Ways to Enhance the Efficiency of Your Talent Management Process

Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group once said: “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to.” This thought comprises the core mindset that organizations need to take towards their talent management process. Recruiting and training employees are important and actually make up a large portion of the whole talent management process. However, if you don’t treat your employees right, and find creative ways for them to stay engaged in your organization, they will eventually jump ship. An effective talent management process is about doing all of the above and giving both employers and employees the tools to succeed. While finding ways to enhance your talent management process, you’ll find higher employee retention and lower employee turnover. 

Table of contents

1. What is Talent Management?

2. Why Is A Talent Management Process Important? 

3. What are the Steps of the Talent Management Process

4. Tips for Talent Management

5. Use the Right Talent Management Tool

What is Talent Management?

Talent Management can effectively be summed up as the way a company manages the employee journey. Talent management includes the whole process of finding, selecting, hiring, training, and retaining talent. It can also include the employee transition and exit process. The ultimate goal of the whole talent management process is to make people in the organization more productive and effective and the organization as a whole more profitable. Talent management is obviously important to understand and utilize effectively. Now, we’ll go through each of the steps of the talent management process in kind and then give some tips to optimize your processes. 

Why Is A Talent Management Process Important?

If done correctly and effectively, a well run talent management process as a couple of clear benefits for any organization

Higher Retention

Maintaining high employee retention is one of the major goals of creating a streamlined talent management process. When the whole talent management process—the planning, selecting, training, and development—comes together, your employee retention should be rock solid. When you hire the right people to work together, and give them the tools to develop and stay motivated, why would they leave?

Happier Employees

This point builds directly off the last one. An effective talent management process will have employees feeling trained exactly for what they’re working on, while being challenged and motivated to accomplish it. They’ll feel satisfied in their work and happy they’re working with your organization. They’re productivity will increase as well, making them as well as the organization happier as a whole.

Better branding

When your organization builds a robust plan for its talent management, it will have a positive impact on your brand as an employer. This will create a feedback loop for your new hiring process. As your company becomes more and more known for it’s high retention, happy employees, and great opportunities to develop, you’ll find more and more qualified candidates looking to join your organization. Your hiring process will still need to be managed carefully, you don’t want to disrupt the process, but you should find it easier to find the right candidates when filling positions externally. 

What are the Steps of the Talent Management Process?

Planning 

The first step is all about planning, planning, and planning. It involves identifying the qualities that you want to see in the ideal candidate and the determining requirements of their position. You will also need to develop a precise job description and produce a plan for your recruiting. 

Attracting

Now, it is time to decide whether a vacant position will be filled externally or by someone within the organization. It is often recommended to fill positions internally as it helps save costs, retains talent, and can boost morale. However, if hiring from within isn’t right for the position, initiate the onboarding process and begin looking for suitable candidates.

Selecting

There are often multiple steps within the selecting process itself but for brevity’s sake we’ll include it in one. These processes include resume gathering and shortlisting, interviews, and negotiations. Once you have your desired candidate it is time to go onto the next step.

Developing 

Now the candidate joins the company and begins work as an employee. There is bleeding over here from the last step as the onboarding process continues but the specifics move from bringing in a candidate to developing them. The new employee will get accustomed to the company culture and should be given many opportunities to increase their skills, aptitudes, and proficiencies. 

Retaining

With all the right hires in the right positions, companies now need to determine the best way to retain that talent in their positions. There are many employee retentions strategies that include promotions, rewards, and other growth opportunities that give employees goals to work for within the organization

Transition

This final step includes the inevitable exit that employees will have at the end of their employee lifecycle. As good as your employee retention programs are, at one point or another, an employee will necessarily exit the organization. 

Tips for Talent Management

Hire for Cultural Fit

When looking for new employees, one of the best things to look for is whether or not the candidate will fit into the company culture. It may be difficult to define what your company’s culture is abstractly but it can be easier to tell in words and actions. Pay attention to the way both current employees and potential hires act when determining if they will fit with company culture. Hiring an employee that does not fit within the company culture will never be the happiest or most productive employee they can possibly be. Therefore, it is best that this aspect is looked at and determined early. 

Create Opportunities for Improvement

The talent management process should be looked at with an eye towards the future. Ideally, the employees of today are the leaders of tomorrow. Therefore, their growth should be prioritized as much as possible. Talent management should involve creating plans for career trajectories within the organization and making sure employees know and understand the opportunities for advancement exists and is something they can strive for. This is a great way to boost retention as employees can easily envision their future within the organization.   

Frequent Performance Assessment 

Annual performance reviews are a thing of the past. More and more organizations are now moving towards much more frequent reviews of performance—making them a part of everyday employee life. If done correctly, this type of review process engages employees in their work and stimulates performance. However, this new review process isn’t as focused on performance. Instead, a more frequent or everyday process of reviews puts more emphasis on future goals and how employees are moving towards them. 

Rewards and Recognition

Rewards and recognition play a large potential role in an effective talent management process that seeks to better manage, motivate and engage employees. While financial rewards and benefits may play a role in this, other rewards and recognition may be just as important. In fact, data suggests that employees are often more motivated by prizes which are relevant to their own personal interests. With this in mind, an opportunity is presented to employers to show their employees that their workplace cares about their interests as individuals while also helping stay motivated to work effectively. 

Facilitate Coaching

One way to improve the development side of your talent management process is to facilitate a culture of coaching and mentoring among your employees. Positive and constructive feedback does wonders to increase performance and keep employees focused on their long term goals in the organization. Additionally, as time goes on mentees become mentors themselves are able to train the next group of hires in the workplace.

Optimize Productivity 

It is essential that organizations take the steps to optimize the effectiveness of their talent management process wherever possible. One obvious benefit to this is that, in the inevitable event that an employee leaves the organization, their exit has a minimal effect on the effectiveness of the team as a unit. This optimization starts with the first steps of the talent management process—hiring. Remember, you want to make smart hires that will have a big impact on the organization, with minimal disruptions to overall workflow. This is one of the reasons hiring within the organization is often suggested, because it does very little to disrupt the current workplace flow and dynamic.

However, it isn’t just about who you hire, it is about how you hire too. The onboarding process as a whole is hugely responsible for the productivity of new hires with an effective onboarding program responsible for about a 54 percent increase in productivity. This should be kept in mind when optimizing all aspects of the talent management process—it isn’t always about who precisely is doing the work, its also largely about what they’re doing. 

Use the Right Management Tool

With the right tool, such as the all-in-on human resource management system (HRMS) Qandle, the entire talent management process becomes even more streamlined and effective. Qandle’s dedicated Talent Management module supports all the needs of talent management such as the storage and access of paperless employee records, the ability to create new documents through eLetters and eSignatures with intelligent access rules, and finally, a shared repository of a company wide knowledge base which provides easy access to all important company policies and knowledge to facilitate employee growth. 

Qandle offers a single unified interface to support all of these needs and more. Through understanding the key steps of the talent Management process, tips to improve effectiveness, and a dedicated HRMS such as Qandle, you can be well on your way to a streamlined talent Management process