Why Your Company Needs a Chief Talent Officer

Vertical Elevation Newsletter??-??August 22, 2024

Employee engagement has declined in recent years with trends such as “quiet quitting” and “coffee badging” taking hold amidst the transition to hybrid/remote environments. These drops in engagement bring less productivity and eventually, lower profits.??

There is a common denominator leaders must address: how you prioritize your talent. How your company views and treats its employees directly correlates to your overall success. Adding a chief talent officer (CTO) to your executive team will bring a functioning talent strategy to the forefront and slowly boost engagement and commitment.??

What “People-First” Means?

You can say you put your people first, but actually doing so means?prioritizing your talent’s growth, culture, and communication at all levels over your product.?

Say you hear through the grapevine that two of your lower-level workers are in a project-related dispute. You have a significant sales call scheduled in the next few hours. At that moment, you can either choose to meet with the workers and postpone and possibly lose a significant sale or have a manager deal with the conflict to prioritize the sales meeting.

The answer should be easy. By meeting one-on-one with the employees, you’re showing them you care and that you’re committed to their happiness in the company whether done in place of the meeting or afterward. But it’s easier said than done.??

Another instance might be noticing when an employee stops showing up to work as often and appears to be slowing in productivity. You can take a proactive approach and ask what they are going through and how you can help. Or you can focus on their outputs and “quiet fire” them as a punishment or give a harmful performance review to get your point across.??

Knowing how to go about these situations can be confusing, which is why it requires training. The first step to reprioritizing your talent is hiring a CTO to oversee employer-employee relations.??

The Benefits of Having a CTO?

A talent-first perspective must be employed from the top, down. In most organizations, human resources traditionally lead talent initiatives. Larger problems stem from this setup. Because HR doesn’t have a seat at the executive level for decisions, the department has influence but no power to make changes. That’s the reality of how organizations are typically set up.?

You can transform your overall success by leaving HR to focus on what they’ve been trained to do (payroll, discipline, policies, etc.) and bringing in a CTO solely focused on talent acquisition, development, and retention.?

1. Your recruiting strategy will be handled by experts.??

Look at any top HR professional at a large company. Most of the time, their background has no connection to recruiting. So, why are they expected to handle recruiting effectively??

You may suspect you have a recruiting or turnover problem; however, it’s due to a lack of expertise on the part of whom you’ve hired to do it. Take it from me, I recruited for three decades and have had to correct the work of HR. It’s a complex sales job. Would you have a top sales executive report to HR???

An ideal CTO is a career professional headhunter and therefore can monitor prospect outreach methods, position descriptions, the interviewing process, and the overall fit each employee has to the vision. They will also ensure the quality of recruiters in your company.?

A CTO’s role includes designing a talent strategy (who you want to hire, how you’ll hire them, how you’ll retain them). As part of the executive team, they consider every department’s needs when forming the plan.

2. When red tape must be cut, it can be done.?

A CTO has the power to get creative when needed. This is where sitting at the executive level comes into play. Executives hold certain power needed in the recruiting process. An HR person can only answer to the executive team rather than being a part of decisions.??

Say your recruiter submits two ideal candidates, but the hiring manager rejects both. Your CTO has the power to explore where the miscommunication occurred and mitigate the situation before possibly losing great prospects.??

3. Your turnover will decline.?

HR has many responsibilities and is tied to a strict budget. It's not focused on keeping employees engaged and your company’s culture thriving. Let alone is the department in a position that warrants trust from employees. That’s why low engagement has become such a large issue across the board. Do you have one set person assigned to the task of cultivating employee-employer relationships and fostering a healthy work culture?

A CTO stays laser-focused on your people's needs and making sure they are met. Every worker has different feelings, goals, and needs, and therefore asking questions is the only way to achieve happy employees. They oversee talent development and training and have the necessary power to create initiatives when desired.??

When tough conversations are needed, they act as a resource to guide managers through difficult situations, always keeping in mind that employees come first. This may mean being a voice for workers when an executive decision is being made, which in the long run will build trust within your company.?