Exploratory Development

Talent management is a new buzzword (actually, not even really new). This term is used to describe very wide range of activities – from gathering people with appropriate skills as a project team to designing complex corporate retaining programs. Nowadays terms talent management, human resources management and human capital management are used interchangeably.

Let’s take a look at talent management from perspectives of an employee and an employer. It seems that their goals of talent management are different.

What does a person expect from talent management? S/he needs to improve her/his skills, increase salary, get higher position, increase self-esteem and job satisfaction, etc. What does a company expect from talent management? It needs to be able to fulfill its operations in the most effective way – right people in the right place for the minimal amount of resources (resources include wide range of things – money, time, reputation, attention, etc). So, it seems logical to hire minimally qualified people who can perform a job and pay them as little as possible. Yes, requirements of a person are completely different from company’s needs.

But let’s take a look at this problem from long term point of view. If company has mediocre employees it hardly can achieve high performance. And even more important – it can’t improve its work. Nowadays a company will not survive if it is not improving its operations continuously. A company needs people who can make it more effective. Such people have to know more than their direct responsibilities; they have to be highly motivated to spend their own energy on a company. In addition there is a loss when key person leaves a company – company has to spend time and money on hiring new specialist and transfer knowledge to him (and sometimes key knowledge can be completely lost).

A company which wants to be successful in a long term has to improve employee’s skills, increase salary, and promote employees. And it is exactly employee’s goals. Of course, right balance is very important – company should not spend all its resources on employee’s development.

In this article only some areas of talent management are briefly described – needs and talents identification, talent development and retaining.

Needs and talents identification

How can we get right people in the right place? First of all, a company must understand what its needs and goals are.

Identification means that a company should know what talent it has and what it needs. On this stage it should be decided what talents are important for a company – high motivation? leadership? specific technical skills? broad outlook? communication? This can be done through analysis of the operations and potential future strategies.

Then a company should find out what talents it has already got. It can be done via employees’ poll plus gathering information from the managers. This information should be updated regularly.

Finally a company has to identify gaps between actual state and desirable. These gaps are the base for talent development.

Talent development

A company needs to address existing lack of desired talents. There are several possible ways to tackle the problem: hire new people, train existing employees, change the operations in a way that eliminate need in absent talents, just ignore it. Ignorance can lead to big problems; change in the operations is hardly possible, so we only can hire new people or develop existing ones.

Hiring new people is quite expensive process. First of all, it’s not so easy to find an appropriate person, s/he has to have required talents, fit corporate culture and has acceptable drawbacks. A company has to spend its time, money and attention of hiring department. Hire poses risk, e.g. we can find a person with strong communication skills and later discover that this person very negatively influences other people motivation. And a company has to spend some resources on new employee education – knowledge transfer, corporate culture, etc. Despite its disadvantages hiring new people is a good way to bring in new knowledge and views which can help to refresh a company. And that’s actually the only possible way when a company experiences shortage of people.

The second way to develop talents is to work with existing employees. And it’s better to talk not about training but about help in people development. How can a company help? There are a lot of options, for example:

• Create the atmosphere of development, provide several good role models and people will follow
• Challenging tasks so a person has to learn new skills
• Coaching
• Knowledge transfer between colleagues
• Trainings

It’s a smart move to create corporate strategy in this area to unite separate events. But the most important thing is people – if a person doesn’t want to develop himself, no corporate strategy can help. I’d recommend starting from the atmosphere and role models. Then, it’s better to explain the strategy to the employees so anybody understands what is going on and what it is for. Explain direct and indirect advantages for people.

Retaining

A company has built very strong team. People who have broad set of talents can find new job much more easily. Oops, we have made a mistake helping to develop people! No, that’s wrong position. Some people will leave a company – that’s for sure. That’s a sad side. But on the other hand having atmosphere of development, helping people to improve themselves ties talented specialists to a company because they want to develop themselves and that’s what a company provides! In current global world information about a company can spread over very quickly so positive references from company’s former employees attracts more talented people to a company. People will leave but a company can expect that on average talent will spend more time in a company and be of better use.

Having information about required and existing talents helps managers to decide how much company can spend on retaining specific specialist. If some person has very needed skills it’s reasonable to spend more resources (e.g. time on analysis of what the person wants) on retaining this specialist.

Problems

Of course, if it was easy to achieve all described advantages then every company would have introduced good talent management. Some difficulties:

• Talent management is a long-term strategy, it doesn’t provide immediate results
• It’s quite hard to create the atmosphere of development
• Cost of talent development can be high and it’s difficult to prove its necessity
• It’s difficult to provide quantitative measures of talent development outcomes
• Management is afraid that personnel will leave a company if they get higher qualification

Good talent management requires open atmosphere, it requires that a person can make a mistake and learn from that. That’s easier to achieve it in a flat structure, than in a hierarchical with lots of levels.

It may be imprudent to introduce talent management in a company which can not provide its employees with non-material incentives. When an employee gets higher qualification and s/he does not like a company s/he will start looking for a better job in another company as soon as s/he realizes that with current skill set it is possible to get job with the same (or even higher) level of material incentives and additional non-material ones. In such companies talent management should be applied very carefully and only to thoroughly chosen employees.

It’s worth at least thinking about

Taking into account all possible problems and difficulties is talent management worth introducing? Let’s take a look at successful companies – most of them have talent management (although it may be called differently). To survive a company has to change continuously, mediocre people can not improve company’s work. Talent management can give a company competitive advantage which is difficult to copy or overcome.