The greatest asset any organization has is its people. Employers clearly understand the impact that recruiting and developing a strong workforce has on business results – A talented workforce is crucial to any organization’s sustained success and growth. Long-term success and viability for most organizations relies on finding and developing great workers, especially at the manager and executive level.
By implementing a talent management solution, businesses can capitalize on workforce strategies. At the same time, it’s important to consider how to drive maximum efficiencies across processes and through workforce optimization. At a time when human resources departments everywhere are being challenged to do more with less, employers should be taking a close look at integrated solutions to maximize system efficiencies.
How to Build a Talent Management Strategy
If you’re starting from scratch, consider these five tips for building out your talent management strategy:
- Launch your talent management strategy with your C-suite’s support. Concisely outline why your organization needs a talent management system. Provide clear organizational goals and inform them how you’ll measure success (they’ll want to see hard numbers). It’s important to your HR team and your entire company that commitment to talent management comes from the highest levels of the organization to demonstrate the importance of talent management planning.
- Appoint a talent leader who champions the initiative. Designate a senior-level person (preferably someone who has the CEO’s ear) who will help develop, update and promote the talent management strategy. They can work with the C-suite to help ensure your strategy stays on track and aligns with business goals.
- Analyze all of the roles in your company. This audit is a key step in establishing a talent management program. Looking at all of your jobs and job descriptions will help you understand your existing talent pool and determine if you have any talent gaps. It’s absolutely critical to determine if you have the talent needed to execute on your business strategy.
- Shop around. It’s important for companies to optimize their approaches to talent management to deliver the best results. So, it’s also important to company success to find a talent management system that not only complements and enhances your current HR and payroll solutions, but also addresses a broad range of employee needs – starting with recruitment and continuing throughout the entire employee lifecycle (keep reading for more on that).
- Put relevant metrics in place to measure success. Regularly monitor and track the business impact of your strategy by using standard talent management metrics. These numbers connect your talent investments to your company’s financial performance. Examples of these metrics include: Talent retention rate, cost to hire, average tenure of new hires, time to fill open requisitions, and revenue generated per full-time employee. Consistently share these numbers, as well as improvement recommendations, you’re your senior leadership team. These updates should focus on the strengths and weaknesses of your talent pipeline and tie in to company strategy by focusing on the impact HR is now having on revenue generation and client satisfaction.
What to Look for in a Talent Management System
Talent management systems should work seamlessly with existing systems and deliver best-in-class performance along with powerful reporting and analytics. The solution has to be scalable, cost-effective and easy to use by both managers and employees to enable success in employee development and performance management.
When evaluating a talent management solution, look for the following features that will meet your needs and the needs of your employees:
- Applicant Tracking System: Recruiting is a complex job. Between managing multiple open job requisitions; taking the needs of your hiring managers into consideration; and communicating with hundreds of candidates, you’re running a million miles a minute in multiple directions. You don’t have time to spend on using manual recruiting processes. A solid ATS will simplify and automate the candidate search offering easy-to-read job statuses, and action items in one place. It should also be device agnostic, enabling candidates to apply for jobs from anywhere.
- Onboarding: Many newly hired employees make the decision to stay or leave within the first six months of being on the job. A recent study conducted by Sierra-Cedar indicates that better recruiting and onboarding leads to greater retention of new hires, reducing turnover and hiring costs. They also found organizations that implemented an onboarding process benefitted from an improvement of 54% in new hire productivity, as well as a 50% increase in new hire retention. So, it should be obvious why your onboarding efforts matter to your company’s bottom line.
- Performance management: Performance management should be more than just sitting down for an annual performance review. This area is where you can help managers easily help their employees set objectives, assess employee progress and provide coaching and feedback to help ensure that employees are meeting their goals and career objectives. When you align individual employee goals with departmental objectives and company strategy, you can help ensure that activity translates into positive business results.
- Succession planning: A Gallup survey indicates that about one third of the current labor force (about 75 million workers) is made up of Baby Boomers. The oldest are turning 72 in 2018; the youngest, born in 1964, are in their mid-50s. And, more than 44 million are still working. Pew Research says that Generation X provides around 53 million workers to our economy. So, when you do the math, that leaves a deficit of about 10 million workers to fill the Baby Boomer gap. It’s a business imperative that you recognize rising talent and critical roles within your company, and make sure you’ve identified and are developing the new leaders who can replace the old ones when they leave the company.
- Learning management: In addition to contributing to a positive culture, offering professional development through a learning management system also provides a pool of potential new leaders from within your company who are statistically more likely to succeed than leaders brought in from outside the business. By strategically and cost-effectively creating, managing and delivering personalized training to employees, you can improve employee engagement and retention.
- Compensation management: Compensation management should be viewed as far more than simply cutting your employees a weekly paycheck. A total compensation package includes salary, as well as benefits such as health insurance, wellness programs, and retirement or pension offerings. Manually managing all of these components for all of your employees or relying on duplicate entry across disparate systems is simply untenable. A system that “talks” to your other systems will allow for single entry, freeing up the HR department for more strategic activities.
The ROI of Talent Management
With technology for talent management, the return on investment (ROI) is there, but the value is not as straightforward as that of payroll, time and attendance, or other central functionality for your HR department. Every business has different needs, expectations and demands, so choosing a talent management solution can’t be one-size-fits-all. Finding the perfect package for your company’s exact requirements and comparing solutions against each other is key to getting exactly what you need.
When shopping around for a talent management system, it’s important to conduct extensive research and find the partner that can deliver a solution that will drive the ongoing success of your current and future employees. Successful companies need talent management strategies that will help identify, evaluate, develop and retain individuals who possess skill sets that drive successful business outcomes. An effective talent management strategy that leverages integrated solutions and diligently tracks and monitors success and opportunities is the best way to help ensure your company will attract and retain the talent you need to succeed now and down the road.
Talent management is a critical component of delivering a better HR experience for the entire company. Businesses that invest in talent management today will see the organizational impact and benefit from deploying those solutions enterprise-wide for years to come.
Finding the right talent management platform to support your business needs is no easy feat. We’d love an opportunity to learn about your challenges and advise you on ways our solution can support your efforts and help you make a difference in your organization. Click here to start a conversation with one of our expert solutions consultants.