Tuesday, 07-02-2012
Posted on 2009-04-06 in Recruitment
Talent Management Processes
Talent Management Processes
Monica Murphy looks at the key issues currently influencing the design of talent management processes and offers practical advice on effective recruitment and retention;While speaking to a business studies graduate a short time ago I was amused at his surprise of his mother’s disappointment that he had turned down a job offer with a reputable organisation. It later occurred to me that his simple story explained the reason for the interest in the area of Talent Management. Basically, the organisation wanted him, but he didn’t want the organisation. The reason he gave was the lack of a clear development plan for graduates.
According to the Boston Consulting Group, in their 2007 research on The Future of HR in Europe, Managing Talent is one of the five critical HR challenges that companies in Europe will face in the near future. Their research indicates that the number of European companies that move to new markets such as India in order to gain access to growing groups of talented workers will roughly triple in the next five to eight years.
Talent management epitomises the processes that support the inflow of talented people by developing employer branding, recruiting and selection, in-house development, and promotion strategies of talented employees.
Why Bother?
The HR function has expanded significantly in the last couple of decades, with many external factors influencing its remit. One such factor is Ireland’s recent economic success. With that economic success has come jobs. With more jobs came a demand for more people. Many organisations realised, often when it was too late, that it was easy to lose good people to competitors. Often, on investigation, the reason for their exit was not related to pay or conditions, but was more because of the lack of development opportunities. And so the idea of Talent Management was born. Managers began to ask what they could do to attract, retain and develop talented people.
Other global factors, such as declining birth rates and an aging labour force, are also forcing companies to examine their talent management strategy. The economic growth in China and India coupled with their vast numbers of graduates may mean that companies look overseas for their next generation of talent.
Talent management is not at all complicated and some would argue, far from a ‘new’ area. Think of a job you had that you really liked and then consider why you liked it so much? Was it because they paid you lots of money? Or because you got a company car? Maybe it was because you had a really big office? For a number of people, perhaps these reasons ring true. However, for the majority of people, it will be because they were listened to, supported and could see development opportunities in the form of further education and training.
Underpinning all of this however, is the assumption that the leaders of the organisation recognise the rapidly changing knowledge society and who are willing to invest some resources into the area of talent management.
It’s essential to recognise from the outset that any talent management process must be aligned with business needs. One way of achieving this is to get a group of key people involved in examining what is required now and what will be required in the future in terms of competency frameworks.
Once this knowledge has been obtained, a strategy for talent management can be built around it. Hudson, a company that offers global talent management solutions, offers one such model for managing talent.
Attract:
Before you can retain and develop the right people, you must first attract them. This is where you set out your stall. The way you do that will depend on what calibre of people you want to attract. The organisation must have a clear strategy on who it needs and what competencies, attitudes and values those people should ideally have.
Employers should write up an honest job description that is reflective of the position. However, other than ‘will be expected to learn and develop’, it is very difficult to write a concise job description for many roles today. With the flattening out of organisational structures, has come the trend whereby you are expected to venture out of your area of expertise and into a new area completely. The idea of being responsible for one discrete task is long gone, and increasingly, organisations are using competency profiles to scout for new recruits.
Depending on the competencies, attitudes and values that are deemed most important; the organisation can then set about attracting potential candidates. For an organisation to get a good sample of candidates to select from, it’s essential that they cast the net wide, using various media when advertising the position. For positions that require experience, organisations may decide to use the print medium. Of course, it’s important not to overlook the fact that the person you are looking for may be already in the organisation.
The Boston Consulting Group’s research reminds organisations to think outside the box and suggests that, to fully exploit global labour pools of highly skilled professionals, organisations may need to consider sourcing their talent from around the world.
Select:
The selection of a candidate involves finding the person whose competencies, attributes, values and expectations are as well matched as possible to those of the organisation. When the parties’ expectations match each other, performance is likely to be good and satisfaction levels will be high. As long as the expectations are being met, trust and commitment and even maybe some long lost loyalty to the organisation will be maintained. Consequently, the most significant part of the recruitment process is to manage the expectations of contracting parties.
Selecting a person can be achieved through various methods. Some organisations use psychometric testing, others opt for a series of interviews, while yet others ask the candidate to make a presentation to the board of interviewers. Giving the candidates an obscure topic to present on can be a good way of gaining an insight into how they handle unusual situations as well as examining their ability to learn quickly.
Whatever the method, it must be extensive enough for both parties to gain enough insight into the other to be as sure as they can that they will work well together and for them to have formed a picture of the psychological contract as well as the employment one.
