What is Talent Management and Why It’s So Important?
If you are like most HR leaders, finding the RIGHT people is a priority, but it’s also a top business challenge. In today’s brutal business climate, you have to find the best candidates, onboard them efficiently, keep them moving ahead, and keep your vision on the far horizon. It’s a demanding task, but the right Talent Management solution has both the competitive advantage and force-multiplier to achieve success.
What is Talent Management?
Talent Management refers to the HR processes your company uses to attract top talent, develop highly-skilled employees, and manage training requirements. It takes everyone’s collaborative effort on your team, and ideally, a hiring and onboarding system that does the work for you.
Why is this important? According to SHRM’s Talent Acquisition Benchmark Report, the average time to hire a new employee is 36 days and an estimated $4,000. This doesn’t include the time it takes to onboard and train employees. If you think about your company’s talent management processes, you can probably think of several inefficiencies that lead to delays in recruitment, high employee turnover rates, and managers feeling overwhelmed with copious tasks and little return on investment.
Getting the right talent and providing the tools for success is hard. But by using a strategic approach to talent management with innovative software, you can streamline your HR processes and strengthen your workforce. Best practices in Talent Management consists of 3 pillars. These principles have been confirmed by many years of research and practical experience. The pillars are:
Talent Acquisition (Recruiting)
Talent acquisition links your workforce needs to your company’s mission and goals. When you think about talent acquisition, it is common to focus solely on finding the right candidates for positions you need to fill urgently. In the real world, your workforce is always in flux. A-players can be distracted and enticed away by your competitors. What about the employees who will advance or retire? And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, millennials aren’t the only ones job-hopping.
Talent Development (Training)
Development is another vital business imperative for Talent Management. An effective talent development plan leverages a design that aligns with your organization’s goals and mission and develops the skills of your staff. Did you know that one of the top reasons employees leave their job is because they didn’t learn new skills? Look at it from their perspective. If they don’t see a brighter future with you, they have fewer incentives to stay.
Talent Management Insight (Metrics)
It’s not enough these days to hire and train for what you see as the present Talent Management need. You need business intelligence that is specific to hiring and training. It should measure success and reveal the return on your investment in human capital. At any given time, you should be able to access your hiring and training metrics to determine: What happened? What is happening? What needs to happen? This information is critical to evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of your company’s processes and flows which has an impact on the talent of your company, employee satisfaction rates, retention, and company costs. Having a solution that collects the data and presents it in a unified dashboard format simplifies the talent management process. It reduces the workload for HR managers by creating a visible snapshot of the status of each employee.
These areas continue to challenge HR leaders and pressure organizations to improve continuously. In our ebook, What is Talent Management, And Why Do I Need It?, we discuss the challenges HR leaders face within these 3 pillars and show you how to conquer the ever-growing demands of recruiting and training to help you achieve your human capital ROI.