminated by senior leadership at an organization and by task owners, it can include specifying tasks and outcomes of a job, providing timely feedback and coaching, comparing employee’s actual performance and behaviors with desired performance and behaviors, instituting rewards, etc. It is necessary to outline the role of each individual in the organization in terms of functions and responsibilities to ensure that performance management is successful.

Performance management principles are used most often in the workplace and can be applied wherever people interact with their environments to produce desired effects schools, churches, community meetings, sports teams, health settings, governmental agencies, social events, and even political settings.

The way performance management is applied is important in getting the most out of the group. It can have a positive impact on how employees perform on a day-to-day basis. In order to avoid a negative impact, it must be applied in a way that does not encourage internal competition, but rather teamwork, cooperation, and trust. This is done through an implementation process of clarifying the work that has to be done, setting goals and establishing a performance plan, frequently providing coaching, conducting a formal review, and recognizing and rewarding top performance.

Managers use performance management to align company goals with the goals of teams and employees in an effort to increase efficiency, productivity, and profitability. Performance management guidelines stipulate clearly the activities and outcomes by which employees and teams are evaluated during performance appraisal.

To apply performance management principles, a commitment analysis is completed first to create a mission statement for each job. The mission statement is a job definition in terms of purpose, customers, product, and scope. This analysis is used to determine the continuous key objectives and performance standards for each job position.

Following the commitment analysis is the work analysis of a particular job in terms of the reporting structure and job description. If a job description is not available, then a systems analysis is completed to create a job description. This analysis is used to determine the continuous critical objectives and performance standards for each job.

Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen, and their colleagues developed a new approach to improving performance in organizations. Their model is used to stress how the constraints imposed by one’s own worldview can impede cognitive abilities that would otherwise be available. Their work delves into the source of performance, which is not accessible by mere linear cause-and-effect analysis. They assert that the level of performance people achieve correlates with how work situations occur to them and that language (including what is said and unsaid in conversations) plays a major role in how situations occur to the performer. They assert that substantial gains in performance are more likely to be achieved by management understanding how employees perceive the world and then encouraging and implementing changes that make sense to employees’ worldview.

• Succession Planning

A succession plan is a plan that focuses on identifying potential leaders and high performers, helping them develop so they can advance within their organization. Succession planning is vital because, as an organization grows, it’s more cost-effective to develop current employees for key positions rather than hire new people. Giving employees a clear path forward in their careers via a succession plan can also boost engagement and retention.

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t prioritize succession planning, choosing to focus on business growth rather than on the growth of their people. Among organizations that do have some sort of succession plan, 54 percent take an informal or mostly informal approach, and the majority don’t believe their succession plan is effective.

Key Elements of Succession Planning

Defined goals: Your organization should define what the end goal of the succession plan is, whether that’s to help employees increase their expertise, learn managerial skills, or something else.

Tasks or requirements: This is essentially a list of requirements for what is needed in order to reach the end goal of the succession plan.

Timeline: Knowing how much time employee development may take will help your organization align the succession plan with times when you need people to step into new roles.

Budget: Define how much money or what resources you will dedicate to succession planning, as that will shape every other element of your organization’s plan.

Strategy: Finally, define how you plan to introduce, execute, and measure the results of a succession plan.

Talent mapping is a technique that charts individuals’ skills and abilities, assesses their performance and potential, and matches them with workforce planning strategies to balance an organization’s talent and needs. Talent mapping enables an organization to determine strategies for future hiring, including internal promotions, likely short- and long-term hiring needs, and development of existing talent to meet future staffing needs.

Talent mapping is a strategic service that is used by businesses to plan for short-, medium- and long-term talent acquisition. It is used by the most perceptive companies to ensure that a recruitment process doesn’t just result in a quick hire, but rather, that it focuses on the short, medium and long term needs and leads to a number of strategic talent acquisitions over a prolonged period of time. It enables business leaders to proactively build the capabilities of the workforce using an in-depth and analytical process. It involves identifying the capabilities, experience and potential of current employees and aligning those with the growth strategy to reveal talent gaps and development needs.

