Talent moves in circular ways

Building talent dynamics to understand talent behaviour

Extract from FULL VERSION article at Medium, follow the link: Talent moves in circular ways

When we read reports about talent like World Economic Forum ones, for example: “These are the best countries and cities for attracting and developing talent”, we are reading about talent as a concept in a macro perspective, far from an individual view.

Talent — scales of view

So, what is Talent? what are we talking about when we talk about Talent? As many dimensions in life, Talent can be viewed with different scales, at individual level or at society level, regarding towns, countries or continents.

When I was studying Physics at university I realized about different levels of seeing reality. When you see matter with human eyes it is continuous and classical laws are very accurate to predict behaviour, though they are not exact. As you dive deeper in matter it starts to open another dimension, another reality. Matter is made of particles which, many of them, are not bonded. Being very simplistic, it is more like planets in an atomic level. At that level we can explain much more things and be much more accurate and near to exactitude, though we discover particles have a degree of uncertainty and nothing is so exact from now on. And, as a matter of fact, we do not need exactitude any more.

‘People’ or ‘persons’? Making a parenthesys, why not saying ‘people’ when we want to say ‘persons’. Because ‘people’ is matter, ‘persons’ is an aggregation of individuals. People is a herd, persons is a rainbow with different and individual colours.

Talent and tribes

So, what is Talent? Cambridge dictionary answers: “a person or people with a natural skill or ability”. So at an individual level it is quite understood it means a person with a expected skill or ability which is helped by natural capabilities.

At a group or society scale, it means a tribe which exists in the midst of a whole society. It is a tribe as, because of normal distribution, talented individuals are spread along society, classes or neighbourhoods. And it is a tribe whose members tipically do not know each other or be connected.

Once again, what is Talent? In a practical way, in a way labour ecosystem or organizations understand it, it is a group of skills or abilities which are expected or desired to bring into positions and get optimal performance, results and business growth. For example, in another World Economic Forum report: “ The Future of Jobs”, they depict a relation of future work skills, an aspirational map of skills or abilities, a picture of desirable talent.

Talent moves in circular ways

Going back to Talent behaviour, why am I saying it moves in circular ways? Well, for an individual it is more like spirals rather than closed circles.

Talent wants to grow and in a macro-scale view it flows towards growth in spiral ways. It is because, after adquiring knowledge and experience, talent matures far from the starting point.

Awareness

First you need talent knows you, in a time we all are over-informed and when you need to be confident about your next job, it is difficult a candidate takes you seriously when hardly knows you, heard bad experiences about you or past interactions were negative.

Talent starts flowing

Once talent knows us and it starts flowing in our direction, we need to feed it, to feed its curiosity, because talent needs to be sure there is a match between both. So we have designed a path of focused interactions and will drive the flow in the most engaging direction.

If we succeed, it is onboarding time, a delicate process in which we not only bring the flavour of our culture but anticipate it through designed interactions. Information, transparency, contextualization, training and assessment are the most critical drivers to truly engage the new employee. In 2013 Boston Consulting Group found that onboarding had the second highest business impact of 22 HR practices.

Employee experience

Advocacy, we will encourage talent during all previous phases to recommend us either by social recommendation or by word to mouth ways. It is during experience when talent is more powerful at recommendation, talking about self experiences and when our employees would like to magnetize more talent to join our daily adventure at work.

Talenti

What is that talenti stuff? Well, using latin, it means talent which is no longer at your organization.

If you reached this point and you are curious about more detail, you are invited to read full article published in Medium, follow the link: Talent moves in circular ways