What are talent strategies?
Talent management is the systematic process of identifying a vacant position, hiring a suitable person, developing the skills and expertise of the person to match the position, and retaining him/her to achieve long-term business objectives. (Cappelli 2008). Johns, Smith & Haythornthwaite (2020) Define Talent management as the methodically organized strategic process of getting the right talent onboard and helping them grow to their optimal capabilities keeping organizational objectives in mind.
How do you build a talent strategy
1. Match talent strategy initiatives with corporate goals
Executive support is essential for the success of both business and talent initiatives. Even yet, it has historically been difficult to create a symbiotic relationship between revenue and talent despite their mutual dependence.
However, businesses have started to combine people strategy with business strategy in recent years. A business must make sure it has the necessary talent on hand if it plans to expand by making acquisitions in new markets. There is unmistakable proof that without coordinated talent plans, nothing succeeds, including mergers, international expansions, product launches, and day-to-day operations.
2. Complement Your Talent Strategy with Succession Planning
Do leadership weaknesses give you nightmares? You’re in good company. A Deloitte succession survey found that while only 14% of leaders think they do it successfully, 86% of them believe that leadership succession planning is an “urgent” or “vital” priority.
Individual career decisions cannot be changed, but leadership exits can be taken into consideration through long-term succession planning and expedited leadership development initiatives. Keeping the talent pipeline full is a crucial aspect of succession planning. The modern worker demands opportunities for professional growth that go above and beyond standard training and development initiatives. Maintaining a robust, engaged pipeline from which to construct your succession planning will be facilitated by clearly outlining growth and advancement possibilities and fostering a learning environment.
3. Build for the best while preparing for the worst
Change can obliterate even the most well-intentioned strategy if it doesn’t account for the “what ifs,” regardless of how much forewarning you have.
Your talent strategy must include contingency planning if you want to shield your company from the damaging effects of change. After all, your staff serves as the cornerstone for the success of your firm, and your capacity to draw in and hold onto top personnel during trying times may be the difference between you succeeding while others fail.
4. Locate (and Work With) an Honest Talent Partner
The landscape of learning and development, employee engagement trends, compensation demands, workforce technology requirements, and a host of other “focus” areas are all changing at a breakneck pace, giving us frequently only enough time to (hopefully) check the box with little potential for improvement.
While a talent partner cannot extend your day, they may provide you with the knowledge and insight you need to speed up decision-making, shape your strategic direction, and guide you on environmental issues you might otherwise overlook.
5. Develop Underdeveloped, In-Demand Soft Skills as Part of Your Talent Strategy
While Gen Z and Millennials bring fresh perspectives, energizing energy, and an astonishing array of technical talents to the workplace, a growing body of research suggests that these generations lack essential soft skills like problem-solving, cooperation, learnability, and time management.
In your talent development goals, you must include soft skills training in addition to recruiting for these particular skill sets. It would be ideal if you had the time, funds, and support of your executive team to develop fresh soft skills training programs. There are, however, creative methods to include the development of soft skills in your current programs.
6. Promote Senior Leader Coaching to Quicken Leadership Development
It makes sense that firms would want to reproduce and scale effective coaching results, which is perhaps why they are rushing to expand the use of one-on-one coaching throughout their organizations to more tactical leadership levels.
Yes, the days of the C-suite enjoying all the advantages of private coaching are long gone. A fresh strategy is necessary given the intense competition in the job market and the requirement for quicker leadership development. Hence the apparent shift toward coaching senior leaders.
Why do you need a talent strategy?
A strong talent acquisition strategy will facilitate effective hiring.
A clever talent acquisition plan is something you cannot overlook if you want to transition from merely hiring to hiring to improve your organization. You can assess labor markets, take into account international factors, and continuously review personnel plans with the aid of a solid strategy. Additionally, you’ll be able to split your workforce in a way that makes locating and effectively addressing talent gaps much simpler.
Strategies for attracting top talent are long-term investments.
Compared to 20 years ago, the market is substantially more competitive today. Although there are more enterprises and the talent pool has expanded, there is fierce rivalry for the best employees. Everyone is on the lookout for that game-changer, and once they find one, they will stop at nothing to hold onto it. You need a serious talent acquisition strategy if your objective is to consistently discover top personnel.
Your market position will be improved through employment branding.
Employment branding is one of the components of talent acquisition where you identify, define, and explain the company’s brand, key differentiators, organizational culture, goods and services, and reputation. Businesses with effective branding enjoy superior market placement, which aids in attracting and keeping top people. Because they can already see what it’s like to work for your company, candidates will pick you.
Continuous improvement is fueled by tracking.
Metrics and analytics are often used in acquisition efforts to aid in tracking. By doing this, you’ll always be aware of the skills you now have and those you lack. Consequently, you are aware of what to look for in a candidate when you need to hire. This can only simplify the hiring process, right? Additionally, increasing productivity which eventually results in improved business is possible when you locate the proper candidates.
Components of a talent strategy
1. The Business Context
Your company’s talent strategy primarily serves to support your business objectives. Take a look at where your business plans to be in two to five years and think about what your staff will be required to do to get there.
While doing so, think about how your current organizational structure, hiring procedure, performance management system, and learning pathways might be improved for achieving business goals while luring and keeping the talent you’ll need to do so.
