Talent Management in HRM

What is Talent Management?

Talent management is defined as the methodically organized, strategic process of getting the right talent onboard and helping them grow to their optimal capabilities keeping organizational objectives in mind.

The process thus involves identifying talent gaps and vacant positions, sourcing for and onboarding suitable candidates, growing them within the system and developing needed skills, training for expertise with a future focus, and effectively engaging, retaining, and motivating them to achieve long-term business goals. The definition brings to light the overarching nature of talent management – how it permeates all aspects of the human resources at work while ensuring that the organization attains its objectives. It is thus the process of getting the right people on board and enabling them to enable the business at large.

 Talent Management Process

Let’s get into these key steps in the process of managing talent effectively:

1. Planning: Like in any process with a set outcome, planning is the first step in the process of talent management. It involves the following identifying where the gaps lie – the human capital requirement, formulating job descriptions for the necessary key roles to help guide sourcing and selection, and developing a workforce plan for recruitment initiatives.

2. Attracting: Based on the plan, the natural next step is to decide whether the talent requirements should be filled in from within the organization or from external sources. Either way, the process would involve attracting a healthy flow of applicants. The usual external sources include job portals, social networks, and referrals. The talent pools that need to be tapped into must be identified in advance to keep the process as smooth and efficient as possible. This is where the kind of employer brand that the organization has built for itself, comes into play because that decides the quality of applications that come in.

3. Selecting: This involves using a string of tests and checks to find the right match for the job – the ideal person-organization fit. Written tests, interviews, group discussions, and psychometric testing along with an in-depth analysis of all available information on the candidate on public access platforms help in gauging an all-rounded picture of the person. Today there are software and AI-enabled solutions that recruiters can use to skim through a vast population of CVs to focus on the most suitable options and to find the ideal match.

4. Developing: Quite a few organizations today operate on the idea of hiring for attitude and training for skills. This makes sense because while you would want a predisposition to certain skill sets, it is the person that you are hiring and not the CV. Developing employees to help them grow with the organization and training them for the expertise needed to contribute to business success also builds loyalty and improves employee engagement. This begins with an effective onboarding program to help the employee settle into the new role, followed by providing ample opportunities for enhancing the skills, aptitude, and proficiency while also enabling growth through counseling, coaching, mentoring, and job-rotation schemes.

5. Retaining: For any organization to be truly successful, and sustainably, talent needs to be retained effectively. Most organizations try to retain their best talent through promotions and increments, offering opportunities for growth, encouraging involvement in special projects and decision-making, training for more evolved roles, and rewards and recognition programs.

6. Transitioning: Effective talent management focuses on the collective transformation and evolution of the organization through the growth of individual employees. This involves making each employee feel that they are a part of a bigger whole. Providing retirement benefits, conducting exit interviews and effective succession planning might seem like unrelated career points but they are all transition tools that enable the shared journey.

(Ghosh, 2021)

Talent Management in Human Resource Management (HRM)

Talent management typically embraces several responsibilities of HR. However, just because you have an HR team, it does not mean you are managing talent. You need to have a talent management strategy in place devised just for your organization to achieve optimal outcomes. Since talent management capitalizes on employees, it helps you maximize the importance of employees.

·       By hiring and developing skilled employees, your company becomes more robust and better adapted to handle changes and risks.

·       Skilled employees can find means to harness innovative technological capabilities and solve problems or develop original ideas.

·       When employees feel appreciated at a company, they know they will have many possibilities to develop. They are less prone to look for work elsewhere.

·       Talent management brands your organization as an employer. It helps you to pull the best applicants for future hires.

·       Producing inspiring talent motivates other employees and helps them improve.

 

How to Incorporate Talent Management in Your Organization?

HR teams grapple with incorporating a talent management strategy that maps out their goals and priorities. The causes are different, but without a talent management strategy, the outcomes are usually the same.

The most challenging part is getting started with the appropriate framework for the strategy. Let us walk through the standard steps in a strategic planning process, so you can utilize them to sketch your HR talent management strategy:

·       Begin by listing your organization’s strategic goals and determining any modifications or new directions for the organization.

·       Identify and analyze the essential drivers and hurdles that could influence your organization’s capability to accomplish its goals.

·       Analyze where your organization is and where it wants to be and address gaps to accomplish your business goals.

·       Based on the objectives, difficulties, and gaps, identify HR goals to help the organization achieve its goals.

·       Do an inventory of your existing talent management processes to identify if you need to make any changes to support your goals.

·       Track essential metrics to report progress and success or take corrective steps as needed. It will help you determine if the goal or linked action was practical and is worth retaining.

(Gurchiek, 2006)

Benefits of Talent Management

Prioritizing employee satisfaction and development improves the business's potential for its own growth and value. Specifically, some of the advantages of talent management for employers may include the ability to:

• Recruit top talent: Businesses that value and support their workforce can bolster their reputation and become known as an employer of choice qualities that many of today's job candidates are looking for in an employer.
• Keep productivity up (even after employee departures): When employees leave, there may be gaps in coverage, but a strong talent management strategy helps ensure that open positions can be filled quickly, all while keeping operations running in the meantime.
• Improve productivity: A strong talent management strategy helps employees develop their skills and reach their full potential (whether it's training, mentorship, career pathing, or other approaches), which can make the business more efficient as well.
• Reduce costs: Finding and hiring new employees is more costly than retaining valued staff. It also takes time and resources that can stretch HR and hiring teams thin. The cost of a bad hire can have long-lasting and damaging effects on a business.
• Empower employees: By having a firm understanding of workers' skills and abilities, you can empower teams to develop new methods of problem-solving and take on new challenges.
• Keep lines of communication open: A company that values two-way communication and feedback (for example, through the use of check-ins and reviews), demonstrates its commitment to engaging employees and keeping their needs top of mind.