The Performance-Potential Matrix

When companies engage in talent mapping, they often use a nine-box grid called the performance-potential matrix to assess their current employees. This matrix measures aspects of performance and potential such as leadership, effectiveness at the current position, impact, and trust.

Utilizing the matrix gives HR professionals a good idea of the strengths and weaknesses of current employees, as well as their potential to grow or be promoted into other positions in the future. This information can then be used to find out what talent gaps exist in the organization, which can help with hiring both now and in the future.

Making Talent Mapping Easier

The process of talent mapping takes a great deal of time and effort. Thrive TRM can assist with the talent mapping process by facilitating the record-keeping it entails. Thrive tracks notes, makes it easy to automatically incorporate those notes into employee profiles, and creates reports based on data users’ input into the system.

With Thrive TRM, you can compile a profile of your company’s current staffing situation and better determine your future hiring needs. This information can then be shared with your entire hiring team and any members of management that want to be in the loop.

Another capability offered with Thrive TRM is feedback and assessment. Your hiring and management teams can use Thrive TRM to have an ongoing dialogue about the company’s talent management strategy without the difficulties of scheduling meetings and trying to get everyone together at the same time.

The information that is gleaned from the talent mapping process can then be used in recruiting and hiring efforts to make sure your organization’s ongoing needs are being met in the candidates you hire. Thrive TRM streamlines recruiting and hiring and contributes to a comprehensive talent management strategy.

Reasons why talent mapping is essential for strategic growth.

Inclusive employee engagement

Talent mapping is principally an internal process used to assess current and future effectiveness, involving the entire organisation across every level and function. While much of the ‘assessment’ is passive and metrics driven e.g. clarifying the technical knowledge, qualifications and performance of individual employees it also presents a perfect opportunity for employee engagement. It’s another touch point, where career conversations take place and qualitative data of employee goals and interests are gathered and compared with growth strategy and future investment. Building trust and raising morale are two likely outcomes of any employee engagement initiative, especially when the focus is on understanding and potentially fulfilling career aspirations.

Opportunities for internal moves

The most effective talent mapping approach mobilises the whole organisation to record the capabilities, experience and potential of each employee. Only a non-silo mentality will ensure consistent data collection, as well as the detail required to inform talent decisions. According to accountancy firm PwC, compiling a skills and attributes database is a great way to ensure the right people are assigned to the right roles and for selecting which talent can be moved internally to meet short-term business demands. This, on the one hand, is a proactive way to bolster teams so they can deal with sudden changes in priorities and market conditions or pre-empt vacancies and manage talent shortage risks. It can also create new opportunities for internal moves, by revealing skill shortages not previously identified. Training needs, too, are highlighted and training solutions delivered to ensure positions are filled, where gaps emerge.

Identify potential leavers

Reviewing employee performance and potential isn’t just about identifying talent gaps and training needs within the workforce. Talent mapping can also uncover signs someone may soon leave an organisation, or that it’s time for them to move on to a new opportunity. First of all, taking the time to investigate the tangible impact of employees is always a good idea. Once you’re clear about this, you can then assess the potential each person has to progress or evolve within the organisation, over time. The 9 box grid is a popular talent mapping tool, as it helps leaders visualise where employees sit on a matrix and clarify whether a degree of motivation, reward or training will help them develop their careers.

Succession Planning

Succession planning is, of course, a primary objective for any talent mapping exercise. Traditionally, talent mapping processes would only seek to highlight people with leadership potential and ensure only those people were given access to development opportunities. As discussed earlier, though, the focus of development programmes has shifted from engaging with ‘high potential’ leaders to recognising that every employee should have access to career growth trajectories. Talent mapping, in this context, is about broadening your perception of the ‘critical roles’ within the organisation and understanding how those roles could be filled if vacancies emerged. It also encourages the establishment of clear development pathways, whether the function is a ‘specialist’ or leadership position, thereby challenging ‘invested in’ employees to step into and/or create new opportunities for themselves.

Reducing the time to hire

The previous sections each considered the benefits of talent mapping from an internal perspective. Of course, in an ideal world, all talent needs could be solved internally, but that’s rarely the case for most organisations. Rather than being caught out when a vacancy arises, external talent mapping is another valuable method to ensure organisations gain a competitive people advantage.

