The Case for a New Talent Strategy

Talent and culture continue to grow as differentiators among competing organizations. Even the best technology, operations and products may start to hold less comparative weight in market valuation when a company’s ability to attract, hire, retain and motivate the best talent is in question.

There is growing war for talent and organizations must get ahead of the competition by being a company that people want to work for and want contribute their best work to. The increase demand for physicians, for example, is driving change in how health care providers hire and keep doctors. The Association of American Medical Colleges recently reported this: “by 2030, the study estimates a shortfall of between 7,300 and 43,100 primary care physicians. One important implication of this projection is that the most talented and sought after workers -- physicians in this case, will choose to move on if their work experience is less than ideal. Organizations with the greatest advantage understand and meet the increasing expectations of smaller pools of skilled talent.

Employees seeking better work experiences (not just better jobs) can quickly learn about a company’s culture to inform their decisions. They will peruse Glass Door, Comparably, Yelp, LinkedIn and a host of other social media outlets to understand what it might be like to work there. Consider this from “The Rise and Rise of the ‘Glassdoor Generation’, “While the average Fortune 500 company can reach just over 1.7 million people with their own social networks, the average achievable social audience of all of their employees is a whopping 22.2 million people! If the messages they’re sharing with that massive audience are positive that’s fantastic, but if your employees are unhappy, just imagine the devastating impact any disgruntled comments could have on your reputation as an employer!” So, what do you do to prepare for this new educated buyer? You design and deploy flexible hiring processes and individualized work experiences. You rework your employee value proposition to be more like a promise than a proposition so that it rings true throughout the employee experience. You build a talent strategy that considers incentive plans, working conditions, scheduling, continuous development and the culture strength.

Finally, and perhaps most revolutionizing, is increasing Board oversight. Due in part to corporate scandals and to a greater understanding of the power of corporate culture and its impact on employee performance, publicly traded companies are seeing an increase in requests from their Boards to report out on the health of the culture. This Wall Street Journal article explores how board oversight increasingly includes culture metrics and employee feedback to help build greater accountability for reputation management and the business climate. The National Association of Corporate Directors is creating guidance for boards to include oversight of culture. Your talent strategy needs to include employee data and focused plans for building a strong employer brand and healthy corporate culture to back it up.

So, if you aren’t working out a new, modern talent strategy, why not? This is the time to build a plan that attracts and retains the best employees. Or, do you wait and find yourself reacting to a talent shortage, solving for people opting out because of your weak value proposition, or scrambling to give an answer to a board that’s now asking for it?

The Employee Life-cycle Assessment (ELA), a WeInspire exclusive process, allows us to pinpoint the strengths and opportunities for improvement within the employee experience at your organization. The results guide you straight to a strong, pro-active talent strategy.