Talent management is a scientific strategy used in human resource planning to improve business value and help organizations achieve their goals. This means that talent management is aimed at improving business performance and achieving ROI. Productive and engaged employees help make a business profitable. Creating a strategic approach to talent management to help an organization win in the marketplace is the ultimate goal of HR.
Talent management is linked to the organization’s strategic goals and workforce plan to identify its current and future needs to recruit, hire, retain, and develop the most highly talented employees currently available in the current job market. It defines an organization’s commitment to hire, manage, develop, and retain talented employees.
As a key business strategy, talent management ensures that attraction and retention of high performing talent is a key goal. Organizations must fully integrate Talent Management within all employee related processes of the organization. The role of every leader is to ensure the right talent is in place to perform critical roles.
What is a Talent Management Strategy?
A talent management strategy is the plan of action to optimize employee performance.
This includes:
- Attracting top talent and creating an efficient recruitment and selection process
- Onboarding employees faster (to optimize time to productivity) and with greater quality
- Identifying development needs earlier to address gaps in skills and other job requirements
- Providing timely feedback to employees and providing coaching and job experience to develop skills and behaviors needed
- Identifying the key drivers of employee engagement and measuring outcomes to improve departure rates and risk of departure
- Retaining them to stay productive longer by creating a positive organization culture and value proposition
How to create a Talent Management Strategy?
For any strategy in the business, your starting point is always the strategic direction and goals of the organization. Then, 1) determine the strategic priorities of the organization; 2) define what talent management practices to align to these priorities; 3) conduct a workforce needs analysis and create a workforce plan; 4) identify what actions are needed to achieve the strategic priorities; and 5) create an action plan to implement this strategy.
Here’s a template to help you build your Talent Management Strategy:
- What are the strategic goals of the organization?
- List your strategic priorities
- Determine business priorities
- What issues need to be addressed to achieve success?
- Assess the current and future needs by identifying what areas of talent management can help achieve the goals
- Improve turnover
- Attract top talent
- Develop successors
- Identify risk of departure
- Connect talent management practices to strategic priorities
- Identify what talent management practices are needed to achieve strategic priorities
- What processes need to change? What’s working? What’s not working?
The essence of this step is to connect the strategic priorities to tangible talent management practices.
- Identify what actions are needed to achieve your goals and what metrics can measure results
- Create an implementation plan and project plan!
- Identify the actions
- Create teams
- Monitor progress
- Provide training and coaching on the new processes
- Collect feedback
- Measure results
Developing a Talent Management Strategy takes time. It involves the commitment and involvement of the senior leader team and other stakeholders, and resources to implement the change. It takes full commitment on the part of everyone involved including the HR and Talent Management team to develop the process, define roles, design processes, create systems and roll out the new plan. As a general rule, it can take 3-5 years to fully execute a Talent Management Strategy. It is therefore important to have systems in place that help in the implementation.
Institute of Organization Development offers a Talent Management Certification Program to help participants learn how help organizations achieve success in developing a strategic approach to talent management. For more information – www.instituteod.com.
Author:
Dr. Nancy Zentis is the Chief Strategist and CEO of Institute of OD, offering online certification programs for those interested in Organization Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development and Executive Coaching, and Professional Development Skills for ongoing learning. As a consultant in the field of OD for many years, she has developed Talent Management and Leadership Development Strategies for many leading organizations. She can be reached at info@instituteod.com. For more information about our certification programs and short courses, visit our website www.instituteod.com