Talent Management and Corporate Strategy: Aligned for Driving Excellence

Talent Management in the contemporary scenario has received increasing importance from the corporate world and have been acknowledged as the key for providing a competitive edge and a leadership advantage by developing the top talents and resources in an organizations.

Talent Management can be regarded as a process of acquisition, hiring and retaining the most talented organizational resources/employees by building a supporting and a high performing organizational culture.

The Talent Management strategy should be aligned with the overall corporate strategy for driving business excellence which involves defining the leadership criteria for present and future, identifying core competencies and developing those core competencies by providing training and support.

For competing and staying ahead in the competitive battle, business leaders plan and implement best practices in talent management for acquiring the best of the talent pool from the market and capitalizing proactively on the available opportunities. Effective talent management strategies should be long term focused and have various feasibilities or alternatives for making the best of the available opportunities.

Anticipating change and creating an adaptable workforce: In today’s fast changing competitive world, business leaders are in search of talents who can quickly adapt with the change, proactively anticipate change and adapt with it, can cope up with the challenges and be constantly updated with the latest developments and corporate practices.

The employees selected should possess the right knowledge, skills and experiences, which can be acquired with proper training and development. The organizations which have a strategic talent development plan in place, offer the following benefits:

• Improves the ability of responding to the changes proactively instead of being reactive, by developing the critical talent and skills needed for staying ahead in competition.

• Contributes towards a control on the training costs, by laying more focus on the essential skills to be improved in the employees.

• Enables recruitment of high performing staff/employees.

Aligning Talent Management Strategy with the Corporate Strategy

The Talent Management strategy should be aligned with the overall corporate strategy and the future business goals, as it would result in superior productivity, focused approach and an integrated involvement from all the functional departments.

Goal alignment creates a sense of employee ownership and accountability amongst the employees, thus improving their commitment towards their job and overall motivation.

For ensuring goal alignment in the organization, communication of goals and strategic objectives across to all the levels of the employees from the top to bottom is the first step. Communication of goals improves departmental cooperation, reduces redundancy in work and drive superior performance through collaborative efforts and integrated approaches.

Alignment of goals offer several advantages like:

• Drives the focus towards company’s crucial objectives or goals which require a proactive attention.

• Clearly highlights the specific responsibilities which are associated with specific goals

• Strengthens ownership, commitment and accountability of the employees and thereby improves overall employee performance and organizational productivity.

Over the next 2 decades one of the most crucial resource which would be defining the competitiveness of any organization is the talent which is also the shortest resource. Hence, in the fast changing competitive world, identification of the best fit for the best jobs is one of the major challenge which any HR department is faced with in the present scenario.

Hence a well-crafted talent management strategy in alignment with the corporate strategy can save a lot of cost.

Talent management and corporate culture

Corporate culture of an organization influence the talent management strategies of an organization. Organization’s which are more proactive, flexible and have an open culture, can foresee the business changes in advance and accordingly develop their workforce with the needed skills or competencies.

Importance is given to employee development through various workshops and trainings and followed up with frequent reviews and evaluations.

Talent management and information system

Talent management supports the assessment value of the information system. It helps in formulating mission statement of the project, which will include components like succession planning, performance evaluation, charting the data flow diagrams and thereby planning proposal.

The link between talent management and HRIS: Human resource information system functions do have a relationship with Talent management.

It was found that performance development and knowledge management of human resources information systems have a relationship with Talent management. Individuals who work in HRIS should align the talent management strategy with the overall business strategy.

Recruiting top talents using social networks: When the organization is recruiting and hiring the best talent, only following the traditional method is not enough. Social network provides the basis for selecting the right candidate at the right point of time for various roles.

There are various techniques which can be used for recruiting the individuals and the selection of the right technique leads to success rates in performance. For e,g after 10 years of the introduction of Facebook, it is reported to have 1.23 billion active users, making it a successful network media.

Another rising star is Linkedin in the social recruiting world. While using social media as a medium for posting job, overall details of the job role, responsibilities should be described. The target persons should be identified and accordingly use that particular network.

Job advertisements tagline should be very attractive to the users or applicants for applying for the particular job. It should contain details of not only the candidate’s experience, skills and qualifications but also the social and cultural background, which is also essential to fit in the organizational culture.

Using information systems to set goals and evaluate performance: Performance evaluation system motivate employees to give their best performance towards the organization.

In order to retain the talent, a proper and fair evaluation should be carried out. Several guideline measures should be followed.

For more consistent evaluation a standard form should be produced which can give a meaningful and detailed evaluation of employees’ performance.

The more effective the evaluation, the more employees get inspired to achieve organizational standard goals with the extensive use of their job knowledge, skill, work attitudes etc.

Workforce analysis and talent management: Different factors need to be identified for effective workforce planning and analysis prioritizing goals, job roles and obviously skills and knowledge of the talent workforce.

Talent management identifies the potentiality of future plans and the strengths of the employees needed to be developed thereon. To get a clear picture of the potentiality of the employees, it is necessary to get the picture of workforce and thus the talent management processes.

The employee profiles including their education, experience, certificates, interests, job duties and responsibilities, performance history should be constantly updated. The career interest and potentiality need to be assessed time to time.

In short, the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of and for the employees should be studied. If all the information of the human talent is gathered, one can go for the basic understanding of today’s workforce.

Measuring the success of talent management: There are certain measures for measuring the success of talent management. There are certain high-profile potential talent employees who are trustworthy and are flexible enough to the environment. These talents have the caliber of being the future leaders.

Organizations measure candidate reactions during the overall hiring process till its end. It helps to determine what makes the candidates positive and what makes them negative. Thus the organizations can ensure more efficient hiring process which will enable the candidates to always show positive reactions.

The internal as well as the external talent can be measured for the success of the process. There should always be a motto for positive turnover of the organization to continuously upgrading the talent management.