(HCM, 2023)

 What does a talent management team do?

The talent management team in HR has several responsibilities, including:

1. Recruiting top talent

The primary duty of a talent management team is to hire employees. These are some recruiting tasks they may manage:

• Write job descriptions
• Review application materials
• Conduct interviews
• Use applicant tracking systems

2. Managing employee performance

It's important to follow up with employees after hiring them to ensure they're successful. The talent management team monitors employee performance by tracking their attendance and productivity. They provide feedback to employees in performance reviews, which allows employees to improve.

3. Developing training programs

An important role of the talent management team is to help keep employees working for the company. One way to accomplish this task is through mentoring and providing training materials to help employees succeed in their roles. Their success leads to job satisfaction, which can increase retention.

4. Advancing career opportunities

The talent management team works with employees to create long-term goals with the company such as getting promotions and developing their skills. Helping to advance career opportunities can increase job satisfaction and encourage employees to stay with the company for longer.

5. Organizing management strategy

Recruiting, training, developing, and retaining strategies are essential for reaching staffing goals. The talent management team helps create this strategy by collaborating with other departments within the company. To support the workforce, HR makes plans with managers on how to improve the work environment, provide adequate training to new hires, and help current employees further develop their skills.

Talent management provides a unique perspective of the company's needs and reviews employee performance. This helps to determine where management can focus to meet goals. For example, if all departments are low on productivity, HR may notice this while doing performance reviews and determine the solution is to hire more staff to handle the workload, which may increase productivity.

(Cooke, 2023)

The Future of Talent Management

The future of talent management centers on modernization. Those companies and organizations that do not modernize should expect to get left behind.

Gone are the days of 30-year careers in one organization, when employees started at the bottom of the personnel ladder and tried to work their way up. In fact, most new entries into the workforce are likely to change jobs every three to five years and hold 12+ jobs in five to six different companies. Furthermore, these individuals will change professions two to three times and, in the process, will be working for a very long time.

So, what is the reason for this development?

Simply, workers are living longer, healthier lives and choose to continue working for a variety of reasons. It has been said before that Baby Boomers are retiring, and while that’s true, it isn’t happening at the rate of first thought.

One of those reasons focuses on the continuing technology disruption. Simply, technology creates this concept of the half-life skill. Essentially, the half-life of a learned skill is five years. That means much of what a worker learned 10 years ago is now obsolete and half of what the worker learned five years ago is irrelevant.

Mix that with a volatile business environment and it translates to workers’ necessity to change jobs. In doing so, they must be prepared for the evolving future of work. (Guides, 2023)

Rethinking Talent Management

HR must find ways to source new talent by specifically looking at the open global talent economy.  This allows HR to find talent anywhere in a variety of formats.

Next, companies should focus on the learning and development aspect.

Workers want to continue to learn, so companies must offer platforms that create an environment of continuous, ongoing learning with new opportunities to learn grow, and contribute to the organization.

Finally, companies need their talent management strategies to be nimbler.

Talent practices need to be reinvented and converted into an ecosystem that helps with the rapid deployment and development of talent by using agile processes and systems that help HR respond to talent.  (Davis, 2023)

Conclusion

Talent management is a crucial aspect of organizational success that involves a strategic approach to attracting and developing the right talent to meet the company’s objectives. By prioritizing talent acquisition and nurturing employee growth, companies can create a highly skilled, engaged, and productive workforce. A talent management team performs a critical role within companies to recruit new hires and maintain the workforce. The talent management team addresses staffing needs, helps improve the work environment trains employees, and ensures job satisfaction. If you're a human resources (HR) expert, learning more about talent management can help you improve engagement and increase retention.

Therefore, talent management in HR is essential because acquiring candidates with top talents helps improve the company workforce and can expand opportunities.

 References.

Cooke, N., 2023. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/talent-management-hr. [Online]
Available at: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/talent-management-hr
[Accessed 23 Nov 2023].

Davis, G., 2023. Talent Management- What Is It and Why Is It Important?. [Online]
Available at: https://engagedly.com/blog/what-is-talent-management-and-why-is-it-important/
[Accessed 23 Nov 2023].

Ghosh, P., 2021. What is Talent Management? Definition, Strategy, Process and Models. [Online]
Available at: https://www.spiceworks.com/hr/talent-management/articles/what-is-talent-management/
[Accessed 21 Nov 2023].

Guides, H., 2023. talent Management: A Guide for Human Resources. [Online]
Available at: https://www.hrexchangenetwork.com/hr-talent-management/articles/talent-management-guide
[Accessed 23 Nov 2023].

Gurchiek, K., 2006. Talent management: a key component of HR. [Online]
Available at: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/cms_015460.aspx
[Accessed 23 Nov 2023].

HCM, 2023. What Is Talent Management and What Is HR’s Role in It?. [Online]
Available at: https://www.paychex.com/articles/hcm/role-of-hr-in-talent-management
[Accessed 21 Nov 2023].