TALENT MANAGEMENT AND BEST PRACTICES

( adapted from my previous article posted at the notes page of the MIHRM Facebook)

Times change. Emphases change with changing conditions. Terminologies also change in an attempt to accurately depict the new environment and emphases. And so the term “talent management” has taken on a high level of prominence to describe the function of managing the inflow, retention, utilization of valued human resources in an organization as a result of the work of McKinsey's 1997 research (The War for Talent, McKinsey Quarterly)  and the 2001 book by Michaels, Ed; Handfield-Jones, Helen; Axelrod, Beth (2001) called “The War for Talent”.   Prior to this term becoming popular, this function had been performed over several stages using several terms across the entire spectrum human resource management such as recuitment and selection, retention and motivation and career management. Salary and benefits, now called compensation and benefits was part of this function now called Talent Management.

Anyone with two bits of underatanding will know that an organization can do well only if there are sufficient numbers of capable persons working in their jobs in a committed manner to make the company efficient, effective, competitive and profitable. Having sufficient numbers alone cannot help the company attain that.

This article explores the scope of talent management and the best practices that a company should be adopting, and common errors to avoid.

First Things First – What is Talent Management.

The Johns Hopkins University defines talent management as, “a set of integrated organizational HR processes designed to attract, develop, motivate, and retain productive, engaged employees.”

The Businessdictionary online site defines it as “An organization's attempts to recruit, keep, and train the most gifted and highest quality staff members that they can find, afford and hire.

 ( https://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/talent-management.html) 

Definitions like the above give us a good view of what talent management is all about. But these definitions do not and cannot be final, and does not fit all organizations. Yet it should be enough for us to gain an insight as to what is expected of the function for the time being. The reason why there isn’t a “one size fit all” definition is because the term “talent” for each organization first needs to be defined by an organization. We cannot be managing talents in one company using the definition of talents in another company. For each organization, the scope of what a the talent is to expected to be able to do, the degree of skills,  the emphasis between functional hard skills and soft skills can be very different.

Having defined Talent Management as a function, let us know ask ourselves this "What exactly do we mean by 'talent' in respect of the organization which we manage. Too often these days, we glibly call the person tasked with this responsibility with various fanciful job title such as Talent Acquisition Associate, Talent Manager and so on. I have asked this question to quite a few persons in the classes that I have taught. None of them so far have expressed any clear convincing understanding of it. When it comes to recruitment, they just fill in the vacancy with the best available person they can manage to get their hands on to within the recruitment deadline!

As far as I am concerned, each organization has first to define what it means by talent, how many to have, how many it can afford to keep according to how well it can utilize them.

The scope of Talent Management

From the two definitions seen above, we can summarize the scope of talent management to span from:

1.      Recruitment                                 :How to define talents, where do you find them,                                                               how to attract them

2.      Selection                                      : How to identify and pick out the talents

3.      Learning and Development        : How to bridge capabilities gap and hone skills

4.      Motivate and retain                      : How to compensate, reward and grow the talent

5.      Engagement                               : How to keep him committed and excited with the                                                               well being of the organization

And that just about covers the entire spectrum of HRM. The engagement function alone covers communication, motivation, rewards, employee relations, employee participation and involvement, etc.

Isn’t Talent Management Just a More Catchy Phrase for HRM?

Talent management differs from previous HRM in these ways:

HRM’s focus is on recruiting a person that best fits the job to perform it competently, whereas talent management seeks to find the person who not only fits the job, but is able to contribute to the organizational as a whole.

1.      In talent management, the role of identifying and picking out the talent largely lies with the superior of the talent to be recruited. HRM’s role is to facilitate activities for attracting the talents, coordinating the process of selection and providing the recruiting manager with the proper selection tools.

2.      Talent management is strictly strategic in nature, while HRM always include the inevitable administrative role.

3.      Talent management is highly focused on managing and retaining people identified as talents to hone them into top notch performers and contributors, whereas HRM’s role includes ensuring the non-talents are taken care of.

Talent management has therefore developed into a specialist field within the HRM function. In many companies where there are both a HR section manager and a Talent Management section manager, the HR section manager’s role is reduced to the more administrative responsibilities over managing day to day people relations, their welfare and wellbeing.

Even so, it must still be remembered that the talent management function cannot function within a silo. It must be performed in close collaboration with other HRM functions and activities especially in particular learning and development and compensation employee engagement.

Best Practices in Talent Management

1.      Define the talent first. Build the talent profile. Build the competency map. Obviously each organization needs to begin with identifying what it deems to be talent. Is it someone with great tactical capabilities having good experience and hard skills? Or is it someone with great strategic outlook and foresight, having wide exposure and good general knowledge?  Or is the organization looking at people who contribute towards culture building or transformation while also having the hard skills to get the job done? Or is it creative researcher type to bring about competitive edge product and service advantage? That means the organization has to look at the value it want. Think about what you want in terms of result first.

2.      Identify Internal Talent Pool.  Go through HR records and talk to key persons to identify those that are there, and those that will be there. Nothing beats talking to the key people who are naturally your valued assets who know the business. Look also at how critical is that key position in case it has to been replaced and plan for succession. Yes, establish the talent pipeline!

3.      Study the HR Climate. Talents leave you for any number of reason. Pay and benefits issues may be foremost, but not the only reason. Pay and benefits issues can easily be resolve by simple benchmarking for affordable competitive positioning and generous result-based incentives. But more important are the push factors. Things that happen in the organization that makes well paid people want to leave, i.e. the operating and people culture. Sometimes it is just the way superiors talk at meetings. Sometimes it is how superiors act in the fact of interpersonal conflicts by subordinates. Other times, it is how decisions are made or suggestions shot down. And these are going to be very difficult to address. But however difficult it may be, they must be resolved, a bit at a time.  And do make certain that superiors are not “potential successor allergic”.

4.      Develop Clear Career and Succession Paths supported by well-designed learning and development program which is linked with a growth and learning compensation program. This will encourage learning and transfer of learning.

And finally, accept the fact that talent management is not the job of the Talent Development Manager. Therefore ensure that every superior feels secure with the talent management program in his area of responsibility. That means he must have ownership of the program. It is necessary to consider rewards for the superior for the talent retained and developed as well as to hold him accountable for talents lost.