Giovanni J.

Morales

HRM 207 – TALENT MANAGEMENT

ASSIGNMENT/RESEARCH WORK 2

1) KEY PHASES FOR IMPLEMENTING A TALENT MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

Many HR groups struggle to formulate a talent management strategy that maps out their
goals and priorities for the year and ties these to their organization's strategic plan and goals.
The reasons why are varied, but without a talent management strategy and plan, the results are
usually the same - the HR team is not seen as playing a strategic role in their organization, and
talent management activities aren't given the organizational importance they should have.

Often the hardest part is getting started with the right framework for the strategy and plan.
To help you, this article walks through the typical steps in a strategic planning process, so you
can use them draft your own HR talent management strategy.

STEP 1: IDENTIFY ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS/PRIORITIES

 What are your organization's strategic high-level goals or priorities? Are there any
upcoming changes or new directions/initiatives for the organization? Start by listing
each one of them.

STEP 2: IDENTIFY ORGANIZATIONAL DRIVERS AND CHALLENGES

 Identify and consider the key drivers and challenges that could impact your
organization's ability to achieve its goals. Consider both internal and external challenges.
These could include things like a highly competitive job market, new or changed
legislation/regulations, results from an employee satisfaction survey, new technology,
etc.

STEP 3: CONDUCT A GAP ANALYSIS

 Compare where your organization is today with where it wants to be, and identify any
gaps that it needs to address in order to achieve its goals. In identifying each gap,
consider also the risk of not addressing the gap.

For example, if your organization has a goal to rank #1 in the industry for customer
satisfaction, you need to identify your current customer satisfaction rating and the rating
required to rank #1 in your industry, then identify the gap between these two. The risk of not
improving customer satisfaction ratings by this degree could include a drop in market share or
in sales.
STEP 4: DEFINE YOUR HR PRIORITIES AND GOALS
 Based on the goals, challenges and gaps you identified in steps 1-3, identify HR goals for
the coming year to support the organization in achieving its goals. You should typically
identify 3-5 goals. Don't forget to make them SMART (specific, measurable, achievable,
realistic/relevant, time-bound) and link them to the applicable corporate goals.

STEP 5: INVENTORY YOUR TALENT MANAGEMENT PROCESSES/FUNCTIONS

 Next, do an inventory of your current HR talent management processes to determine if
you need to make any changes to existing process or add new process to support your
goals. Where gaps or needed changes are identified, put plans in place to address them.

STEP 6: MEASURE THE RESULTS AND COMMUNICATE SUCCESSES/CONTRIBUTIONS

 With your HR goals and priorities in place, it's important to assess and measure their
effectiveness and communicate the results to the organization. As you work on
achieving each goal, make sure you track relevant metrics so you can report on progress
and success, or take corrective action as needed. This is important to help you
determine if the goal or associated initiative was effective and is worth retaining.

Again, make sure you measure both the implementation and effectiveness. That is, was
the initiative executed as planned, as well as did the initiative have the desired effect. For
each HR goal, define the methods you will use to communicate results.

2) BENEFITS OF TALENT MANAGEMENT

The advantages of talent management are substantial. Let’s look at how resource
management supports talent management and the business benefits associated with it:

 Timely availability of resources for projects

As the project demands change from time to time, resource planning to fulfill ad-
hoc requirements can be daunting. Resource management tool provides complete
visibility into resource profiles and captures details like experience, skills, qualifications,
cost, and availability. Employees can validate skills and competencies from time to time
by their supervisor before updating them on the system. In this manner, organizations
can maintain a skill inventory equipped for current and future projects. It helps the
organization identify the right person for suitable project vacancies at the right time and
cost. Also, allocating resources considering their skills and interests motivates them to
stay productive and ensures timely delivery of projects.
 Improve employee engagement and productivity
One of the fundamentals of the talent management process is to identify and
nurture employee skills. Allocating over/underskilled resources to projects can lead to
employee burnout, disengagement, and schedule overruns. So, enterprises can use
workforce planning tools to schedule team members to activities based on their abilities
and interests. It has a significant impact on employee motivation and productivity.
According to Gallup, “utilizing the skills and strengths of employees regularly improves
their engagement by six times.” Providing adequate training opportunities for reskilling
or building new skills helps maintain their Individual Development Plan or IDP. Training
new skills also ensures that resources ending up on the bench are billable as soon as
they are rolled off from projects.