Long view of talent development

Underpinning any internal mobility or succession planning process is the need to develop talent over a long time. Whether that’s broadening or narrowing someone’s experience, talent mapping is a great way to identify specific needs or speculate about unknown future ones and how they may be met through training and development. Leaders often start by reviewing current and future workforce potential. Though, during the last decade, more organisations are using talent mapping to identify critical jobs of the future and determining what skills they will require in five- or ten-years’ time, to fulfil these roles.

External Brand building

In the same way that internal talent mapping can lead to better employee engagement, regularly engaging with external talent either directly or through a talent mapping service provider can improve employer brand and generally raise the reputation of an organisation.

To attract talent today, companies must ensure that all potential candidates enjoy positive experiences of the brand. Many companies, for example, now participate in talent community building, utilising ongoing networking and other marketing touch points to ensure their brand remains ‘top-of-mind’ for prospective candidates. When the company is ready to launch a recruitment campaign, it’s already one step ahead of its competition, in a tight talent market.

Gather Market intelligence

Gathering market intelligence and insight into competitor capabilities is a key objective of an external talent mapping process. Once an internal talent map identifies gaps and potential future gaps that could emerge, it becomes a foundation to analyse organisations, industries and people on an on-going basis. This can involve comparing, for example, the make-up of competitor teams and organisational structures, investigating compensation and benefits trends, as well as training and development plans. Stock-piling this intelligence can give businesses a detailed and holistic view of the market for talent, increasing the chances of hiring the absolute best candidates. It enables decisive hiring, while building a clear foundation for succession planning.

Trend analysts suggest Artificial Intelligence (AI) and big data is fuelling innovation in recruitment technology, creating more sophisticated optimisation and data analytics tools that can be leveraged for talent mapping exercises. And companies that invest wisely in the best tools and consultants, will position themselves at the forefront of the industry.

Human resources plays many roles in a company. The department manages employee relations, talent acquisition, payroll, onboarding, and much more. One more duty of HR is talent management.

Sourcing the best people from the industry has become the top most priority of the organizations today. In such a competitive scenario, talent management has become the key strategy to identify and filling the skill gap in a company by recruiting the high-worth individuals from the industry. It is a never-ending process that starts from targeting people. The process regulates the entry and exit of talented people in an organization.

To sustain and stay ahead in business, talent management cannot be ignored. In order to understand the concept better, The stages included in talent management process:

• Understanding the Requirement: It is the preparatory stage and plays a crucial role in success of the whole process. The main objective is to determine the requirement of talent. The main activities of this stage are developing job description and job specifications.
• Sourcing the Talent: This is the second stage of talent management process that involves targeting the best talent of the industry. Searching for people according to the requirement is the main activity.
• Attracting the Talent: it is important to attract the talented people to work with you as the whole process revolves around this only. After all the main aim of talent management process is to hire the best people from the industry.
• Recruiting the Talent: The actual process of hiring starts from here. This is the stage when people are invited to join the organization.
• Selecting the Talent: This involves meeting with different people having same or different qualifications and skill sets as mentioned in job description. Candidates who qualify this round are invited to join the organization.
• Training and Development: After recruiting the best people, they are trained and developed to get the desired output.
• Retention: Certainly, it is the sole purpose of talent management process. Hiring them does not serve the purpose completely. Retention depends on various factors such as pay package, job specification, challenges involved in a job, designation, personal development of an employee, recognition, culture and the fit between job and talent.
• Promotion: No one can work in an organization at the same designation with same job responsibilities. Job enrichment plays an important role.
• Competency Mapping: Assessing employees’ skills, development, ability and competency is the next step. If required, also focus on behaviour, attitude, knowledge and future possibilities of improvement. It gives you a brief idea if the person is fir for promoting further.
• Performance Appraisal: Measuring the actual performance of an employee is necessary to identify his or her true potential. It is to check whether the person can be loaded with extra responsibilities or not.
• Career Planning: If the individual can handle the work pressure and extra responsibilities well, the management needs to plan his or her career so that he or she feels rewarded. It is good to recognize their efforts to retain them for a longer period of time.
• Succession Planning: Succession planning is all about who will replace whom in near future. The employee who has given his best to the organization and has been serving it for a very long time definitely deserves to hold the top position. Management needs to plan about when and how succession will take place.
• Exit: The process ends when an individual gets retired or is no more a part of the organization.

