What is Talent Management?

Talent management is an ongoing process aimed at attracting and retaining qualified employees. Talent management is also about developing the skills of the workforce and encouraging them to constantly improve their performance. The main purpose of talent management is therefore to have motivated employees who will stay with the company in the long term. The exact approach to achieving these goals varies from company to company. This article explains what talent management is, its key objectives, the strategies behind it, and the processes used to put them into practice

Talent management is about identifying, attracting, retaining and developing qualified employees. Thereby, the goal of this holistic strategy is to fill all positions necessary for the success of the company with suitable employees quickly and in the long term in order to ensure better company performance.

Thus, Talent Management offers effective approaches to numerous central challenges of today’s labor market.

Generally, talent management is one of the tasks of Human Resource Management. However, the approach will only be crowned with success if the company’s executives also support it. With regard to the martial expression “War for Talent”, people talk about extremely qualified employees who are particularly hard to find on the labor market. Current challenges such as the shortage of skilled workers, which has developed into a general labor shortage due to an increasingly severe shortage, as well as a high willingness to change jobs, decreasing length of service, increasing demands on the quality of work and the working atmosphere in the company are also addressed by talent management.

Talent management pursues different goals. Among them are:

• Mitigate the consequences of the shortage of labor and skilled workers.
• Maintain and increase competitiveness and productivity
• Counteract strategic risks of demographic change
• Establish an organizational development in order to adapt to the ever faster changing competitive conditions – keyword VUKA environment: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous
• Minimize vacancies within key positions
• Ensure long-term retention and promotion of specialists and managers
• Ensure succession and keep fluctuation low
• Build an attractive employer brand

Basically, a talent management strategy is a conceptual approach. This defines how the company wants to recruit, develop and retain talent in the long term. In this context, the talent management strategy also includes the approach to succession planning. In addition, the talent management strategy defines which lures are to be used to attract employees and retain them in the company.

Another task of talent management is to prepare employees for their position, develop their skills and integrate them into the corporate culture. This in turn has an impact on their actions, helping to ensure that talent can develop within the company’s unique ecosystem and itself keep cultural as well as business goals in mind. Increasingly, the topic of talent management also includes the management of departures and alumni from the workforce. This is then called talent relationship management.

There are numerous options for setting up effective talent management. Some companies focus exclusively on the skills and experience of applicants. However, it is more effective and sustainable to evaluate whether the candidates fit well with the corporate culture. It is therefore recommended to use a system that fits your company well and that you can sustain. However, this does not mean that the strategy should not be reviewed from time to time and, if necessary, updated if it is no longer effective.

Below we describe how you should proceed in order to set up a long-term successful talent management process.

Step 1: Define Exactly What Skills You Need
First of all, you need to define which profiles of employees you want to recruit and what skills they need to have. Professional software solutions such as Ingentis org.manager can help you keep track of this. In addition, you should consider training existing employees. This will help you avoid having to hire new employees if necessary.

Step 2: Make Sure You Attract the Right People
There are several steps to recruit talent:

1. Create powerful ads and post them on relevant job boards. A strong employer brand is helpful in this regard.
2. Try to be present in areas where the professionals are that you want to attract, for instance in relevant forums. This is called active sourcing.
3. Use the willingness of your employees to recommend you to others to generate further results (Talent Referral Systems).
4. Plan interviews and other potential measures to find the most suitable candidates for a position. In addition to rather standardized questions, you can consider using personality assessments as well as references and tests.

Step 3: Onboard Your Talents Carefully
It tremendously helps many new employees get oriented, if they are – to some extent – prepared for the new company when they start their job. You should therefore inform them about their tasks, schedule training sessions, and brief their colleagues so that they can support the new employees with day-to-day work issues.

Step 4: Organize the Learning Process and Development
It’s often easier to build on the expertise of existing staff than to hire new employees. Even when it comes to top talent, they will want to continue learning with you so that they can continue to deliver their top performance in the future. Therefore, plan for how your employees can develop. This can be done by attending conferences, taking courses or using a learning management system, among other things.

Step 5: Conduct Performance Appraisals
You can only assess whether employees are ready to take on further responsibilities if you regularly analyze their performance. This can also save you from recruiting new talent. At the same time, you help employees prepare for promotion. The trend goes toward all-around reviews (360-degree feedbacks), team debates, and more closely timed feedback sessions (pulse checks, retrospectives, etc.).

Step 6: How to Get Your Biggest Talents to Stay
Promotions, benefits, motivational tactics, ensuring job satisfaction and improving company culture all contribute to employee satisfaction. Invest here because it’s always cheaper to retain existing employees than to recruit new staff.

Step 7: Create a Succession Plan
In the event that senior employees retire in the foreseeable future, suitable candidates for succession must be promoted. With the help of suitable software such as Ingentis org.manager, you can see which retirements are imminent, even in the long term. It is also important to empower these employees to perform at their best. This is done through continuous learning opportunities, which includes knowledge management. When employees leave the company unplanned, an exit interview should be held. This is where you find out what went wrong, if anything, and are more likely to prevent the same problem from occurring again.

Software solutions such as Ingentis org.manager can provide important support in talent management. Two practical examples illustrate what this can look like in practice:

Effectively Managing an Aging Workforce:

Since 2011, tens of thousands of people from the baby boomer generation have been turning 65 every year. This trend will continue until 2030 – and will not stop at our example Company A. Although the aging workforce is recognized as a problem, insufficient attention has been paid so far to exactly where in the organization action is needed and how intellectual capital can be retained in the company. To manage future retirements more effectively and make timely plans for suitable succession, the company wants to better understand how its workforce is made up.

With a corresponding software solution, the responsible HR department not only calculates the percentage of employees who may retire within the next few years. The tool also visualizes additional data such as years of service or performance levels of individual employees. This enables the HR department to make a much better assessment of who might be suitable for which vacant position in the future and to initiate the necessary measures at an early stage – for example, to establish a mentoring program, to recruit suitable specialists or to examine ways of delaying the retirement of important employees. In this way, the example company ensures that the organization is well positioned in the long term and can meet future challenges.

Calculating Flight Risk and Taking Countermeasures at the Right Time:

A wave of layoffs, such as that caused by the Corona pandemic in the form of the “Great Resignation,” can severely shake an organization and have a noticeable impact on its performance! The HR department in example company B wants to prevent such a scenario at all costs and leave nothing to chance. Using the appropriate software solution, the HR manager uses certain factors to calculate how high the churn risk of individual employees is to be assessed.

In the dashboard view for the entire company, it becomes clear that a particularly large number of layoffs are imminent at a particular location. Those responsible can now start discussions at an early stage and, if necessary, implement appropriate measures to motivate employees to stay or initiate suitable replacements in good time. With the help of the software, Company B, for example, is able to avoid being suddenly surprised by a wave of layoffs and being presented with a fait accompli.