What is Talent Management?
Talent management is a modern approach to human resource management that focuses on attracting and developing talented individuals. Research has found that businesses can become more profitable when they focus on helping their specialized staff members to acquire new skills and build their careers. However, the simple and transactional attempts at talent improvement used in the past, such as offering tuition reimbursement or offering training seminars, are no longer sufficient in the competitive environment. Instead, businesses must seek to help staff members learn new skills while on the job and encourage them to grow even after they return home.
Modern software platforms designed for talent development can assist businesses with attracting and retaining talent. These platforms can identify individuals within your company who would be good candidates for new roles. Additionally, modern platforms can help businesses to communicate with their staff members in more effectively. Email automation is often used extensively by these platforms to communicate with staff members at scale in the right manner and at the right time. Emails can also be used to notify managers when they should speak to specific employees. Data from a wide range of sources can be used to create these internal emails.
Talent can also be developed by strategically attracting talent from other organizations. Optimizing how you convince people to join your company is important since truly talented individuals are rarely unemployed and can usually find a new job within a matter of weeks. Software platforms can leverage publicly available information to make lists of people who could be the right match for a position. You can then email or text these people in an attempt to lure them into joining your company. Additionally, software platforms can be used in a manner similar to a CRM to regularly engage with people who are thinking about joining your company. Therefore, your company can be more effective at bringing in the talent you need.
What Is the Process for Managing Talent?
Managing talent effectively is not an endeavour you can expect to achieve overnight. Instead, you should expect to follow a process that will seek to achieve your talent development goals while continuously improving over time. No company gets the management of talent right every time, but the goal is to do so better than your competitors. If you manage your talent in a competitively superior manner, you can attract more talented individuals than other firms in your industry. Additionally, you can keep the people you need around longer and more consistently to minimize work interruptions while positioning your company to capitalize on new technological shifts.
Start by Researching Your Needs
The first step when seeking to manage talent is to assess your needs. Many businesses want to dive straight into managing their talent, but they end up making enormous mistakes when their strategy is ill-conceived. After all, a strategy will need to be formulated that will become the basis of fundamental changes to your organization. For instance, you will need to completely transform how your HR department operates, and relatively heavy investments in technology and workforce development are usually required. As always in business, if you align your investments with your business needs, you can achieve exceptional results.
You should review any data that you have about employees, your hiring process, and the people you are seeking to attract. Some of this data may be relatively unstructured, so you may need to think critically about the information you have. However, your goal should be to discover talent gaps within your existing workforce and current problems in your hiring process. You can then implement changes to resolve the specific challenges your company is facing.
Get the Right Tech Stack
Utilizing modern technology is the key to improving how your organization attracts and retains talent. As with all areas of modern business, leveraging data can significantly improve how your organization manages its talent base. Additionally, HR platforms can help your company to make better decisions and engage with talent in a more effective manner.
When choosing what technologies your organization will adopt, it is crucial to ensure that the products you purchase precisely match your needs. Many types of platforms and data systems are available from a diverse range of providers. Each of these providers usually aims to differentiate itself from its competitors by offering a range of features designed to meet a specific subset of needs. Therefore, your organization needs to conduct thorough product evaluations before choosing a solution. Online reviews can be especially helpful for ensuring that a product you choose is actually capable of meeting your specific needs.
Improve How You Perceive Talent
As mentioned earlier, the modern world requires a different way of perceiving employees than in the recent past. Before, employees were more replaceable because the state of technology made work less specialized. Today, the world is becoming far more specialized. For some key job roles, there may be only a couple dozen people in the world who are sufficiently qualified. Recruiting and retaining specialized workers is, therefore, imperative for modern businesses.
The key to keeping employees around is to treat them well, make your workplace more engaging, and provide opportunities for staff members to grow. In today’s world, it is often necessary to talk one-on-one with individual employees to determine what they want. You can then develop a personalized plan that will get them where they want to be in the future.
Common employee objectives include:
- earning an advanced degree
- transitioning to a new job role
- earning a higher salary
- developing friendships with coworkers
- spending more time at home with loved ones.
All of these objectives can be achieved if employers are motivated to develop their talent base. Of course, by helping employees to achieve their objectives, you will be able to retain their loyalty.
Transform Your Hiring Process
The hiring process that your business uses offers a substantial opportunity to improve how your business attracts talent. Today, specialized employees have just as much bargaining power as employers in the marketplace. Therefore, you need to develop a hiring process that sells talented individuals on the prospect of joining your company and gets them excited about a promising future ahead.
Many software platforms are available to streamline your hiring process. These platforms can help you to organize the talent you are trying to recruit. Additionally, some platforms are able to use the data you have to develop insights on whether someone is the right match for a job. For instance, platforms can help you to determine the right questions to ask during an interview or assist with deciding whether someone is a good fit for your corporate culture. By transforming your hiring process with modern technology, you can recruit better talent that will help your company to grow.
Why Is Managing Talent So Effective?