The best way to approach talent management

1. Support when an employee is effective in the right role

You need to support employees that are performing effectively in their current roles. The idea is to retain talent by helping them grow and making sure they are happy with their job role and responsibilities.

2. Invest in employees underperforming in the right roles

While it is easier to write off employees that are underperforming in the right role, it is important for organizations to consider all factors like poor training, lack of resources, poor role definition, and poor supervision before blaming it all on the employee.

Otherwise, you might end up hiring the replacement with the exact same issue.

That is why you need to do what it takes to give your employees the right training programs and define their role more accurately.

3. Promote employees performing outstandingly in the wrong role

There will always be a time when employees will outgrow their job roles. Organizations need to get the timing right and promote the employees before they get hired by a competitor. Employees often think they are ready for a promotion before you think they are ready. In cases like these, it is always better to move them before you are comfortable in order to retain talent.

4. Move out employees underperforming in the wrong role

When you see an employee underperforming, you need to analyse whether they are in the wrong role or the right role. If they are in the right role, then you need to invest in the employees. But if they are in the wrong roles, then you need to move them into a role that is more suited to them.

Talent management is the full scope of HR processes to attract, onboard, develop, engage, and retain high-performing employees. This means that talent management is aimed at improving business performance.

Talent Management Strategy

A talent management strategy (TMS) is the magic ingredient behind managing an organisation’s talent both current and potential. Talent management is an important business goal for any organisation and talent management strategy can give the competitive edge to any organisation.

Talent management strategy can move an organisation’s talent management beyond essential talent management activities like talent acquisition and performance management, to levels of critical talent growth, managed talent relationships and an inclusive talent system.

A well-designed TMS within an organisation facilitates the HR function and management to plan toward recruiting and retaining top performers, employing them against specific business goals at a better rate than their competition.

Talent management strategy is majorly concerned with the following areas:

Talent attraction and recruitment:

Organisations often undermine the cost of recruiting the wrong talent. Failing to recruit the right person at the right time can result in significant cost to an organisation. Recruitment processes can be gruelling and niche profiles may be difficult to find. Hence the recruitment function within an organisation’s HR department needs to focus on its attraction recruitment strategy while seeking specific profiles with specific skill sets.

Employing innovative recruiting strategies can help organisations to get job openings seen by candidates who are looking for a new role. Innovative recruitment strategies also make it faster to hire great candidates, more consistently, and with significantly less effort.

Building and employing talent:

Building and employing talent refers to addressing the specific needs and aspirations of talent and balancing them with the short-term and long-term goals of the organisation.

As a talent management strategy, deploying talent is getting the talent placed in the right roles at the right time to fill critical competency gaps and support the individual career growth of the each employee.

Talent management strategies like hire vs build help organisations in more than one way. Such a strategy doesn’t just save the hiring cost for acquiring a talent in the organisation, but also ignites faith within the existing talent. Further to this, developing plans that factor in the personal aspirations of the existing talent increases the satisfaction levels as a by-product of the talent getting motivated.

Talent Retention

A study by Employee Benefits News highlights that the average cost of losing talent for the organisation is a surprising 33% of their annual revenue.

Talent is every organisation’s supreme revenue generator in terms of innovation, sales and customer relations. The cost of attrition is directly related to the organisation’s disability to consider the welfare and personal goals of the talent.

For succeeding in talent retention efforts requires organisations to think about things from the talent’s perspective. Every employee is different, and same goes for the personal goals and objectives for the talent.

An effective talent retention strategy, as part of the overall talent management strategy, attends to this concern.

Talent Management Strategy Talent management is not a mere checklist of requirements that need to be sufficed it is a strategy that needs careful implementation, regular checks, and continual improvement. The following are the six primary talent management strategies that serve as the pillars of people functions.