The psychological contract is the unspoken agreement of what the employer will provide and what the employee will give in return. Examples of factors in the psychological contract are that the employee and employer will both be treated with respect and that performance will be fairly evaluated. Increasingly though, it is important to unveil this psychological contract and for both parties to openly communicate expectations, particularly when the nature of work is changing and employees are enjoying more autonomy in their work practices.
It is important to ensure those conducting interviews are fully capable of doing so. It’s not uncommon today to find inexperienced people conducting interviews who are unaware of questioning techniques that will allow the interviewer to gain maximum insight into the potential candidate’s competencies, attitudes and values.
Engage/Retain:
If an organisation has managed the preceding stages well and has come out with a clear image of what the employee’s expectations are, retaining that person should be relatively straightforward. However, if the organisation fails to meet agreed expectations and if it is not actively doing something to keep its talented people, they will move on.
A major problem in the labour market is the number of highly qualified women leaving work to have children and not returning. Clever employers are working closely with female employees who have young families to negotiate a way for them to continue to work. Providing job-sharing opportunities is one possibility as well as allowing the employee to do some of their work from home.
It is no secret that, with predicted drops in population in Western economies, a labour shortage is anticipated. According to Cullen and Farrelly, in Best Practice HR in Ireland (2005), with more demand for workers, employers who can design jobs and working environments that meet the personal, family and other non-work needs of employees will have a distinct advantage in winning the war for talent.
Interestingly, IMI research in 2003 reported that over two-thirds of a survey population indicated that their organisation had no formal work/life balance policy.
Organisational Psychologists Pearn Kandola, provide a useful list of measures that an organisation can implement to help people to remain engaged in an organisation:
1. Provide leadership that is inspirational, approachable, supportive and committed.
2. Move people from jobs when the challenge has gone.
3. Convey realistic expectations of where they may go.
4. Do what can be done to make it happen when they push on doors they want to open.
5. Give people headroom to seek and exploit new opportunities whether within the existing business or new businesses.
6. Schedule periodic reviews/feedback sessions to identify and address ‘psychological contract’ issues before people start to question why they are still in that position.
7. Encourage secondments to other organisations that will provide different perspectives and stimulate productive new thinking.
8. Ensure the availability of mentoring and coaching by experienced people who are competent, interested and committed.
Development:
Examining the current trends of job loss in Ireland, it is becoming more evident that our society is one where knowledge and skills are the intellectual capital of the organisation, and it is in them that the strength of the organisation lies.
Ján Figel, European Commissioner for Education, Training, Culture and Multilingualism, outlined recently how ‘Globalisation, new technologies and demographic developments constitute an enormous challenge; one of the answers to this problem is the access to lifelong learning.’
Ireland has an economy that is driven primarily by IT, telecommunications and engineering, so it is vital that organisations upskill their employees. Research in the area suggests that more than three quarters of the technology in use today will be obsolete in ten years, and more than three-quarters of the employees who will be working in ten years are already working today. All of this translates into the reality that in order to stay buoyant, Irish organisations must continually develop their workforce.
While many organisations have come to realise the importance of providing learning in the workplace, many approach it in a ‘one size fits all’ manner. The trick is to provide the right type of learning opportunities to the people its most relevant to.
HR/Training Managers need to enlist the support of line managers, so that learning needs are identified as they arise. Quite often, employees will be asked about their learning needs at the annual appraisal which is not only an unsuitable forum, but it can also cause employees to dream up learning needs the day before the appraisal rather than having them well-thought out.
A popular method of meeting learning needs is to develop a Professional Development Programme (PDP) for the various disciplines of employees in an organisation. This can work, but only if there is room for change and creativity and the realisation that it may not suit everybody. They should ideally be open to supporting the wide variety of individual preferences that will exist. To retain talent, companies will need to tailor career paths so that they reward and fully utilise different types of employees with different interests and skill levels.
Providing mentors is another option open to organisations that want to facilitate their employees’ growth. Mentoring can be used as a highly effective means of identifying and developing talented people, and it can be used as a method of facilitating the induction of younger, less experienced employees. David Clutterbuck, in Everyone Needs a Mentor (1995), notes that it is asserted (if unproven) that mentoring is a more efficient form of developing talent. His argument is that in many cases, the relationship forces the mentor to develop as well, so in effect; the company is training two people at the same time.
Conclusion:
Companies that do a better job of attracting, developing, engaging and retaining their employees will gain more of the share of talent as a critical resource. They must do this according to the ‘new realities’ as summarised by Michaels in 'The Mismanagement of Talent' (2001)
