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.
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.
Definition
A conscious, deliberate approach undertaken to attract, develop and retain people with aptitude and abilities to meet current and future organisational needs. It is 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 organisational needs.
It refers to the skills of attracting highly skilled employees, of integrating new employees, and developing and retaining current employees to meet short term and long term objectives. Companies engaging in a talent management strategy shift the responsibility of employees from the human resource department to all managers throughout the organisation.
Talent management is also known as Human Capital Management.
It refers to the process of developing and fostering new workers through on boarding, developing and keeping current workers and attracting highly skilled workers at other companies to come work in their company.
Talent management decisions are driven by a set of two factors- organizational core competencies and position-specific competencies. The competency set may include knowledge, skills, experience, and personal traits. Talent management is the recruitment, development, promotion and retention of people, planned and executed in line with organisation's short term and long term business goals.
Why Talent management....??
The fundamental significance of successful talent management practices:
The key enabler of any organisation is talent
The quality of people - last true competitive differentiator
Talent drives performance
FIVE Essentials of Talent Management:
Organisations adopting a talent management approach will focus on co-ordinating and integrating:
Recruitment - ensuring the right people are attracted to the organisation. Right people at right time in right place.
Retention - developing and implementing practices that reward and support employees, which enables employees to retain in the organisation.
Employee development - ensuring continuous informal and formal learning and development
Leadership and "high potential employee" development - specific development programs for existing and future leaders.
Performance management - specific processes that nurture and support performance, including feedback/measurement. There can be both positive and negative performance.
Workforce planning - planning for business and general changes, including the older workforce and current/future skills shortages
Culture - development of a positive, progressive and high performance "way of operating". Organisation culture enables employees to perform efficiently and effectively.
Talent management as a Strategic Approach
Talent management is viewed as a strategic approach to managing human capital through ATTRACTING, RETAINING, DEVELOPING, and TRANSITIONING of employees.
ATTRACTING TALENT: Creating Assessment and Selection Strategies and Processes
RETAINING TALENT: Reducing Turnover and Aligning Talent with Organisational Goals
DEVELOPING TALENT: Challenging your people with Executive Coaching and Leadership Development Programs
TRANSITION TALENT: Creating Goodwill through Career Transition Programs
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.
The management should be innovative and proactive to win the war over the distinctive competitive advantage of the competitors. With the next-generation predictive modelling systems, talent management and workforce planning can be transformed from reactive administrative functions to proactive systems which are capable of accurately forecasting talent demand right to the individual job. Attracting and nurturing talent has become the call of the hour, attracting brains has more difficult than foreign direct investment. However, talent management is what will make India enduringly competitive. Strategies are to be framed for overcoming talent shortages, to bring them to companies and to retain them. Obstacles are to be identified and overcome. Talent could flourish if the enabling social and physical infrastructure is in place.
"Talent is footless and youth will seek a better quality of life where ever and whenever" - Anil Ambani.
Attracting the Right Workers to the Organization
To win the war for talent means more than just attracting workers to a company. It means to attract the right worker-the one who will be enthusiastic about his/her work. Enthusiasm for the job requires an employee to be more than having a good attitude about receiving good pay and benefits-it's like an employee's goals and aspirations also match those of the company. Therefore, it's important to identify the employee's preferences and mutually assess how well they align themselves with the company strategy. To do this, the organization must be clear about the type of employee it wants. Companies do this with their customers: marketing managers identify specific segments of buyers to target for selling products. Red Bull, for example, targets college and young age consumers, whereas Slim Fast targets for adults of all ages who are overweight. Both companies sell beverages but to completely different costumer segment. Similarly, companies essentially have to develop a profile of the type of workers they want to attract. Do they want entrepreneurial category who seek autonomy and continual development, or do they want team workers who enjoy collaboration, stability, synchronization and structure. Neither of employee type can be inherently "better" than another, but an employee who craves self-work may feel highly constrained within the very same structure in which a team player would thrive and prosper.
Earlier, we said that it was essentially important to mutually assess how well employees' preferences are aligned with the company's goal and strategy. One-half of "mutual" categories refer to the company, but the other half refers to the job doers. They also need to analyze whether they'll fit well into the company as a whole. One way to help the prospective hires to make this determination is to describe to them the "signature experience" that sets a company apart. As defined by "Tamara Erickson" and "Lynda Gratton", your company's signature experience is the distinct practice that shows what it's really like to work at your company.
