The 7 Steps to build a great Talent Management Process

Constantly changing work and workplaces have pushed companies to remain flexible, focus on employee collaboration, and seek to impart continuous learning and development opportunities. Now more than ever, talent management strategies need to be flexible and agile, not just for managing the talent lifecycle, but also for providing instant insight to unlock the power of their workforce.

Talent management is an organization’s commitment to recruit, mentor, retain, and engage to build a future-ready workforce. It comprises all of the work processes and systems that are associated with retaining and developing a superior workforce. Talent management can assist you to create a motivated, engaged, and skilled workforce aligned to your organizational goals. Besides, it also helps in reducing employee turnover that can save hiring costs significantly.

The Global Race for Talent

Innovative leaders understand the importance of strategic hiring and deployment of top talent to ensure continuity and manage risk. Consequently, top candidates have more options than ever, making employee experience an essential part of the recruitment process. The results from a 2020 Deloitte Survey mirror this opinion. In the survey, more than four in ten executives rated competing for talent globally as one of their most pressing talent concerns. 63% of the respondents also reported being highly concerned about employee retention in the next 12 months.

Faced with these statistics, it’s only natural for HR leaders to shift their focus towards creating a seamless employee experience, starting from strategic hiring to pain-free onboarding and thoughtful development opportunities for retention. In other words, a new talent management process is the need of the hour, and advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) can significantly augment efforts in this regard.

Here’s a 7-step process to restructure or build a new talent management process:

1. Sourcing and Attracting Talent

   If you’re a talent management specialist or HR leader, one of the first things you need to understand before hiring top talent is why they would want to work for you? By understanding the expectations of prospective employees, you can create a process that attracts highly productive employees who are also the right fit for your organization.

   Another aspect of hiring is looking for the right talent. Even if you know what a top employee looks for in an organization, where would you go about finding them? Social networking sites like LinkedIn could be a place to start but you need a better strategy to recruit the right people at the right time.

   An analytics-based approach using advanced software like PeopleStrong’s recruitment platform can help you streamline your hiring process by implementing a skill-based AI-matchmaking framework. The platform identifies gaps in recruitment and enables you to create in-depth job profiles and match them to the top talent in various fields.

2. Continuous Training and Development Opportunities

   In a survey, 86% of employees said job training is important to them. Furthermore, 75% showed a willingness to learn things outside of work hours to improve their job performance.

   Think about it like this – just like you, your employees also want to grow. So, when you invest in their development, they’re likely to feel more engaged and perform better. Through relevant pieces of training, you can upskill the existing workforce and augment employee satisfaction levels by giving them growth opportunities and tangible benefits. For instance, you might have a marketer on the team with excellent leadership skills who can be trained for managerial positions. With PeopleStrong’s Skill Cloud, you can get real-time talent insights on employee skills and career interests to develop their potential further. Additionally, you can create AI-powered personalized learning paths to help your employees grow and also identify skill gaps to build targeted training programs for increased proficiency.

3. Improving Employee Performance

   This point circles back to the previous point regarding appropriate training sessions and nurturing talent for improved performance. As a talent manager, you should be able to recognize the skills and areas of improvement for various employees and equip them with the necessary tools to improve their output. Performance is one such tool which agile and continuous performance management aiming to bring people performance closer to business performance.

   Get a head start in your Performance Management journey with pre-filled templates running across all departments, geographies, and functions.

4. Retaining Top Talent

   Retaining top talent is another questionable area for most talent managers. Hiring talented employees is never enough unless you have strategies in place to retain them. 

   Recent research indicates that more than 52% of global employees are looking for new jobs. The reasons behind this shift range from lack of communication to connection in the post-pandemic world and lack of recognition and growth.

   In our opinion, creating a transparent and open communication channel between employers and employees is the most critical step in retention. By listening to your employees, you can identify the critical pain points and work towards eliminating them.

5. Create a Culture of Recognition

   In addition to training employees to learn new skills and improve existing ones, it’s essential to create a culture of recognition to make them feel valued and cherished. Recognition at work also helps build a sense of security in employees that motivates them to perform better.

   Whether it’s a tiny gift for celebrating an achievement or an office-wide email recognizing extraordinary employee contributions, small changes in your talent management strategy can go a long way in making employees feel appreciated and stick around longer.

6. Cultivate A Clear Career Path

   No employee wants to stick around in the same position year after year. Therefore, it is vital to create a genuine career path for employees so that they know what kind of career progression to expect. Simply put, you don’t have to promise the moon to your employees, but you must assure them of complete support and resources to help them reach their full potential.

   At PeopleStrong, we have developed what we call Jinie, an AI Talent Coach that engages with employees for their career growth. Jinie creates automatic career paths for employees and nudges them to develop relevant skills and regularly check their goals to stay engaged and motivated. Using robust data visualization, the tool also provides hiring managers with a detailed map of their talent landscape to help them identify potential gaps and opportunities.

7. Prepare for Coverage of Critical Roles

   Succession planning is all about aligning employees with your company’s growth strategy and developing them further to address emerging business issues in the long run. A well-planned talent management process focuses on succession planning or continuous coverage of critical roles to ensure the key positions in the company maintain some level of stability.

   One way to achieve long-term succession planning is investing in an automated talent management dashboard that identifies high performers across job roles and geographies through real-time performance dashboards. With these metrics, you can create a succession strategy by mapping employee potential to critical positions and job requirements to ensure business continuity and effective leadership.

Parting Thoughts

Despite increasing automation, human capital remains an essential resource for most organizations. Even though the economy is slumping at present, the demand for top talent is high, as observed in the past periods of recession and other black swan events. In these times, to stay profitable, it’s imperative to build a cohesive and insightful talent management process leveraging the power of emerging technologies like AI to bring measurable results.

PeopleStrong’s AI-Powered Integrated Talent Management Platform is helping 350+ organizations across Asia to recruit, mentor, retain, and engage your future-ready workforce.