Talent management

Talent management refers to the process of developing and integrating new workers, developing and retaining current workers, and attracting highly skilled workers to work for your company. Talent management in this context does not refer to the management of entertainers. The term was coined by David Watkins of Softscape published in an article in 1998. The process of attracting and retaining profitable employees, as it is increasingly more competitive between firms and of strategic importance, has become to be known as "the war for talent."

History

Talent management is a process that emerged in the 1990s and continues to be adopted, as more companies come to realize that their employees’ talents and skills drive their business success. Companies that have put into practice talent management have done so to solve an employee retention problem. The issue with many companies today is that many organizations put tremendous effort into attracting employees to their company, but spend little time into retaining and developing talent. A talent management system must be worked into the business strategy and implemented in daily processes throughout the company as a whole. It cannot be left solely to the human resources department to attract and retain employees, but rather must be practiced at all levels of the organization. The business strategy must include responsibilities for line managers to develop the skills of their immediate subordinates. Divisions within the company should be openly sharing information with other departments in order for employees to gain knowledge of the overall organizational objectives. Companies that focus on developing their talent integrate plans and processes to track and manage their employee talent, including the following:

• Sourcing, attracting and recruiting qualified candidates with competitive backgrounds
• Managing and defining competitive salaries
• Training and development opportunities
• Performance management processes
• Retention programs
• Promotion and transitioning

Talent management is also known as HCM (Human Capital Management), HRIS (HR Information Systems) or HRMS (HR Management Systems), and HR Modules.

Organisations

Human capital management

Companies that engage in talent management (Human Capital Management) are strategic and deliberate in how they source, attract, select, train, develop, retain, promote, and move employees through the organization. Research done on the value of such systems implemented within companies consistently uncovers benefits in these critical economic areas: revenue, customer satisfaction, quality, productivity, cost, cycle time, and market capitalization. The mindset of this more personal human resources approach seeks not only to hire the most qualified and valuable employees but also to put a strong emphasis on retention. Since the initial hiring process is so expensive to a company, it is important to place the individual in a position where his skills are being extensively utilized.

The term talent management means different things to different organizations. To some it is about the management of high-worth individuals or "the talented" whilst to others it is about how talent is managed generally - i.e. on the assumption that all people have talent which should be identified and liberated. From a talent management standpoint, employee evaluations concern two major areas of measurement: performance and potential. Current employee performance within a specific job has always been a standard evaluation measurement tool of the profitability of an employee. However, talent management also seeks to focus on an employee’s potential, meaning an employee’s future performance, if given the proper development of skills.

The major aspects of talent management practiced within an organization must consistently include:

• performance management
• leadership development
• workforce planning/identifying talent gaps
• recruiting

This term of talent management is usually associated with competency-based human resource management practices. Talent management decisions are often driven by a set of organizational core competencies as well as position-specific competencies. The competency set may include knowledge, skills, experience, and personal traits (demonstrated through defined behaviors). Older competency models might also contain attributes that rarely predict success (e.g. education, tenure, and diversity factors that are illegal to consider in relation to job performance in many countries, and unethical within organizations).

Talent marketplace

A talent marketplace is an employee training and development strategy that is set in place within an organization. It is found to be most beneficial for companies where the most productive employees can pick and choose the projects and assignments that are most ideal for the specific employee. An ideal setting is where productivity is employee centric and tasks are described as “judgment-based work,” for example, in a law firm. The point of activating a talent marketplace within a department is to harness and link individuals’ particular skills (project management or extensive knowledge in a particular field) with the task at hand. Examples of companies that implement the talent marketplace strategy are American Express and IBM.

Current application of talent management

In current economic conditions, many companies have felt the need to cut expenses. This should be the ideal environment to execute a talent management system as a means of optimizing the performance of each employee and the organization. However, within many companies the concept of human capital management has just begun to develop. “In fact, only 5 percent of organizations say they have a clear talent management strategy and operational programs in place today.”

Web 2.0 in Talent Management

Given the growing importance of engagement and knowledge transfer in today's workplace, organizations are increasingly looking at Web 2.0 tools to meet the challenges of managing the many facets of a diverse and dispersed workforce. Organizations that deploy Web 2.0 software tools (blogs, wikis and social networking tools) achieved an average year-over-year improvement in employee engagement of 18%, compared to just 1% for the organizations that do not deploy all three.