Let's see the signature experiences of two companies, Whole Foods and Goldman Sachs. At Whole Foods, team-based hiring and creating is a signature experience-employees in every department vote on whether a new employee will be retained after a month trial period. This demonstrates to the potential hires that Whole Foods is all about collaboration and team work. In contrast, signature experience of Goldman Sachs's is multiple one-on-one interviews. The story they often tell is that of the prospective hires i.e. of the MBA student who went through 60 interviews before being hired. This story signals to new hires that they need to be comfortable meeting new people and building networks across the whole company.
The added advantage of hiring workers who match one's organizational culture is that they will be less likely to leave the company just to get a handsome compensation.
With plenty of people losing their jobs these days, the hiring gets even tougher as you get hundreds of applications each day. When productivity is in great demand and everybody is on the lookout for the best possible worker available, you need to get very creative to attract the right people to your company.
Five Innovative Ways to hire the Best Talents for one's Business:-
Twenty years ago, businesses won't even consider contract job worker. The dilemma of those times took freelancing and temporary work to the next level altogether. When you can't simply afford to spend all those money on a single employee, you can cut both ways:
1. Being Internet-Savvy
Why waste precious time sifting through all those replies you get from online job boards when you can find talents by using the right keywords? Smart freelancers know this and they include relevant words to describe their skills, making people find them faster online.
2. Define Your Wants:
Many small businesses don't know what they are looking for in a worker. This is why they try to find Jack and Jane of all trades. Based on what you require for the project, you can narrow down your search in skills someone specializes in.
3. Going Social
If you want quicker response, minus the cost of advertising jobs the old way, you may always leverage and connect with people on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. All you have to do is post your requirements and wait for replies.
4. Looking for Happy Workers
You need to consider those who are driven and motivated by their passion to do the job that you require. It can be tough to find a freelancer with this quality, but always stick to people who are happy at what they do for the chance to excel is greatest. There will be stressful situations, but those who are passionate about the job will be committed to your vision - no matter what.
5. Nurturing Your Brand
Invest your efforts in building your social proof as one brand and explore new ways on how technology can build your company's image. The best talents want to work for the best! You have to put love in your social media campaign to get that visibility which will attract experts in a snap.
What Is Retention?
Employee retention is a process in which the employees are encouraged to remain with the organization for the maximum period of time or until the completion of the project.
In today's scenario, employees are not the ones who don't have good opportunities in hand. As soon as they feel dissatisfied with the current employer or the job, they switch over to the next job. It is the responsibility of the employer to retain their best employees. Retention involves five major things:
Compensation
Growth
Support
Relationship
Environment
Compensation -
Compensation constitutes the largest part of the employee retention process. The employees always have high expectations regarding their compensation packages. Compensation packages vary from industry to industry. So an attractive compensation package plays a critical role in retaining the employees.
While setting up the packages, the following components should be kept in mind:
Salary and monthly wage: It is the biggest component of the compensation package. It is also the most common factor of comparison among employees. Time to time increase in the salaries and wages of employees should be done. This increase should be based on the employee's performance and his contribution to the organization.
Bonus: Bonuses are usually given to the employees at the end of the year or on a festival.
Economic Benefits: It includes paid holidays, leave travel concession, etc.
Long-term Incentives: They include stock options or stock grants.
Health Insurance: It saves employees money as well as gives them a peace of mind that they have somebody to take care of them in bad times.
After retirement: It includes payments like EPF (Employee Provident Fund) etc.
Growth -
Growth and development are the integral part of every individual's career. If an employee can not foresee his path of career development in his current organization, there are chances that he will leave the organization as soon as he gets an opportunity.
The important factors in employee growth that an employee looks for himself are:
Work profile
Personal growth
Training and development
Support -
Lack of support from management can sometimes serve as a reason for employee retention. Supervisor should support his subordinates in a way so that each one of them is a success. Management should try to focus on its employees and support them not only in their difficult times at work but also through the times of personal crisis. Management can support employees by providing them recognition and appreciation.