It’s also important to consider outside variables like the local job market, the competitive environment, new technologies, and workplace trends.
2. Employee Value Proposition
Good employees have more possibilities for jobs in the corporate world of today. The finest workers seek a feeling of meaning and purpose in their work rather than just a paycheck. Why employees stay with you is explained in an employee value proposition. It incorporates your company’s values, establishes your culture, and tells potential employees what to anticipate from working for you.
An EVP is more than just values written on your careers page and signs on the wall; it must be consistently reinforced via actions to permeate your culture. It most prominently manifests in the way that employees are managed.
Gallup estimates that managers are responsible for at least 70% of the variation in employee engagement ratings. Organizations can integrate their EVP into their talent strategy with the use of management training and effective internal communications.
3. Branding for employers
Employer branding is the process of presenting your business to prospective and current employees as the employer of choice. It is essential for drawing in and hiring qualified employees. 75% of job seekers think about an employer’s brand before ever applying for a job, according to Linkedin research!
Candidates can tell a difference in your hiring process when what you state on your careers page matches what they experience when they visit your company. Your employer brand is influenced by press, blog entries, social media posts, Glassdoor reviews, and company photographs and videos. Knowing your brand’s current position and the desired direction is crucial when designing your talent strategy.
4. Talent sourcing
A strategic talent acquisition program begins with identifying the top abilities, backgrounds, and personality attributes of the candidates you want to hire. Then, you write job descriptions that clearly state these qualifications and motivate potential applicants to apply. . Additionally, it contains a tactical method for locating people through sourcing, internal recommendations, job advertisements, and internal recruiting. Building a talent pipeline through sourcing enables businesses with room for expansion to extend their workforce when necessary.
A good talent acquisition program must manage the interview process; teams can choose top candidates through a structured hiring procedure with prepared interviewers and regular feedback collection.
Without an applicant tracking system to manage and keep track of the application process, no strategic talent acquisition campaign is complete. For more effective job matching and applicant screening, you might also think about utilizing AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies.
5. Learning and Growth
In the quickly changing corporate climate of today, constant learning is essential. Additionally, learning increases employee happiness: according to recent research, those who learn at work are 47% less stressed and 39% more likely to feel successful and productive.
Learning is the largest challenge for 2019, according to 2019 Deloitte Human Capital Trends, which was evaluated as critical by 86% of executives.
A solid personnel strategy contains strategies for management and leadership development, allots funds for learning, and identifies opportunities for learning and growth.
6. Performance Administration
Employee morale can be made or broken by management practices, which have an impact on engagement. Spending some time strategically considering performance management and how it might help achieve the objectives of your company’s business is worthwhile.
Success has been recorded by organizations that adopted a continuous feedback methodology. The performance management trend known as OKRs (Objectives Key Results) has been adopted by Google and other businesses. It allows employees to create goals. You can change your talent strategy to focus on the best performance management techniques by comparing your existing system to comparable programs.
7. Analyses and Reporting
As you establish your talent strategy, hiring and people analytics can assist your business to identify issue areas and give a baseline for future analysis. Your efforts will be guided by a combination of performance indicators and survey metrics, which will also allow you to iteratively improve your talent strategy. The following metrics are important to monitor:
- Supplier of labor
- Fill the time
- Ratio of change
- Price per hire
- Candidate background
- Level of hires
People analytics is using AI more and more. Just make sure it’s being utilized morally, by local regulations, and builds trust among employees rather than eroding it.
Examples of a talent strategy plan
Here are 5 examples of effective talent management strategies.
Framework for Leadership and Development at Oxford University Hospitals
With the use of this framework, Oxford University Hospital will be able to attract, identify, develop, and retain leaders with the greatest caliber and capability.
They are bravely shifting away from a “command and control” style of leadership toward one that emphasizes inclusivity, influence, and honesty over power.
They advocate shared ownership as opposed to concentrated power for the few.
The University of California, 2015–2018 Human Resources Strategic Plan.
To create their strategy, they make use of an innovative Strategic Value Continuum.
This strategic plan begins with a great deal of tactical detail, focusing on the tactics for each functional area from Benefits Programs, Compensation Programs, Employee Relations, HR Compliance and Policies, Labor Relations, Retirement Programmes and services, Retirement Programmes, HR Systems & Data, and less on the overall strategic outlook (with the latter having a stated focus on data-driven decision making)
Edinburgh University’s People Strategy, 2012–2016.
It’s unusually well-branded and artistically presented for these documents, plus it has a preface from the HR Director (complete with a picture) to add a more personal touch. The University Strategic Plan 2012–2016 and the People Strategy have been coordinated.
The plan outlines a forward-looking and ambitious people agenda to enhance the University’s status globally while taking into account the numerous problems affecting the higher education (HE) industry.
Halogen Software: Talent Management Strategy Template in the Strategy Document.
An effective HR software vendor has provided a helpful 11-page strategy document template that you can use to create your talent management strategy.
Peterborough County: 2015–2019 Talent Management Strategy
It’s interesting to note that this plan is exceptional in that it devotes its beginning to make a thorough business case for the necessity of talent management.
Other than that, it is a conventional talent management plan document that should be read in conjunction with the other four mentioned documents.