Your people are your greatest asset. Make sure you find and keep the right talent for your company.
In this global economy, companies can copy your products and ideas, leaving the only real competitive advantage an organization possesses: its talent.
Talent management best practices can help your company effectively hire, retain, deploy, and engage your people so that your company can be successful in the short and long term.
If you understand the extreme importance of talent management, then you’ll want to learn from research and the experience of others what works to elevate you talent management programs. And always consider that what works for one company may not work for another company. This is one of the key findings of The Global Human Resource Research Alliance, a study of best practices in talent management.
Günter Stahl, a lead researcher for the study, says it’s important before adopting best practices to understand why they work for some companies, and to consider whether they will be as successful in a new corporate environment. For example, 360° feedback systems would not succeed in very hierarchical organizations where employees are not comfortable giving supervisors their honest feedback.
Talent management best practices for 2012
Taleo released a whitepaper with 10 talent management best practices for this year. Here is a quick rundown of their tips:
- Develop a social recruiting strategy. This means Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. You want to make sure you get in front of people where they are—and increasingly people are using social media for work purposes. For business, LinkedIn is the number one social network.
- Extend your employment brand. Make sure your brand extends beyond the hiring process to your onboarding process, as well. You want to make employees feel comfortable and give them a great overall impression throughout your talent management programs.
- Engage your line managers. Make sure line managers feel comfortable talking about performance with their direct reports.
- Prepare now for the talent shortage in 2016. Make sure to strengthen and build the talent you already have and work on keeping them around.
- Take stock of your internal talent. Know as much as possible about your people. What do they want to do? What kind of experiences do they have? Referral programs work well.
- Integrate talent management. Make sure your processes integrate with one another. My earlier article about why leaders should care about integrated talent management explains more on this topic.
- Line up future leaders. Identify your high potentials and help them succeed.
- Automate all of your talent management. No more using paper or email processes. Technology exists that can save you money, time, and hassle.
- Move everyone in the same direction. Everyone needs to be working toward the same goals to make progress.
- Manage talent anytime, anywhere. Everyone needs mobile access to your talent management systems.
Next time, I’ll give even more tips for leaders to consider for their talent management programs.
What are some best practices related to talent management that your company currently uses that you can add to the list?
Photo Credit: Victor1558
Beth,
Your comment about hierarchical systems reminds me that somehow leaders operating in those environments still need to figure out a way to get past some of that structure. I have run across situations before where employees might be afraid to discuss their goals or long-term development preferences if the area of interest was outside their current role. The ramifications of appearing ‘disloyal’ to their current function made them keep silent about what they really wanted.
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David,
Your point is well taken and the culture of the organization and its leaders can play a key component went working through to functional. I have often found that getting the team to identify the pitfalls of not changing and creating a vision for a more powerful future can help them take this challenge on as a team. If only one person is willing to take this on, then failure is likely.
Beth