Talent Management Strategy introduction, Developing a Talent Management Strategy

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.