What is talent management?
The process of planning for talent is broad plan that outlines the way a business will hire, keep and developing the current and future employees.
The process of planning for talent is based on four areas of focus:
Cost: Companies are looking to make the most of their investment in their workforce , which means spending money as efficiently as is possible. Furthermore, today’s workers are increasingly remote and the company’s talent pool is now global. Employing talent from various countries with better pay packages helps companies stay in the game and reduce costs.
Demographics: Retired and aging employees as well as outdated skills could cause problems for businesses that don’t have an approach to deal with it. Planning for talent can be strategies to improve the skills of and retrain employees who they already have in your business.
Management: Keeping the top talent within your organization isn’t simple. The focus of talent planning is to keep the best employees in your organization by creating succession plans for career progression to replace the top executives and senior managers when they’re ready to leave.
Flexibility Work-life balance: The days of 9-5 are beginning to disappear. Today employees are looking at the flexibility of a company and its innovation when deciding on their career paths. With the help of talent planning, it’s much easier to prepare for these changes and to accommodate the best talent within the company.
Effective talent planning requires a lot of steps.
1. Be sure to align your company’s business objectives
The first step towards successful talent management is to know precisely what your business’s objectives are.
It’s essential to get an accurate picture of the expansion plans your company has and opportunities in the market so that you can establish the company’s objectives for business today and in the future. Be careful not to get this process confused with the annual budgeting process which considers the rate of employee turnover and retention. This is more than this. It is important to define how your company will look in five years’ time, how you’d like products or services to be with, and what skills and talent will be required to make it occur.
Do you require additional software developers? Do any of your top managers require instruction on how to adjust to a modern, flexible work environment?
Look at your own employees and the talent you’re hoping to recruit from outside. This is the only way to gain more insight into the things your company requires to reach its goals.
2. Use and implement talent analytics
In the next step, you can use your data to assist you prepare for the future and your current talent requirements.
Given the importance of using talent analytics it’s surprising how few they’re being used today to monitor the development of talent. A Deloitte study found that only 4percent of businesses have predictive talent analytics tools to aid in the management of talent and only 14% of employers have a program for talent analytics in place.
Implementing and using analytics for talent will help you analyze the talents and abilities that your business already has. It also lets users carry out a complete gap analysis and identify the gaps within your company. Skills that were sought-after in 2010 may not be what you’ll require over the next five years.
For instance, analytics on talent can reveal the employees you have who have higher productivity than others and which ones have more advanced abilities than others, or even which employees are the most active in their work. The information on talent also lets you assess expected salaries as well as benefits for current and future job openings within your organization, so that you can offer better deals and retain the top performers in your workforce.
3. Find out the most important hiring requirements and develop a hiring strategy
Understanding your business’s objectives is a prerequisite for identifying your company’s key need for recruiting.
Begin by talking to hiring managers from various departments on their strategies and plans. Find out how many employees in important positions such as executives and managers they anticipate will retire or leave their posts soon so that you can determine which ones to prioritize. Next, consider the hiring decisions you’ll have to create to ensure that your future goals are achieved.
After this, after that, you can develop your hiring strategy. Then, break down the numbers of new hires that you’ll need to recruit to fill the current and future gaps in skills and also the budget and recruiters to get it done. You can then begin analyzing these roles and needs in isolation and develop the best recruitment method to draw the most qualified candidates to fill each.
4. Identify high-potential employees
In addition to creating a hiring strategy to fill in the gaps in skills Take a look at the talents you already have within your business.
Review the top performers within the lower ranks of your business and see whether any of them possess potential for leadership. Examine their skills and their determination and suitability and then evaluate their potential to determine whether they possess the qualities is required to become the next leader in your business. The hiring and filling of posts internally makes lots of sense since employees with high potentials are significantly more valuable to companies than workers with low potential.
A simple method of determining whether an employee is a leader is to utilize an assessment like Hogan’s High Potential Model. The model makes use of personality tests which allow companies to create programs that are high-potential. Hogan’s chief executive officer, Ryan Ross, says that assessing candidates objectively lets you focus on their strengths and weaknesses without being influenced by “politics or relationships or the context.”
The model assesses potential for leadership through three components:
- Foundations What an employee does with their career, especially if they’re rewarding to manage and well-organized
- Emergence: How an employee is distinguished from their colleagues, develops connections with business partners strategically, makes use of their influence and is seen as an authority
- Effectiveness: How an individual can create and sustain teams that are high-performing, which ensure the success of an organization
The way to measure employees offers businesses a bird’s-eye perspective of their working habits as well as their potential for leadership and the ideal job goals. When you’ve got a good grasp of these areas it’s much easier to locate internal employees to raise and fill leadership roles later on.
5. Develop your employees
While we’ve mentioned the importance of identifying people who are able to become leaders in the near future, it’s important to be focused on each employee.
Planning for talent requires an approach that is focused on the development of each employee on your team. Your strategy for talent planning will provide employees with educational opportunities, in addition to the opportunity to receive internal guidance by senior managers and leaders.
Why? The reason is that everyone on your team must be able to see the career path that you envision for your organization.
A mobility program within your company helps your company to refresh employees currently employed and fill in the gaps within departments without the need to search externally. In addition having an internal mobility plan assists in identifying collaboration opportunities that allow employees to make use of different skills sets to finish projects quicker.
Then, monitor your employees’ ongoing upskilling or training efforts. If they’re taking on more training, get in touch with them once they’re nearing the end of their journey to talk with them about the next steps. If you can connect with employees who are striving to keep their skills in top shape and sharper, the better chances you’ll be able to keep them in your organization rather than losing them to an opponent.