 Enable succession planning for critical positions

Succession planning is a critical process of talent management that helps create
a skilled workforce capable of filling leadership and other critical roles as the business
grows, changes, or develops. During business expansion or management turnover,
succession planning ensures that productivity and employee morale isn’t affected.

 Enable strategic hiring

Strategic hiring is a critical initiative of talent management that aligns hiring and
onboarding with your company’s future vision. It focuses on long-term goals and
considers future skills that your employees will need to perform at a high level. Hence,
one cannot take on the spur decisions to fulfill strategic business goals as it can
compromise quality and prove to be very costly. Enterprises must have visibility into the
future and pipeline projects to make informed hiring decisions. Resource capacity
planning helps you identify the skill gap in advance. It helps avoid last-minute scuffle for
a competent workforce and hire appropriate skill sets to meet future work demands.
Depending on the scope and duration of the projects, you can hire a permanent or
contingent workforce.

 Allow multi skill-building through job rotation

Limited and monotonous repetitive work can cause boredom and a feeling of
career stagnation for most employees. Not exposing them to various roles and activities
hinders employees’ career objectives resulting in lower morale, productivity, and
unplanned attrition. Skill building and developing is one of the significant outcomes of
talent management. Managers can implement a job rotation strategy that helps team
members diversify their skillsets. Workforce management solutions capture their
competencies and enable the timely allocation of resources to the right job.
 Encouraging employees to build multiple secondary skills improves employee
motivation and also helps enhance their billability.
3) COMPARE TALENT MANAGEMENT WITH REPLACEMENT PLANNING

 Talent management is a constant process that involves attracting and retaining high-
quality employees, developing their skills, and continuously motivating them to improve
their performance. The primary purpose of talent management is to create a motivated
workforce who will stay with your company in the long run. On the other hand,
replacement planning fills an immediate need . The first area of discrepancy is planning.
Replacement hiring is typically employed when there is an immediate need. For
example, a leader decides to retire and a role becomes vacant. Then, either a
subordinate fills the role or an external candidate is hired. This usually results in a long
learning curve, as there would likely not be any transition period between the
incumbent and their replacement.

4) WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES IN MANAGING TALENT

Carrying out talent management isn’t always easy. Many problems can come up,
like managers not being invested in helping employees, unmotivated/disgruntled
employees, and an employee who is not a good fit for the company.

Take a look at some of the leading talent management issues and challenges a business
could experience:

Poor hiring strategies

Talent management starts with filling an open position with a high performer.
Without a strong staffing management plan, a company might face difficulty with the
rest of the talent management process. Many times, businesses don’t know where to
start with hiring. They don’t know where to begin sourcing candidates or how to attract
talent, and the business might have difficulty getting a candidate to accept their job
offer. Top Echelon’s 2016/2017 State of the Recruiting Industry report found that one of
the top reasons most candidates turn down a job offer was because the hiring process
took too long. With an ineffective hiring strategy, a company might have trouble
sourcing top talent. And, if top talent is sourced, the candidate won’t want to wait
around forever for an offer.

Inexperience with technology

Automation is important for streamlining and simplifying business operations.
Businesses might use an applicant tracking system (ATS), payroll, and accounting
software. Using software saves businesses time so they can work on growing their
company. For the hiring portion of talent management, a good technology to use is an
 applicant tracking system. What is an ATS going to do for your agency? With ATS
recruitment, hiring managers can post jobs, send emails to multiple people, and
organize candidate resumes. And, an ATS tracks candidates so hiring authorities can
hang onto candidate information even after one job is filled. Using payroll and
accounting software solutions helps automate other business processes. By using these,
the company could have more time to devote to talent management. If a hiring
manager is unsure of how to make the most of their software, they could end up
crippling talent management and putting a hold on business processes.

