Talent Management - November 2008 - (Page 18)

recruitment & retention assessment & evaluation compensation & beneﬁts performance management learning & development succession planning Figure 3: Building a Talent Organization FOUNDATION Corporate talent philosophy: Make talent acquisition a strategic priority and invest the resources needed to be a talent organization. Workforce composition: Maximize productivity by valuing people, promoting diversity and inclusion, and providing the resources necessary for success. Infrastructure: Use technology and communications systems to support the acquisition, management and retention of talent. ATTRACTION Employment branding: Recognize the imperative for, and invest in, creative approaches to brand the company as a great place to work. Sourcing and recruiting: Leverage today’s novel sourcing and recruiting techniques, many in the realm of social networking, to attract top-quality candidates. Cultivate company-wide responsibility for recruiting. Global readiness: Understand the global nature of today’s talent pool, along with current migration challenges, to establish a strategy that supports international talent needs. SELECTION Legal compliance: Ensure the accuracy and legal defensibility of your selection processes by using valid hiring tools that measure job-relevant competencies and consistently applying up-to-date compliance standards. Candidate evaluation: Consistently use proven assessment techniques to ensure selection of candidates who possess the requisite competencies for success and who are a cultural fit for your organization. Planning and throughput: Use predictive techniques to accurately forecast talent needs. Employ systems that efficiently process candidates, resulting in hiring top talent ahead of the competition. RETENTION On-boarding: Ensure a positive experience for new hires via efficient processing of paperwork, early socialization and culture integration experiences, and provide all resources needed to quickly become productive. Workplace culture: Foster a talent accountability mindset throughout the organization and an environment in which employees are emotionally invested in their success, as well as the organization’s. Succession management: Strategically evaluate internal bench strength, identifying genuine high potentials and developing them for key leadership roles. First, an organization must have a foundation to support the central need to acquire talent. At this point in the war for talent, a number of companies still do not recognize the signiﬁcance of the talent shortage. For those that do, the key question is whether executive leadership is making talent acquisition a central element of its business strategies and investing accordingly. Once that foundation exists, the company needs to have a process to attract talent. That should include investments in employment branding initiatives. “Help Wanted” signs are no longer adequate. To attract today’s best talent, companies must employ sophisticated attraction technologies and approaches. The most effective way to create a productive workforce is to begin with talent that tightly matches the requirements of the role, as well as the organizational culture. Proper employee selection in the ﬁrst place is inﬁnitely more effective than development aimed at creating skills that don’t exist. Further, because of the looming shortage of available talent, it is imperative to move targeted prospects quickly through the hiring process and extend an offer before the candidate is lost to another opportunity. From the moment the employee agrees to join a company and through on-boarding and evaluation for leadership potential, the company culture and its focus on the inherent value of each employee must be obvious. Finally, simply knowing the elements involved in an effective talent strategy is insufﬁcient to become an effective talent organization. Step one is to assess the company against best practices in this nascent ﬁeld. Following that assessment, index the ﬁrm to provide a clear, actionable and quantitative approach to improvement. Once the organization has identiﬁed problem areas, talent managers can develop detailed road maps to implement solutions. A New Era, A New Approach that enable predictive hiring as a management tool also should be applied to the organization’s talent strategy and ultimately its efforts to become a talent organization. A truly talent-based organization values talent as a top priority and implements the tools, strategies and best practices to support the acquisition and retention of the best employees on the market. Figure 3 contains the four pillars of talent strategy — talent foundation, attraction, selection and retention — as well 12 distinct factors that talent managers should assess. These central elements facilitate the process of talent transformation. Employing this kind of talent strategy can mitigate the challenges imposed by the global talent shortage. Predictive hiring methodology draws upon decades of workforce planning. When effectively deployed, it can produce strategic, tangible results for any organization. However, predictive hiring is predicated on the notion that talent is readily available to meet workforce demands. That availability no longer exists. Companies that seek to hire the best talent must systemically evolve into talent organizations. An organization’s senior leadership must recognize and support the need for such an evolution if a predictive hiring talent approach is to succeed. Kevin Klinvex is co-founder and executive vice president at Select International, an assessment systems provider. He can be reached at editor@talentmgt.com. 18 November 2008 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - November 2008

Talent Management - November 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Learning Connections Recruitment & Retention Assessment & Evaluation Compensation & Benefits Performance Management Learning & Development Succession Planning Insight Dashboard Application Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - November 2008

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