Managing talent using a modern approach is far more effective than former approaches to human resources. Employers can enjoy having a wider range of talent available for any job position, and they can avoid losses by reducing turnover. There are many reasons why managing talent is effective, and these reasons are explained in detail below.
Accounts for Employee Goals
One of the main reasons why the modern way of managing talent gets results is because employees are able to achieve their goals. When working for your company puts an individual on course to get what they want from life, the individual will become unlikely to quit, much more motivated, and feel a need to give back by helping your company to succeed.
Considers the Recruitment Lifecycle
Talent recruitment is often a long-term process. Ultimately, people will often decide to move to a new job in response to certain events, such as after a major argument with their manager or after getting divorced. When businesses use the assistance of modern technology to nurture relationships with talented individuals over the course of several years, they can hire people when they are ready for a change. As a result, companies can be much more effective at bringing in great talent.
Gives Employees a Reason to Stay
When your employees are getting what they want from their job, they have no reason to leave your company. For instance, an employee might aim to eventually quit their job after getting the training they need to qualify for another job role. If your company is providing that training and offering to open a relevant position when the training is complete, the employee could stay loyal to your company for decades.
Improves Employee Motivation
Any experienced manager knows that an employee who is extremely motivated can be 10 times more effective than an average employee. Satisfied employees always work hard. Most importantly, motivated employees feel much more inclined to innovate and help your company to succeed. Therefore, your business can be more effective at keeping up with new technologies when they emerge.
Uses Data to Guide Decision-Making
Almost any business activity can be enhanced by using data to make better decisions. After all, data can usually provide objective answers to matters that ordinarily would have to be guessed based on instinct. When your business uses data to discover the most effective ways of nurturing new and existing talent, your HR efforts can be far more effective.
Leverages Modern Software to Drive Performance
Modern software platforms can help to automate business processes in a way that helps your business to communicate effectively with a wider range of stakeholders. The software can inform your HR managers when actions should be taken and assist with a wide range of decision-making processes. Additionally, software platforms can help your business to analyze your historical performance over time. Therefore, you can leverage historical insights to improve performance.
Improves Other Areas of Your Business
In the process of improving how your business manages talent, you will have to make improvements to your business that can help to build equity, reduce risk, and enhance your marketing efforts. Businesses that are truly loved by their employees enjoy the benefit of having positive chatter online from insiders, including on career websites, in social media posts, and in third-party online articles. When you treat your employees well, your reputation can improve dramatically in ways that can make your company more attractive to investors, partners, and customers.
What Is the Talent Management Model?
The talent management model is a framework that HR managers can use to improve how they manage talent. This model is useful for planning and developing a strategy. There are five stages to this approach to managing talent:
Planning
In the first stage, HR teams focus on formulating a strategy for managing talent. To create a strategy, it is crucial to start by fully understanding and internalizing the overall business strategy. A plan can then be developed for the workforce that helps to develop talent while achieving overall business objectives.
Additionally, keep in mind that the planning stage should take into account the importance of regularly revising a strategy as new information is discovered. Therefore, it is important to establish metrics and begin gathering data.
Attracting
In the second stage, businesses use a marketing and sales process to attract talent. Many organizations focus on creating compelling employee value propositions. These tools can then be used to guide marketing efforts that can appeal to both long-term employees and temporary consultants.
Developing
The third stage involves developing employees once they have been recruited into your organization. Development efforts should start by instituting an effective onboarding process that teaches employees your company culture and gets them optimistic about their future in your company. A combination of performance appraisals and one-on-one development meetings can then be used to provide individual employees with the right mix of resources to help them thrive in the workplace.
Retaining
After investing in your workforce, you will then need to do the actual work required to retain talent. A major part of employee retention is assessing how much keeping each employee means to your business. You can then use this information to quantify the value of pay and incentives that your business can afford to provide to each employee.
Additionally, it is important during the retaining stage to develop your company culture in the proper direction. If you keep your culture on the right course, employees are much more likely to stay with your company.
Transitioning
Finally, your organization should seek to seize opportunities available at the end of an employee’s career at your company. You should seek to improve how you develop succession plans. Also, it is important to develop strategies that can be used to encourage important employees who quit to reconsider their decision. In some cases, you may want to continue nurturing an individual who quits by using a long-term talent acquisition strategy. Additionally, you should aim to optimize exit interviews to enable your company to learn from mistakes and pain points that may have led to the loss of key talent.
Read more about talent management in our talent management infographic.
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Developing a Talent Management Strategy
Creating a strategy for managing your talent should be perceived as a long-term effort. When you first get started, you will usually make mistakes that will need to be accounted for in the future. Therefore, be sure to gather the right data to understand how your strategy can be improved in the future.
The bottom line, however, is that nearly every organization can benefit from managing talent more effectively. By making full use of the technologies that are available to improve how talent is managed, businesses can improve employee productivity while achieving long-term growth. Therefore, businesses should start by conducting thorough research online that can be used to devise a solid strategy for managing talent in a highly effective way.