The feedback from supervisor helps the employee to feel more responsible, confident and empowered.
Relationship -
Sometimes the relationship with the management and the peers becomes the reason for an employee to leave the organization. The management is sometimes not able to provide an employee a supportive work culture and environment in terms of personal or professional relationships. This decreases employee's interest and he becomes de-motivated. It leads to less satisfaction and eventually attrition.
A supportive work culture helps grow employee professionally and boosts employee satisfaction. To enhance good professional relationships at work, the management should keep the following points in mind.
Respect for the individual: It is must in any organization.
Relationship with the immediate manager: A manager designs and plans the work for each employee. It is his duty to involve the employee in the processes of the organization.
Relationship with colleagues: Promote team work, also in different departments as well. This will induce competition as well as improve the relationships among colleagues.
Promote an employee based culture: The employee should know that the organization is there to support him at the time of need. An employee based culture may include decision making authority, availability of resources, open door policy etc.
Individual Development: Taking proper care of employees includes acknowledgment to the employee's personal goals. Create opportunities for their career growth by providing mentorship programs, certification, educational courses, etc.
Environment:
It's not about managing retention; it's also about managing people. If an organization is able to manage its people well, retention will take care of itself.
Organization environment includes different factors like:
Culture
Values
Company reputation
Quality of people in the organization
Employee development and career growth
Risk taking
Leading technologies
Trust
Types of environment the employee needs in an organization:
Learning environment: It includes continuous learning and improvement of the individual, certifications and provision for higher studies, etc.
Support environment: Organization can provide support in the form of work-life balance.
Work environment: Efficient managers, supportive co-workers, challenging work, involvement in decision-making, clarity of work and responsibilities, and recognition.
Employee Retention Strategies -
They can be broadly classified into three categories:
Low Level
Personalized well done and thank-you cards from supervisors
Periodic days off for good performance
Give rewards (gift, certificates, monetary and non monetary rewards)
Scholarships for employee's children
Providing benefits like Home insurance plans, legal insurance, travel insurance etc.
Providing perks: It includes coupons, discounts, rebates, etc.
Fun at work
Medium Level
To appreciate and recognize a well done job
Give special bonuses for successfully completing firm-sponsored certifications.
Provide benefit programs for family support.
Give medical care reimbursement.
High Level
Promoting Work/Life Effectiveness and balance
Develop flexible working schedules
New ideas must be appreciated and risk-taking must be rewarded
Show support for individual initiative
Encourage creativity
Organization must encourage professional training and development and/or personal growth opportunities.
Understand the benefits of good talent management.
Talking about the talent management we define it as "Talent management is a complex collection of connected HR processes that delivers a simple fundamental benefit for any organization"
It also refers to the skills of attracting highly skilled workers, of integrating new workers, and developing and retaining current workers to meet current and future business objectives. The method to attract and retain profitable employees, as it is increasingly more competitive between firms and of strategic importance, has come to be known as "WAR OF TALENT". Talent management is also known as HCM (Human Capital Management).
Talent Sourcing
In order to have competitive advantage, the first thing that a company needs to have is effective and good talent sourcing so that right people are assigned to right jobs. When talent sourcing is done by an organization to a consultant firm, following steps are generally followed by the consultants:
To understand the structure and culture of the client organization, their business activities and future plans.
To gain full information about the job for which client needs to hire people - job description, location, working environment, approximate compensation etc.
To identify potential candidates from current database or by putting advertisements.
To shortlist the candidates by taking their interviews, making them fill questionnaires or by some other method.
To present the candidates who are shortlisted.
To help the client in negotiating the offer with the candidates.
To take follow up with the candidate as well as the client organization to ensure both are satisfied.
Why Talent sourcing:
In this competitive environment, one needs to be fast enough to capture the best talent in the market for which innovative channels are required. Following are the reasons why companies go for talent sourcing:
Cost effective - A company does not require giving advertisements and shortlist the applicants. Advertisements are getting costlier and also they might not have the correct reach. Instead by talent sourcing, the HR consultant provides the shortlisted candidates.
Less time - A company does not require preparing advertisements and interviewing large number of candidates. This saves a lot of time of the employees.
Diversity - Interviewer might unintentionally select candidates who have qualities similar to them. This can kill diversity in the organization.
