Developing a successful talent management strategy
Tips, tricks, culture, and diversity
The philosophy of talent management (versus traditional workforce management) is built upon four principles: attract, develop, motivate, and retain talented employees. It’s the idea that increased performance makes a business more sustainable. This approach provides a sustainable competitive advantage and a method to outperform the competition.
Attract, Develop, Motivate, Retain
The first tactic to crafting a successful talent management strategy is to make the shift from “workforce management” — a philosophy in which HR departments treat their work as mere administrative services — to an approach that centers around the experience of the employee.
Next, help your HR staff and your managers develop faith in your talent. If you want your candidates to stick around long-term, you need to build trust and rapport. Conduct exit interviews to determine the entire context for an employee’s exit from the company.
Be mindful of the welfare and personal development of talent. This will show your candidates and current talent that the organization is serious about them as whole, entire persons, not just cogs in a machine.
Finally, understand your employees’ aspirations and build an experience to connect those aspirations with your organization’s outcomes.
These tactics will help build a strong core approach for more nuanced talent management strategy development.
Other recommended areas to consider
- Make talent a pillar of your business strategy, not an afterthought. Focus on how your talent helps create business value and drives the company’s prosperity. Consider whether talent mobility can fit into the strategy. If it does, Point C may be able to help.
- Convert business goals into talent goals. Build the goals so that they are deeply connected to the goals of your talent. Help your talent see that achieving the business’s goals helps them achieve their goals.
- Anticipate future hurdles and nip them in the bud. Ask what changes can be made to smooth the organization’s path. Is a cultural change required? Does the benefit package need updating or tailoring?
- Lead the talent management strategy with company culture. Shifts in the business’s culture can affect its relationship with its talent. Presenting these changes as opportunities can go a long way toward helping talent feel they have a place in the organization.
- Take initiative with talent management. Some initiatives include courses, internships, job rotation, and talent recognition.
- Strengthen the company’s brand with content marketing. Sharing employee expertise in a variety of places, such as blog posts, articles in external publications, and social media outlets improves recruitment and branding efforts and showcases your talent’s capabilities.
- Make use of employee referrals. If you’ve hired great talent, why not hire your talent’s great network? Happy talent means a potential pipeline of referrals that you can use to fill positions, and even better, it’s faster to hire referred talent.
Questions to ask when developing talent management strategies
- What are the organization’s goals for the next five years? Are there metrics in place to measure progress toward those goals?
- What skills does the company need in its talent pool five years from now?
- How engaged is the current talent?
- How does HR plan to fill open leadership positions?
- What’s the competition doing?
Answering these questions will go a long way toward establishing the foundations of your company’s talent management strategy. In addition, staying in touch with employees’ desire for on-the-job education and development, as well as ensuring that you’re hiring a diverse talent pool by taking a global approach to finding talent, can help your organization be more resilient.
Questions to consider when thinking about education and diversity:
- What are the critical skills your talent needs right now?
- What’s the half-life of their current skills?
- Where are the gaps in their skill sets?
- What groups are under-represented in your talent pool, and where can you find the ideal candidates to strengthen the pool?
Talent management strategies
Build versus hire
Adopting a mindset of building your talent pool vs. simply hiring generally results in longer-term retention, which saves the costs associated with hiring new talent. Perhaps more importantly, the philosophy of building a solid talent pool offers existing employees a vision of their future within the organization. From there, seeing the organization, its culture, and its prospects from the talent’s point of view can lead to a stronger relationship and better support of talent.
Personal development, motivation, and support
An effective talent management strategy reflects how employees’ needs and interests meet employers’ needs and interests, much the way two jigsaw puzzle pieces fit together. Given that prioritizing talent management leads to positive business results, having an effective talent management strategy is critical to future success.
Developing talent loyalty through offers of personal development, support, and motivation is another way of viewing the organization through the talent’s lens, then responding in ways that help build loyalty and improve retention.
Align talent strategy to business strategy
One way to define an effective talent management strategy is as “the marriage of the organization’s goals and objectives and the personal development aspirations of its present and future talent.” Consider: where can your organization offer this kind of integration of goals with your talent?
Aligning talent management strategies with business strategies offers talent a high-level view of the organization’s mission, thus making it easier for talent to buy into the mission. Having meaning and purpose behind one’s work can increase loyalty.
Organizational culture, change, and opportunities for talent
Change in organizations is inevitable. If your talent understands that change can lead to new opportunities, you’ll have a chance to build a bridge between the organization’s future and your talent’s future.
Technological transformation
Just as change is inevitable, so too is technological evolution. Given that the children of today are learning skills for jobs that won’t exist by the time they’re adults, the talent an organization onboards now will need to cope with technological change within their tenure at any company. Staying on top of those changes makes both the organization and its talent nimbler and more effective.
In addition, using analytics to determine what talent is needed and in what departments of the organization will improve the effectiveness of recruitment strategies. Data becomes all-important when an organization defines its talent management strategy.
Diversity in hiring
More than at any other time, diversity in hiring is leading to new working environments that are inclusive, equitable, and diverse for both employees and clients. Organizations are being held accountable for their decision-making in new ways, and if an organization can demonstrate its work in these directions, then both current talent and potential talent can see that working with the organization means working with an engaged, modern, multigenerational, high-performing workforce.
A key part of an effective talent management strategy is being able to openly display organizational culture in a way that is attractive to strong candidates. Effective employer branding makes an organization more desirable in the eyes of talent, a matter that extends to things like talent succession, i.e., the replacement of talent that’s exited with talent that continues to strengthen the business.
Content marketing is one way for an organization to strengthen its brand. Demonstrating your organization’s knowledge by sharing employee expertise in a variety of places, especially through social media, not only lets employees demonstrate their prowess, but can also improve recruitment effectiveness, which includes recruiting stronger succession candidates. Talent attracts talent.
Avoiding costs and losses
The costs related to the attrition of current talent, plus those costs that come from hiring and training new talent, can be considerable. Losses to performance, effects on the employee experience, and missed opportunities for growth and development add to the drain on an organization. Conversely, developing a talent management strategy focused on employee experience, growth, and development can lead to increased success in recruitment and retention of talent, which can lead to those positive business results you really need.
Interested in getting your organization up to speed with current and new talent? Give Point C a call today at 612-355-8910 or visit our Contact Us page.