1. Detailed job descriptions:

A well-informed, detailed job description helps the sourcer, the sourcing software, and the candidate understand the job-role better. Generic job descriptions only serve to confuse all parties involved in the talent acquisition process and lead to a wave of irrelevant applications. Information that must be a part of the job description includes the following:

• Job title and location
• Skills required
• Overall duties
• Reporting lines
• Tools and equipment used
• Salary and benefits

With these, candidates can make an informed decision on whether to apply or not and sourcers get CVs that fit the bill better.

2. Person-organization fit

An employee that does not fit into the organizational culture can neither be the happiest employee nor the most sustainably productive one. While the culture can be difficult to define in words, it is prevalent in actions and quite easy to understand whether a candidate would be a good fit or not. Personal and organizational values need to have a certain degree of overlap for any employee to feel at home within the organization. Without a comfortable person-organization fit, the most amount of time, effort and energy would go into attempts at adjustment. Hiring candidate with the right P-O fit (or PE fit) thus greatly improves the chances of better employee engagement, higher employee satisfaction, and usually better performance.

3. Collaborate-coach-evolve

An important strategy to make talent management more effective involves creating a culture of coaching, mentoring (even reverse mentoring) and collaboration. Constructive feedback goes a long way when it comes to helping employees evolve and develop their skills and expertise. Managing talent is thus also about preparing them for the future of the organization to be ready for changes down the path and to be able to rely on each other.

4. Reward and recognize right

The process of rewards and recognition forms an important part of the strategy to motivate, engage and manage employees better. This goes beyond financial rewards and bonus packages. Studies point towards the fact that employees often want R&R schemes that motivate them with “prizes” that are most relevant to them as individuals. This is a great opportunity for organizations to show their employees how much they care for them as persons and as integral aspects of the organizational machinery.

5. Opportunities for continuous improvement

Managing talent needs to be put in the context of the future that the organization has envisioned for itself. Thus, employees need to be equipped with the right tools to be able to maximize their own potential. For the continuous improvement of the organization, there needs to be the scope and opportunities for the continuous development of its employees. Moreover, this ensures that the cumulative skills within the organization is updated, upgraded and upscaled. Talent management involves strategically planning career paths that make sense for every employee. We all tend to work better we know where we are headed and what the next stop is for our careers. This does not entail making empty promises of promotions but rather creating a career map in discussion with the employee, making sure that they relate to it and feel that it is realistic while also providing them with all the necessary tools to make the map a reality. Having a map to follow also improves retention scores since employees then know what they have to look forward to and work towards and can then collaborate effectively to achieve it.

A talent management system (TMS) is an integrated software suite that addresses the “four pillars” of talent management: recruitment; performance management; learning and development; and compensation management.

A talent management system, or TMS, is an integrated software platform that supports core talent management processes, including recruitment, employee onboarding, performance management, learning and professional development, compensation management, and succession planning. These processes, and the technical capabilities that support them, are typically delivered via software modules. So, businesses can start with what they need and add additional functionality as they grow.

Most importantly, with a TMS, an organization can link human resource planning to its business strategy. This ensures proactive measures are in place to provide the necessary talent that will support the current and future goals of the business.

Purpose

Whereas traditional HRMS and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems focus primarily on transaction processing and the administration of basic human resources processes such as personnel administration, payroll, time management, etc., talent management systems focus on providing strategic assistance to organizations in the accomplishment of long-term enterprise goals with respect to talent, or human capital. Talent management systems may also be referred to as or paired with an applicant tracking system (ATS) in either standalone application or as a suite of products. According to Bersin, talent management may be defined as the implementation of integrated strategies or systems designed to improve processes for recruiting, developing, and retaining people with the required skills and aptitude to meet current and future organizational needs.

The key elements of a talent management system.

• Ensure talent strategies align with the needs of the business. Work with leadership teams to understand business objectives, then ensure the talent strategy supports these outcomes.
• Recruit candidates. Source talent globally, nurture candidates throughout the recruitment process, and leverage the efficiencies of a comprehensive applicant management and tracking system.
• Onboard employees. Optimize new hire engagement with a dedicated onboarding portal. Ramp employees quickly with paperless new hire processes. Automate workflows for on-, off-, and cross-boarding.
• Manage employee performance. Help employees manage their goals. Use guided action planning for continuous performance management.
• Plan and design compensation models. Reward and recognize strong performers.
• Develop and retain employees. Provide modern and engaging learner experiences. Schedule and carry out compliance training. Develop proactive succession plans and actively develop leaders.

