Talent - an organisation imperative

Every organisation will claim to have 'talent' in its business, but not all will know where it is, where it is missing, what to do with it and where the next batch of talented individuals is coming from. As the labour market becomes tighter with an even fiercer fight for the 'best' and most able, being clear on how your organisation identifies, manages, utilises and re-plenishes its talent is crucial.

Talent - Doesn't everybody do it?

Whilst it may be true that organisations significantly invest in 'talent' whether through recruitment, development or rewarding their people, most organisations still struggle with the challenge of getting the right people into the right jobs at the right time. Why?...well in our view this is because many businesses focus their investment on short term talent initiatives (e.g. training, hiring and moving people around the organisation) rather than building a pipeline of talent which is anchored to the long term needs of the business.

To invest wisely, and manage your talent effectively, we believe you need to look at the issue holistically. For us this means starting with business requirements - putting the needs of your customers and stakeholders at the heart of your talent agenda.

How we go about it

To build a really effective talent strategy, we follow a 4 step approach:

Step 1 starts with understanding what the business will need to be successful - today and in the future... The big shifts you anticipate in your markets, the demands your customers will make of you in the future and the 'big levers' of business performance.

At Step 2, Assessment follows parallel tracks - individual assessment and assessment of future roles. This means evaluating the business strategy or plan to understand which roles will be most critical to your future performance (and very often they are roles which currently don't exist!), as well as understanding which roles / activities will become less important over time

At Step 3, Talent Mapping is focused on 'making meaning' of the assessment results. It's not until you can overlay what you need with what you've got that the assessment data starts to come alive. The Talent Map gives you a clear picture of where your business plan is at risk - i.e. where you don't have enough of the right talent, your talented individuals are in the wrong place or where potential is 'blocked'.

Step 4 Building your talent strategy is about prioritising where and how you should focus your investment in talent to give you best return. This means not just putting the right training and recruitment programmes in place, but ensuring you have the right underpinning processes to as well as the right leadership mindset to build a pipeline of talent which is aligned with, and geared up to deliver future success.

Don't just take our word for it