Talent management is the systematic process of identifying the vacant position, hiring the suitable person, developing the skills and expertise of the person to match the position and retaining him to achieve long-term business objectives.
Talent management naturally encompasses many of the responsibilities of HR. All the same, it is not enough to expect that just because you have an HR department, you are managing talent. You need to have a talent management strategy in place designed just for your company to gain optimal results.
1. What are the key components of talent management?
The key components of talent management are –
Identifying Talent Gaps
One of the key objectives of talent management is to identify the gap between the existing talent and talent that is required to drive the desired business goals. Planning exercise of the talent management process should also account for specialized roles that are required to support the growth of the organization.
Talent Acquisition
Talent gaps across all levels of the organizations need to be addressed ensuring the required levels of the workforce is maintained consistently. It is critical to attract the right quality of talent while maintaining optimal staffing levels.
Performance Management
The ultimate goal for performance management is to ensure all roles are aligned with business goals. This ensures that the right employee is assigned to the right role giving him/her the right setup to succeed, thrive and meaningfully contribute to the overall organizational goal.
Learning and Development
Using inputs from the performance management process, learning and development plans should be formulated for existing employees that aid in both: career growth for the employee and help in enhancing the employee’s contribution to overall organization goals.
Total Rewards
Total rewards primarily deals with giving the employee due credit and acknowledging their contribution to the organization through various reward mechanism like compensation, recognition’s, promotions etc.
Retain Key Talent
Efficiency of a talent management system/process can be accessed by its ability to retain key talent in an organization. Developing a retention and succession plan to sustain organizational growth is one of the measurable objectives of talent management.
2. What are the talent management activities?
Talent management activities deal with a set of activities at a function level as listed below –
Talent Acquisition
- Establishing the talent gap
- Creating Job Descriptions
- Sourcing the right talent
- Screening and interviewing of potential talent
- Negotiating employment contracts
- Seamless onboarding of new hire
Performance Management
- Identifying a performance strategy
- Aligning organizational goals with Individual roles
- Formulating goals and competencies at a role level
- Enabling managers with the right set of tools to conduct appraisals
- Train managers for performance conversations
- Building a total rewards plan
- Identify top talent and formulate a retention plan
- Normalizing of rating
- Communicating areas of improvement to employees
- Leveraging tools like continuous feedback, multi stakeholder feedback, performance journals to ensure a holistic process
- Drawing actionable insights from feedback shared by employees on the overall performance process
Learning and Development
- Leverage inputs from performance management to create targeted L&D Plans
- Provide the required platforms and learning solutions to employees
- Build career growth paths for employee and supplement with development plans
3. Why is talent management important?
Talent management becomes absolutely important to ensure that the organization’s most critical resource: People is delivering to its maximum potential. The heart of talent management lies in aligning the organizational goals with employees to provide a sense of purpose and direction. It entails efficient role mapping, attracting and retaining the right talent and maximizing productivity and performance of existing talent: All critical drivers of organizational success.
Hence it is imperative for any organization to invest in talent management to realize its desired goals.
4. What are the benefits of talent management?
Top benefits of talent management are –
Overall Organization Alignment
The ultimate goal for talent management is to ensure all roles are aligned with business goals. This ensures that the right employee is assigned to the right role giving him/her the right setup to succeed, thrive and meaningfully contribute to the overall organizational goal.
Better Hiring Techniques
By leveraging a talent management system managers can make data driven hiring decisions by rightly assessing a prospective candidate’s experience and skills. This helps in ensuring right talent fit.
Retain Top Talent
With a strategic retention plan in place effective talent management ensures that high performers remain engaged and connected with the organization
Maximise Talent Potential
Learning and development efforts should be designed to aid in both: career growth for the employee and help in enhancing the employee’s contribution to overall organization goals.
Enhanced Employee Experience
With the right talent management processes in place an employee would be assigned to the right role, mentored at regular intervals, duly rewarded and experience growth: All of which will eventually positively impact the employee experience.
5. What are the talent management tools?
A range of tools can help make the talent management process effective.
- Strategic alignment of individual goals to organizational goals
- Well defined metrics clearly calling out elements like what is defined as success in this role, how is performance measured et
- Objective, transparent performance management system leveraging new age tools like continuous feedback, performance journals, MSF etc
- Talent mapping tools like 9 box potential, Merit profile etc to identify top performers
- Career development tools such as Individual Development Plan, Succession planning to nurture talent
- Targeted L&D mapped out at a role level leveraging inputs from the performance process and career development plans
- End to end integrated HRMS solution that brings together all the HR processes on a single platform to provide a single view of the entire employee lifecycle and derive meaningful talent management insights
6. What are the objectives of talent management?
Identifying Talent Gaps
One of the key objectives of talent management is to identify the gap between the existing talent and talent that is required to drive the desired business goals. Planning exercise of the talent management process should also account for specialized roles that are required to support the growth of the organization.
Attract the desired talent across levels
Talent gaps across all levels of the organizations need to be addressed ensuring the required levels of the workforce is maintained consistently. It is critical to attract the right quality of talent while maintaining optimal staffing levels.
Improve existing employees performance and productivity
Through the performance management process, development plans should be formulated for existing employees that aid in both: career growth for the employee and help in enhancing the employee’s contribution to overall organization goals.
Retain Key Talent
Efficiency of a talent management system/process can be accessed by its ability to retain key talent in an organization. Developing a retention and succession plan to sustain organizational growth is one of the measurable objectives of talent management.
7. What is the difference between talent acquisition and talent management
Talent management is an overall ongoing activity of attracting nurturing, developing and retaining talent on the whole. Whereas Talent acquisition only deals with attracting and hiring the right talent to achieve organizational goals. Talent management helps in identifying internal talent to fill in a new role whereas talent acquisition primarily involves recruiting external talent.
8. Who is responsible for talent management?
Best Talent management processes involve active participation from pretty much everyone in an organization. While HR spearheads the process it is absolutely necessary for executives, managers and employees to be actively involved to make the entire exercise a meaningful and fruitful exercise.
HRs role lies in primarily building the frameworks, processes, workflows and providing the right systems to run the process. HRs also play an important role in working with the executives in identifying organisation goals that need to be cascaded to employees and formulating a rewards strategy.
Managers should be the real custodians of talent management and ensure that they attract nurture and develop talent. They must leverage the systems provided to ensure that they share constructive feedback and mentor their employees and set them on the right career path while maximising organisation productivity.
Executives active involvement and buy-in is absolutely essential for any talent management exercise to be effective and deliver the desired results. The direction they set the organisation in and accordingly formulate the goals is single-handedly the driving force for the rest of the workforce. They also play a critical role in building a performance-driven culture.
9. What are the challenges of talent management?
Some of the most common challenges of talent management are
- Attracting & retaining talent across all levels
- Building a strong leadership pipeline
- Creating talent management practices to cater to the millennial generation
- Lack of Objectivity & Transparency in performance appraisals
- Ensuring the quality of hire in the long run
- Lack of data adherence limiting meaningful people insights to aid in improving efficiency.
10. What is the difference between performance management and talent management?
Talent management deals with attracting, engaging and retaining talent. It focuses on the entire employee lifecycle right through recruitment, onboarding, performance, L&D, career growth and promotions. In short, it is ensuring that the organization has the right supply of talent to meet its goals. Performance management is one of the subtasks/functions under talent management. It primarily deals with accessing an employee’s performance against a set of goals in a limited pre-defined time frame. Inputs from performance management serve as the background for other aspects of talent management like L&D & promotions.