Functional modules and their market worth

TMS solutions typically offer one or many disparate or integrated modules which provide business functionality in areas of human capital management / human resources typically referred to as “strategic”.

• Performance management
• Goal management
• Compensation management
• Talent acquisition / recruiting
• Learning management systems
• Career development
• Succession planning

The role of talent acquisition and performance management has increased many folds compared to learning management systems in the talent management market. Many companies which were earlier working on only one of these domains have moved to developing integrated talent management systems.

Delivery methods

Many organizations struggle with HR data silos, disconnected technologies, and manual processes, the future of talent management is embodied in solutions designed from the ground up to provide business-centric functionality on a unified talent management platform. Talent management system recently have been at the forefront of growth in the software as a service (SaaS) delivery market following earlier iterations in the standard HR systems space via application service provider (ASP) delivery models. Traditional delivery via on-premises license sales still exist, but are much less prevalent in the competitive space.

Enterprise systems integration

Vendors of TMS software typically claim varying degrees of integration with other enterprise software vendors, and in particular with leading vendors of HRMS systems. The accuracy of these claims is often a question of interpretation, as the degree to which each vendor integrates with 3rd party systems varies considerably depending on circumstances and both the vendor and the third-party solution. In some cases, third party vendors offer certification for such scenarios, in order to offer some basis of comparison.

Competitive market

The so-called war for talent has driven a marked increase of attention and investment in the talent management space as new vendors continue to enter to support an ever-growing demand for strategic human resources applications. Many of these competitors have entered via the software as a service (SaaS) delivery model, affording small and medium businesses (SMB) new less-costly options. The Gartner Magic Quadrants for Talent Management Suites compares the major players of this market each year; in 2018 ranking products included Cornerstone OnDemand, SAP’s SuccessFactors, and Skillsoft’s SumTotal systems.

Benefits of Talent Management Solutions:

• Recruitment strategies that align with the objectives of the business.
• An integrated and centralized data model for all talent management activities.
• Improved employee onboarding, retention, and development.
• Better engagement between managers and employees, including processes for compensation, reviews, and rewards.

Evolution of talent management systems

In the 1980s and early 1990s, talent management focused predominantly on developing internal talent, leading to an excess of middle-management roles. Through the economic downturn, businesses restructured, and more emphasis was placed on attracting external talent. However, by the late 1990s, organizations found they were hiring and losing experienced people at about the same rate. This led to a new focus on retaining and nurturing existing personnel.

HR processes were incorporated, but without a centralized model, each track was siloed and information was often out-of-date. HR and recruiters had to deal with paper-based and time-consuming workflows with little time to focus on strategic initiatives.

Comprehensive talent management systems were created to integrate all HR talent modules within a single platform. Workflows became automated and digital, creating efficiencies across the organization.

Today, talent management systems are used by companies around the world and across all industries. Here are some examples:

A global construction company, Mota-Engil, implemented a TMS to transform its HR practices and prepare its workforce for a future of growth and innovation.

Terex, a leading manufacturer, uses a TMS to support workforce diversification while simplifying and streamlining HR-related activities for increased engagement.

A TMS also helps organizations with unique and modern challenges relative to talent management in the 21st century. For example:

• Diversity and inclusion: Implement diversity sourcing and candidate development plans. Provide proactive and continued development to regain and grow a diverse workforce.
• Skilling, upskilling, and reskilling: Identify skills gaps. Establish training and reskilling pathways to transition people to new or evolved roles.
• Remote workforces: Shift employee support mechanisms to accommodate remote workers. Provide new interaction models to ensure manager and employee engagement is optimized.

Talent management can be a discipline as big as the HR function itself or a small bunch of initiatives aimed at people and organization development. Different organizations utilize talent management for their benefits. This is as per the size of the organization and their belief in the practice.

