Who's Your Talent Manager?

According to the 2009 Talent Management Factbook from Bersin & Associates companies with mature, integrated talent management processes have significantly less turnover, have experienced less downsizing, and have 26 percent higher revenue-per-employee than companies with no integrated processes.   These impressive metrics make talent management attractive as a business strategy but where to begin?

Talent management is about planning, sourcing, attracting, developing, retaining and motivating your workforce.  Let's look at each of these briefly in turn:

Planning: Depending on your core business and company performance and growth objectives, your company will need certain skills in certain roles at certain times.  Useful analysis includes:

• Map of current skills and gaps - Managers typically have a pretty good idea of what skills and/or manpower they are lacking in their own teams but then what happens? 

• 2-5 year plan of projected talent needs – This should include retiring employees as well as an estimate for company growth and normal attrition, mapped against your business plan.

Sourcing: A balanced sourcing strategy should include the following:

• Assessment of internal skills – You may already have the talent you need, with a little investment. 

• Channel map – What are the talent sourcing channels, what do they cost and how effective are they? 

• Salary survey - How do salaries and rewards measure up by job, region, gender, seniority, performance, potential, etc.?

• Demographic analysis - Are there demographic differences (i.e., type of job, gender, age, location, etc.) that you need to be aware of or can turn into a competitive advantage?

Attracting: Once you’ve defined a sourcing strategy, how will you attract people to your company?  Three areas you want to focus on are:

• Brand – Why would people want to work for your company?  What are your core values?  How are people treated? 

• Compensation – You don’t have to pay more than everyone else to attract talent but you do need a compensation strategy. 

• Total rewards – Money talks but don’t let it hog the floor. Non-monetary rewards, recognition programs, development opportunities, etc., are also part of your employer brand.

Developing: Companies will increasingly need to invest in internal development to win the war for talent and ensure the right skills are in place when and where they are needed. 

• Learning – Learning may include formal training, mentoring, networking, peer training, on-the-job learning, and ‘on demand’ learning. 

• Career planning – Letting people be an active participant in their own careers can can be a game changer when it comes to retention, motivation and succession planning. 

• Succession planning – Succession planning is about ensuring you can fill key organizational roles as needed with qualified people.  It's also a great tie in to career development and informal learning.

Retaining: Retaining is a lot like attracting except now you have managers in the mix and nothing kills talent management like a poor manager. 

• Managers – Hold them accountable and give the tools and mentoring they need to be good managers.

• Total rewards strategy – Depending on your workforce, this may include paying for performance, differentiating across demographic groups and/or allowing employees to choose their own rewards.

Motivating: You can find more information about motivation in my recent post Re-Engaging Your Workforce.

This isn’t a definitive guide to talent management but I think we can agree it’s a pretty big job. And it's unlikely that isolated talent management activities will coalesce into a cohesive talent strategy without a dedicated owner.

These days it seems like everyone’s asking, ‘Who’s our talent?’ as people try to identify high performers and high potentials.  But maybe it's time to ask, ‘Who’s our talent manager?’

Or, as a friend of mine recently quipped, rather chauvinistically I thought, ‘Who’s your talent daddy?’

Picture courtesy of A-PEX Project: Teamwork.

Laura Schroeder is a Compensation Strategist at Workday, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA.  She has more than twelve years of experience designing, developing, implementing and evangelizing Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions in the US, Asia and Europe.   Her articles and interviews on HCM topics have been published in national and European trade journals.  She currently lives in Munich, Germany and enjoys reading, writing and spending time with friends and family.