Companies entering new market/place - If a company is entering a new sector or opening an office in new location (Indian company in South Africa); they might not have expertise to hire people and can go for talent sourcing.
There are companies which are not big enough to have HR department. They also prefer sourcing talent.
Why Talent Management?
Personnel cost is the largest category of spending in most of the organizations. Analysis of your recruiting and hiring methods provides the immediate Personnel visibility and insights you need for significant improvement. Performance management provides the ongoing processes and practices to maintain Personnel. Today, many organizations are struggling with silos of HR processes and technologies. 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 is what ultimately drives business success and creates value. Leading organizations rely on various services to assess, acquire, develop, and align talent with business objectives while reducing process costs, improving quality of hire, reducing risk, and achieving higher levels of performance.
Issues faced by HR ….
Heightened competition for skilled workers
Impending retirement of the baby boomers
Low levels of employee engagement
Acknowledgement of the high cost of turnover
Arduous demands of managing global workforces
Importance of succession planning
Off shoring and outsourcing trends
Benefits of talent management
Research from the Kenexa Research Institute (KRI) has examined workers' views of their organizations' dedication to talent management and its effect on employee engagement.
The report is based on the analysis of data drawn from a representative sample of workers surveyed in 2007 through Work Trends, KRI's annual survey of worker opinions. The survey included staff from Brazil, China, Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the United States.
It confirms what academics and practitioners have been saying for years, namely those policies such as career path programs, goal development and monitoring, regular feedback sessions with managers, tracking progress have a demonstrable effect on employee execution and motivation
But it also found that across all six countries, organizations with a focus on talent management have employees who are more engaged and more satisfied with their jobs and companies overall.
Having a strong talent management culture also favorably impacts how workers rate their pride in their organizations and willingness to recommend them as places to work.
Additionally, if employees have favorable views of their organizations' talent management practices, they are more likely to have confidence in the future of the organizations.
Employees who believe in their companies' talent management efforts also have more favorable opinions of their management, the research found. These employees believe their managers effectively manage the workload and that senior management demonstrates employees are important to the success of the company.
They also are more likely to feel a sense of job security, be satisfied with on-the-job training, feel that performance is evaluated fairly and experience greater feelings of personal accomplishment.
Seven "secrets" for a good talent management
Let Class-B people do the things of Class A
Let b-class people to do things this way a class is different from the talent high consumption, but also different from the talent overload, more scientific, just right, even if the employees feel a slight pressure, but not so much feel the pressure is too large, the work slightly challenging job to help motivate employees to forge ahead. Immediately adjust when meet the best results
This is a way to break the routine. The growth of talent is a cyclical regular; usually a person in a position to work on time to three to four years is appropriate... In a timely manner to adjust the position and job talents, for their continuous improvement, continue to grow a great benefit, it is an effective compound talent created one of the methods.
Comments must be outstanding more than the proportion of 70%
For a long time, whether it is government agencies, public or business units, every sum awards, when the proportion of outstanding less than 30% generally, this approach seems to become a social practice, have been widely recognized. In such a social context, we find that there a few units the opposite end of each year as their numbers remain outstanding more than 70%.
Let employees do what they want to do
Development of human resources is to create a relaxed social environment, in possible, try to meet the staff interests, hobbies and aspirations, let them do what they like to do, let them dry long wanted to do, their own jobs, the mood comfortable to the development of its length, to fully release their energy.
Move management
Move management has two advantages: first, to grasp the staff are first-hand materials; second, subordinates can enhance their sense of responsibility and pride.
Starvation therapy
The so-called hunger therapy, that is, let the subordinates eat 70% full, so that they always maintain a state of hunger, which helps enhance the inherent vitality of the staff.
The special quality of leadership
The leader has some special qualities necessary to the development of subordinates, such as "lazy", "simple" and so on. "Lazy" is the leader of distress do not have to hands-on, fulfil their duties to subordinates a certain autonomy. "Simple" refers to the leaders to play a subordinate to note the enthusiasm and creativity of the work in the deployment.
Developing Talent
Superior talent will be a prime source to achieve competitive advantage thus making the phenomena necessary. Any company looking to achieve the same must have a mindset to manage talent throughout the organization starting from the very top in the hierarchy.