It could just include a simple interview of all employees conducted yearly, discussing their strengths and developmental needs. This could be utilized for mapping people against the future initiatives of the company and for succession planning. There are more benefits that are wide ranged than the ones discussed above.

Benefits:

Retaining the top talent: Despite changes in the global economy, attrition remains a major concern of organizations. Retaining top talent is important to leadership and growth in the marketplace. Organisations that fail to retain their top talent are at the risk of losing out to competitors. The focus is now on charting employee retention programs and strategies to recruit, develop, retain and engage quality people. Employee growth in a career has to be taken care of, while succession planning is being performed those who are on the radar need to be kept in loop so that they know their performance is being rewarded.

Right Person in the right Job: Through a proper ascertainment of people skills and strengths, people decisions gain a strategic agenda. The skill or competency mapping allows you to take stock of skill inventories lying with the organization. This is especially important both from the perspective of the organization as well as the employee because the right person is deployed in the right position and employee productivity is increased. Also since there is a better alignment between an individual’s interests and his job profile the job satisfaction is increased.

Better Hiring: The quality of an organization is the quality of workforce it possesses. The best way to have talent at the top is have talent at the bottom. No wonder then talent management programs and trainings, hiring assessments have become an integral aspect of HR processes nowadays.

Better professional development decisions: When an organization gets to know who its high potential is, it becomes easier to invest in their professional development. Since development calls for investment decisions towards learning, training and development of the individual either for growth, succession planning, performance management etc, an organization remains bothered where to make this investment and talent management just make this easier for them.

Understanding Employees Better: Employee assessments give deep insights to the management about their employees. Their development needs, career aspirations, strengths and weaknesses, abilities, likes and dislikes. It is easier therefore to determine what motivates whom and this helps a lot Job enrichment process.

Limitations:

Costs

The time, resources and financial costs to operate a talent management program can be high. This is a burden for small business that don’t necessarily have the resources to implement such a system.

Many companies have one or more HR professionals spending much of their time to develop and implement talent management, but a business with few employees may find those labour hours best spent in other ways. Talent management programs also involve the use of software solutions to map out talent needs at all levels or departments, which can be expensive.

Worker Conflicts

Several workplace realities impede the impact of talent management. Many small businesses rely on part-time and temporary workers. Keeping them motivated while trying to focus on the long-term tenure of full-time, permanent employees is difficult. If your business relies on workers who you don’t need or expect to be around for long, it may not be worth the effort to install a formal talent management program.

Multi-generational workplaces also present challenges. Companies of all sizes struggle to come up with effective recruiting strategies that don’t discriminate by age, and offering rewards for workers at varying ages that may have different motivations can be difficult.

Leadership Limitations

A June 2008 “Bloomberg Businessweek” article pointed out that the leadership pipeline is often not full enough to carry out talent management. HR professionals often map out the leadership needs for the business and the skills required at each level. Small businesses may struggle to bring in and develop enough effective store managers or business unit leaders to complete with other small companies as well as larger competitors. To recruit more aggressively, including in other geographic areas, only adds to the costs of talent management.

HR and Management Conflicts

A core drawback of talent management for small companies is that the programs are often developed and coordinated by human resources professionals. Smaller companies may not have full HR staffs. Instead, managers often hire, train, motivate and fire their own workers while also performing critical business duties. This means managers don’t have the time in many cases to implement talent management. Even companies that do have HR professionals often get frustrated at the difficulty of getting managers to concentrate on talent management needs instead of focusing entirely on other business concerns.

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.

Talent acquisition and management has emerged as a key strategic process in an organization. Though there is a better availability of workforce in the market than ever before, yet the challenge to acquire the right talent still persists for any organization, worldwide. This is essential to achieve the strategic objectives and ensure long term success of an organization. Thus, enhanced corporate competitiveness and globalization has transformed the regular process of human resource recruitment into talent acquisition.

Moreover, the work of an organization these days does not end with hiring of the right talent into the organization. There is a wide spectrum of activities like career management, leadership development, talent planning, etc. which are constantly buzzing in the HR departments of organizations. Such activities fall into the realm of talent management.

