Demystifying Talent Identification

Holding panel discussions and addressing a larger audience doesn’t come naturally to me and I have no qualms in sharing this on a public forum. :)

Nevertheless, it’s always a pleasure to be a part of such discussions and webinars as each time, it allows me to venture into uncharted waters and opens up diverse horizons. Yesterday’s webinar by Mercer Mettl was one such opportunity to connect with our incredibly talented partners Nikita Panchal (Vice President, Global Head Talent, OD and D&I, ACG World), Peyu Gupta (Director - HR & Admin, Hughes Communications) and Dr. Kalindi Kale (Leadership Coach & OD Consultant).

The topic was - ‘Why are organizations gravitating towards Virtual/ Blended Assessment Development Centres for High Potential (Hi-po) /Talent Identification?’

We initiated the panel discussion with a poll asking about the key challenges in hi-po/ talent identification.

1. Lack of understanding regarding difference between performance vs. potential,
2. Lack of an objective process for Talent Identification,
3. Lack of a systematic process for development post assessment,
4. Lack of a systematic process for validating candidate performance and justify ROI of the process
5. Lack of time & resources

Quite expectedly, we got almost equal %ge of responses across all the options. The key theme of the discussion was not to deliberate over whether and why hi-po identification and succession planning is critical for organizational success. It was to identify the challenges and understand the best practices being followed by some well-informed HR professionals; with an awareness that many organizations and HR professionals are not too sure about how effective their hi-po/ talent identification process is. We could clearly see that almost all of these issues are prevalent to a similar extent across organizations and we could sense a keenness among the audience to understand the approaches and well-thought through practices to overcome these.

Being a consultant, it’s always pleasure to hear the other (client’s) side of the table from the horse’s mouth and exactly that’s what happened when the panelists shared their approaches of managing the talent identification-development-retention process in an efficient and effective manner. My key takeaways from this discussion are as follows:

Link Process to Strategy: Linking talent process to one’s own organizational strategy becomes the starting point.

Demystify Talent: Many organizations set up the talent identification process without even defining what Talent means for them. It’s essential to spend considerable period of time on demystifying Talent in their organizational context. Talent is a multi-layered construct where it can be:

• someone handling a critical role and/ or,
• someone having an in-depth knowledge and understanding of the organization’s business imperatives and/ or,
• someone possessing a very rare skill and hence very difficult to find and replace.

One has to uncover these layers to understand roles in terms of criticality/ business sustainability and identify what’s in it for the organization as well as the employees.

Connect Roles with Relevant Talent: Identify roles that are:

• Critical in the current scenario,
• Transformational roles that are not very critical in the current context but fundamental for transforming the organization in the next 3-5 years and,
• Roles that are critical in ensuring sustainability from the perspective of business opportunity capitalization.

Once we identify this, put the roles and the relevant employees together by conducting an objectively defined talent assessment.

Adopting objective and systematic assessment process through Virtual / Blended ADCs: ?Deploy assessments that do not just cover the demonstrated behaviours, but also what’s below the iceberg. This will allow you to see not just what the person chooses to demonstrate but also what he/ she is constituted of. A blend of virtual and offline tools which are also a blend of the emotional being and the rational being, the real me and the virtual me, can provide an objective picture of likely behaviours in potentially challenging situations. Putting highly Reliable, Valid, free from Adverse Impact tools, can make the process more inclusive by treating everyone fairly.

Build Collective Consciousness: Partner with all the critical stakeholders by providing clarity on what the process is supposed to serve across every layer within the organization. Create process enablers by making it a joint accountability for HR and functional managers. Put things into perspective for everyone so that they don’t fear of being judged. It will automatically ensure wider acceptance of the process.

Effectiveness of Virtual/ Blended ADCs: One can easily and clearly visualize the ROI and profitability of the entire process from the very beginning provided one follows the above mentioned points in a diligent manner.

As mentioned in my previous post, Together we learn and grow. Looking forward to having some interesting views coming from my network. :)

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