Ineffective leadership
Strong leadership throughout the company is the basis of talent management.
Managers and other top employees take on an important role in developing and
retaining employees. If there is ineffective leadership within the company, employees
won’t have guidance in developing their talent. The company as a whole needs to come
together to train and keep employees. Without strong leaders, there won’t be anyone
to carry out talent management.

Employee turnover
Talent management focuses on developing an employee from start to finish. This
can help employees feel valued, challenged, and satisfied with their jobs. Without
successfully implementing talent management, a business could experience high
employee turnover rates. High employee turnover rates happen when an employee
feels like their job is stagnant and their pay won’t increase. An employee doesn’t want
to do the same tasks day after day. Instead, they want to grow in their abilities, get
promoted, and take on new responsibilities. If employees leave, the business needs to
start over in the talent management process. It’s especially challenging if managers or
high-level employees leave the company. Then, the business needs to find replacements
quickly. Without managers, the talent management process could fall apart.

5) KEY ELEMENTS IN DEVELOPING A WINNING TALENT STRATEGY

Here are five key strategic elements that can have a profound and long-term impact on
the success and viability of business:

1. Establish Direct Alignment with Business Strategy

Talent strategy should have a direct alignment with how it impacts the business strategy.
Too often we find the linkage between the people side of business and how it reflects in
business numbers, is based on assumptions that are too tenuous or such linkages simply do
not exist. Talent strategy starts becoming powerful and impactful when the linkage with
business numbers is established clearly and measured consistently.
2. Strategic use of talent analytics
Talent analytics, popularized in the last five years by best practices from tech companies
such as Google and Facebook is revolutionizing leadership and talent management.
Management is becoming more data and research-based than merely experience based.
Every company has tons of data related to people practices that if mined correctly can
provide unique and incisive insights and guidance for leadership decision making. From
small tactical steps and process improvement to big decisions, data can provide direction,
predict success and suggest mid-course correction. However, making sense of data and
building appropriate constructs is important, otherwise it is easy to be drowned by the
quantum of data. Many companies track scores of meaningless statistics which eventually
do not result into insights or fail to provide guidance for leadership decisions.

3. Talent Review and Top Talent Identification

A key component of talent strategy is identification and classification of talent. These
eventually take shape as high potential programs; succession plans, 9-box reviews; planned
and managed talent mobility actions. Some key questions that need to be taken into
account:
How do you define top talent and high potential? What are their characteristics? Is
there a company-wide agreement on these?
How do you assess and develop high potentials?
Having identified top talent, what is next for them?

A key aspect of top talent or high-potential programs is that these programs need to be
driven by business leaders with HR as facilitator, advisor and the function which asks the
right questions and keeps the program on track.

4. Culture Building and Transformation

An interesting comment from Facebook is “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. The true
hallmark of great companies is not their brilliant strategy, technology or products but it is
the culture that produces remarkable successes and experiences consistently for customers
and employees. No talent strategy for talent can be complete without culture building in
terms of messaging, symbols, leadership building and mapping of the journey from here to
there. Culture is defined in sociology as a “series of habits” and when these habits – related
to leadership actions, rituals of how employees and customers are treated - are built and
refined over time, results start appearing. Getting leadership to think about the
consequences of their actions, about consensus building and about business strategy is
important.

5. Employee Experience
Ultimately, business results flow from great employee experiences. When talented
employees are excited and engaged about their work, they deliver great experiences for
customers and eventually, great business results.

Talent strategy should focus on:

Outcomes and measures for employee experiences
Areas which improve employee experience
Areas which serve as disablers

Many business and HR leaders fail to see the link between how emotions impact the
outcome of work for employees. So while the emphasis is on obsessive measurement and
achievement of business goals, the positive or negative emotions that either help or derail
results are ignored. A great talent strategy is able to articulate and provide linkage between
positive emotions of employees (which come from memorable experiences) and eventual
business results.