Talent management is all the more essential to keep up with the future needs of the organization. Otherwise, if the organization does not focus on talent management within itself then it will have to resort to the process of recruitment every time the need for appropriate talent arises. Hence, we can say that talent management is all about nurturing and guiding the talent in your organization in alignment to the strategic and long run goals of the organization. It is the succeeding step to talent acquisition.

An organization generally avails the services of an HR Consulting Firm to provide with a cost-effective and quick, yet high quality, talent acquisition and management process. An HR Consulting Firm efficiently and effectively contributes towards recruiting the best and the most appropriate person for the organization with the allocation of minimal resources and within a short period of time. Also, HR Consulting Firm provides the right analysis, strategies, and plans for the management of talent in an organization.

As far as talent acquisition is concerned, an HR Consulting Firm maintains a highly effective research team which keeps a detailed track of the requirements of both the organization as well as the candidate. It may be possible that an HR firm may specialize in certain industries or sectors as far as acquisition of talent is involved. This helps the HR Firm in maintaining high standards of success in meeting the talent demands in particular industries by employing in depth knowledge and research in those industries.

The Firm conducts behavioral interviews with the prospective candidate to obtain a comprehensive analysis of the leadership, team-building, decision-making and problem solving skills of the candidate. Also, the candidate is thoroughly assessed for his attitude towards working in a team, response to change management and reaction towards the cultural climate of the prospective organization. Such analysis helps the organization in not only recruiting a candidate with right educational and professional experience, but also one with the required attitude and flexibility to be a part of the organization.

The HR Consulting Firm undertakes following steps for talent acquisition process in an organization:

• Comprehend the business strategy of the organization.
• Assess the talent availability within the organization.
• Discuss the talent requirements of the organization with the management.
• Analyze the gap areas between availability and requirement.
• Build strategies and plans to meet these gap areas.
• Measure the success of the implemented plans.

Talent management basically works in creating a pool of talent within the organization which helps in achieving the strategic objectives of the organization in the long run. This requires the HR Firm to work on the present set of employees of the organization and polish them so as to align their talent with the strategic objectives of the organization. Talent management process also requires an HR Firm to:

• Analyze the talent strategy and succession planning of organization.
• Develop a talent plan as required for strategic long run success of organization.
• Review talent in the organization.
• Plan various tools and techniques to develop talent within the organization.

Talent management process:

• Carry out performance management
• Develop career management plans
• Benchmarking talent activities
• Leadership development programs
• Team building exercises
• Action learning programs
• Interactive workshops
• Individual development guidance and coaching
• 360 degree feedback

Recruiting

The foundation of talent management is hiring the right people. The best recruiting processes support those efforts by carefully defining job descriptions, using an applicant tracking system to help manage the workflow of the interview process, and carefully interviewing applicants to select the strongest candidates.

Career Management

Managing your employees’ career paths can help increase satisfaction while reducing costly turnover. Building on the information collected during annual reviews, companies can learn more about employees’ Strengths and interests. With that in mind, it’s possible to work with employees on long-term career development plans. Whether you’re dealing with someone on the management track or someone interested in being a highly skilled individual contributor, career management is a critical component of talent management and employee satisfaction.

Performance Management

Once employees have been hired, it’s essential to have the right processes in place to successfully manage them. HR technology and service solutions in areas such as time and attendance can help track productivity and performance. Regular review processes help keep lines of communications open between management and staff, allowing workers to get feedback on what’s going well and where they need to improve their performance.

Organizational Strategy

Talent management activities rarely happen in isolation. Instead, strategic recruiting and support of workforce development begins with a company-level commitment. Your HR team may play a leading role in making this happen, from identifying talent management as a strategic priority to determining how and where that focus will be applied.

Focusing on talent management is a critical component of your broader workforce management strategy, because recruiting, training, retaining, and promoting the right people are essential steps in reaching your staffing goals. While human capital management initiatives encompass talent management and much more, understanding and executing the day-to-day activities of recruiting, leadership development, strategy creation, and career management are essential for successful HCM.

Leadership Development

Have you identified the next generation of leaders within your organization? That’s a vital part of the talent management process. Once these high-performance, high-potential individuals have been located, businesses need to consider the best way to retain them over the long-term. Often, this process requires a focus on training, stretch assignments, and mentoring.