Talent Management
- Home
- Skills & Tools
- Talent Management
Talent management refers to the skill of identifying, attracting, developing and retaining the individuals desired for making an organization successful either through immediate contribution or their potential to do so in the future.
Through their talent management skills, people can successfully create a sustainable and well-performing organization that achieves all its strategic goals and objectives. Considering the complex and dynamic environment in which businesses nowadays operate, utilization of the best talent management skills is extremely important for competing in the global economy as well as capitalizing on new opportunities.
This is because talent management essentially involves developing individuals and organizations according to the challenges faced by the changing environment.
Why is talent management important
The connection between talented employees and exceptional organizational performance has always been the heart of any human resource related decisions. However, the following factors have contributed to the growing importance and demand of talent management skills:
- Development of a skilled workforce. In the face of the problems such as population getting older and lack of skilled workers, talent management has become a necessity for every organization. Leaders with talent management skills are able to create and maintain a supportive as well as people-oriented organizational culture where employees learn and develop along with the development of the organization.
- Value creation. Employees’ talent is rapidly becoming one of the chief sources of value creation. In a research conducted by Brookings Institution in 1982, it was discovered that only 38% of an average company’s value was attributed to intangible assets such as intellectual property, brand and most importantly, people. The remaining credit was all given to tangible assets. However, by 2013, a backflip was seen with 80% of the value being attributed to intangible assets, making talent management more significant than ever.
- Changing employees’ expectations. With employees becoming increasingly dedicated to their professions and demanding more challenging and meaningful work, capturing both the ‘hearts’ as well as ‘minds’ of the workforce has become extremely difficult without leaders having exceptional talent management skills.
How to improve your talent management skills
Bearing in mind the importance of talent management for almost every organization, following are the ways in which you can attempt to improve them:
- Begin by identifying the people and positions in an organization that are critical to its success.
- Undertake a thorough analysis of the current situation to pinpoint any mismatch of task with talent and then ensure that right people are attracted to organization for the right job.
- Employee development. It may, sometimes, be extremely difficult to find new workers who are fully skilled according to the organization’s requirement. In such cases, it is better to invest in and develop your own people who seem to have the potential. Processes must be designed in a way that they help support as well as nurture the performance of employees e.g. through incorporation of honest feedback or progress tracking mechanism etc.
- Retention. Most important of all, after hiring new skilled workers or developing the existing ones, is your ability to retain them. This tends to be the major test of one’s talent management skills. Implementation of an appropriate support and reward system for employees can help to a great extent.
