Talent management is the series of business processes used to attract, develop, motivate and retain your workforce.
Talent management has never been more important as a strategic pillar for Human Capital Management than in 2020. From talent analyst all-star Josh Bersin to Avature’s own CEO Dimitri Boylan, ask any executive or HCM thought leader about the impact of effective talent management in these trying times, and you will have a tough time finding one who doesn’t recognize its ability to foster sustained success.
And yet, ask those same individuals to define the term – from the elements to the stages, to the best practices – and it’s highly unlikely that you will find any two answers the same. Like many topics that have occupied the hearts and minds of HCM practitioners over the last 30 years, not only has talent management seen its fair share of complex iterations and evolutions, but each organization tends to implement its own unique talent management framework – one heavily influenced by culture, industry and organizational history.
In this post, we will take a look at some of the talent management basics, as well as how Avature’s approach to talent management is poised to help organizations meet the demands of a rapidly evolving labor force.
Let’s dive in.
What is Talent Management?
There are many different talent management models to choose from, and much debate regarding their makeup and character. Generally, talent management is considered the strategic process of leveraging and developing the right people to stimulate organizational growth and goal attainment. There are at least three generally accepted components of a basic talent management strategy: employee development, employee engagement/retention and employee mobility.
Pillar 1: Employee Development
Employees – more than 90 percent of them according to LinkedIn – want skill/career development pathway programs, and most are willing to leave their current employer if they don’t receive them. HCM leaders interested in optimizing their talent management strategies have come to understand that employee development pathways are no longer an optional luxury for enterprise organizations in 2020.
A pivotal part of development is performance management. And while there exists a diverse spectrum of hotly debated performance management frameworks, most experts agree that effective performance management plays a critical role in helping organizations align employee development with long-term strategic objectives. It does so by setting expectations, initiating opportunities and formalizing action plans with a degree of clarity unparalleled in human capital management.
Pillar 2: Employee Engagement
With today’s labor force yearning to move beyond the “cog-in-the-machine” attitude of prior generations, employee engagement strategies within talent management tend to focus heavily on effective communication. And yet, this wasn’t always the case. For many years, organizations failed to fully realize the connection between engagement, culture, retention and successful business development.
This all changed, however, around five years ago when an enlightening study by Deloitte revealed that not only were most employees not adequately engaged by their employer, but more than half of the global workforce would not recommend their employer to their peers. An alarming stat for talent management professionals to swallow.
In the five years since, HCM leaders and business executives have turned to technology to aid them in their quest to improve employee retention through the creation of meaningful engagement and culture.
Pillar 3: Talent Mobility
In simple terms, talent mobility represents the movement of employees from one job to another within an organization, as well as their participation in initiatives outside of their typical role/responsibilities. As companies move away from career models based on functional hierarchies, talent management leaders have come to recognize that organizational success is driven by the overall breadth and depth of workforce experience.
Experienced employees prove highly effective in bridging the gap between development and retention, as upskilled employees are more likely to move both horizontally and vertically within an organization.
In an ideal scenario, a robust internal mobility program will be paired with a flexible SaaS solution to form a potent one-two punch of modern talent management. Organizations will be well placed to not only lower their hiring costs, but to develop a broader understanding of who they actually have in-house – from skills, to experience, to professional development goals – and, in turn, to do more with less.
Avature’s Approach to Talent Management: A Seamless SaaS Ecosystem
Talent is all about relationships, and our goal here at Avature since our founding has been to help our customers leverage technology to develop frictionless and uninterrupted talent activities. Although our origins in human capital management are rooted in talent acquisition and our groundbreaking CRM Solution, relationship management has always been a driving force behind what we do and how we do it.
We’ve come to understand that effective talent management doesn’t happen in isolation. In the real world – one of ever-evolving technology and shifting candidate preferences – silo thinking fails. And, given the natural bond between the basic elements of talent management, it was only natural to develop a living, breathing talent management solution ecosystem engineered to adapt and evolve with our clients.
To illustrate, let’s imagine for a moment that you are a manager tasked with evaluating the performance of a large and geographically dispersed team.
While there are likely to be any number of objectives and key results that need to be quantified and evaluated for each individual employee (something easily accomplished with Avature Performance Management), our talent management solutions are uniquely positioned to empower you to take into account additional parameters of modern employee performance such as peer recognition.
With Avature DNA, managers are empowered to not only develop a more holistic picture of employee performance by weighing “praises” and other indicators of positive peer recognition, but, with the help of Avature’s best-in-class data modeling, they can provide direct reports with the tailored, personalized employee experience they so crave in the digital age.
Upon the completion of performance reviews, for example, all employees – from talent in need of a helping hand to an organization’s rising stars – can subsequently be delivered personalized development “ads” and other targeted training content through their DNA employee profile.
Later, when a new position is created to meet a business need, or becomes available due to a long-anticipated retirement, Avature Succession Planning and Internal Mobility can provide hiring managers with access to prior employee assessments and enable them to more easily determine whether or not an internal candidate would be an ideal fit. If it’s determined that an employee has high potential, but is not quite ready for the position, then the talent management loop comes full circle as that individual will be provided with an expanded development pathway through their employee profile/engagement hub.
Such is the power of a unified talent management ecosystem built on the back of multi-point data and integrated tools.
To Conclude…
If you’re looking to move beyond the outdated silo thinking of yesteryear’s legacy suites and implement a dynamic talent management ecosystem that will grow with you, then Avature is your solution of choice. Don’t hesitate to contact our talent experts today and begin designing your organization’s ideal talent experience.