Creating a winning employee value proposition
A company possessing a superior employee value proposition have a better answer to the question "Why would a talented person like to work here??" than the ones not possessing the same. At a home depot a store manager told ""This is my $50 million business; I can double it or run it into the ground. Where else could I get that independence and challenge at 33?"
Creating a winning employee proposition is to tailor a company's brands and the products that it offers, the job that it intends to offer to the specific people it wants to find and keep. Companies look for a talent pool that can be segmented into mainly four groups:
"Go with a Winner" - Executives seek growth and advancement in a highly successful company; they are less concerned with its mission and location.
"Big risk, Big reward" - Executives value compensation and career advancement over their company's success or its active role in their personal development
"Save the World" - Executives demand an inspiring mission and exciting challenges, and care less about compensation and personal development.
"Lifestyle" - Executives are more interested in flexibility with respect to lifestyle choices, geographic location, and compatibility with the boss than in company growth and excitement.
We can see what all can be done by a company to become a value proposition, although money alone cannot become a great employee value proposition To get the people they want, 39 percent of top-quintile companies pay whatever it takes, compared with 26 percent of their mid-quintile counterparts. Once t0hey are on board, faster career progression is the most effective way to put individual high performers on a different compensation trajectory without disrupting overall pay structures.
In order to manage talent it is not possible for any company to give everything to its peers, ideally they should simply figure out who they are aiming for and make sure that the brand is tailored towards the talent segment it is wishing to attract.
Sourcing great Talent
Having a mindset to manage talent and possessing powerful Employee value propositions aren't just enough; very much of importance is to poses robust sourcing strategies. Few companies are good at specifying what they are looking for i.e. what are the qualities that would transform into success for them as in HP looks for smart engineers who are good team players. Home depot wants customer oriented entrepreneurial leaders while Enron looks for independent deal makers with a financial bent.
Although the problem is that most companies don't know what they really want. They must find out and that too really quick otherwise the recruitment program will be flawed before that even begins. Once you come to know what you want there are number of routes that you can take, some get what you need through acquisitions while others outsource by snapping up in the people they believe are already trained elsewhere.
Some strategies might work better for some companies than others for example some companies that grow slowly have less opportunities to develop people through rotation so they tend to get talent in from outside. Looking at certain live examples like HP captures people early through summer internships and part-time jobs for high school students. Home Depot hires its competitors' best employees. Enron recruits retired military officers because "people from the army are used to travelling a lot, and this work is like what they have been doing."
Developing talent Aggressively
Elevating talent throughout the company, developing a sound employee value proposition and having a powerful sourcing strategy, other than these there are also a number of specific steps that companies should try and engage in order to complete their talent program.
Put people in Jobs before they are ready
Various researches have confirmed that the key to development is "a big job before you expect it", yet there is only 10% of the 200 employees believe that this strategy is used by their organization to promote talent. All the companies can do better at this stage, at a structural level they should consider what more can be done from smaller autonomous units. Overall characteristics that make a job good for development are the ones that are attractive in the first place with an exception that executives prefer to have full control over everything that they are looking to do.
Put a good feedback system in place
Everyone is fully aware how important feedback and coaching are still these are not done well by companies. Implementing these would raise the performance of everyone in the company. Fortunately, companies can nudge leaders to offer more feedback through "360-degree feedback" programs (where contributions come from those above, below, and around an individual) and other formal mechanisms. Arrow Electronics uses its 360-degree feedback system, monitored by CEO Steve Kaufman himself, to determine whether managers are actually providing the feedback and coaching that they should.
Understand the scope of your retention problem
More companies tend to improve recruitment and development however only a few realize that there might be a retention problem. Companies focus on only the top 200 executives where the attrition is only 4% but the attrition is high at early and middle ranks of managers. Just as account managers nurture and develop their key accounts someone in the company should be responsible for nurturing and developing every key employee, each one of which should never fall of the screen.
Move on the poor performers now
In order to make sure that employees at the lower level perform well, high performers should run the company to motivate the low level talented employees. Our research suggests that taking action in dealing with poor performers is the most difficult and least exploited area for a company in dealing with building talent. A company undergoing a turnaround will have to bring in top talent fast to bring a transformation within the employee value proposition program.
