Envisioning Tomorrow, Today: Your talent management strategy should be preemptive, and not reactive
Globally, 74% of large companies are struggling to retain their employees and 69% find it challenging to acquire skilled employees for their organizations. Why? Because they lack a proper talent management strategy. From acquiring talent to developing them, there is a set of talent management practices that need to be planned and implemented for any organization to thrive in today’s competitive marketplace.
However, according to the Creating People Advantage 2021 survey, only 31% of companies today are able to streamline their employee resources and make personalized, robust talent strategies for them. As a result, they miss out on top talent that demands flexible work environments and wants organizations to invest in their growth trajectory.
This is why, in the post-pandemic landscape, a well-defined talent management strategy has become crucial for companies. Any enterprise looking to scale its business and improve employee performance must invest time and capital in building an efficient talent management infrastructure – and here are the top 3 talent management strategies to adopt that can ensure that you never miss out on the best talent.
1. Streamline your hiring process
The first step towards building an efficient workforce is by understanding how to attract and hire the right set of people. However, with hundreds of resumes to choose from, the hiring process for a single role can sometimes stretch for months – despite recruiters spending, on average, less than 10 seconds on each resume. This is detrimental in two ways: you risk missing out on a skilled candidate because not enough attention is paid to their resume, or the most eligible candidates drop off and apply elsewhere. Human biases and errors can also lead to your organization hiring people who are not the best fit for the given requirement.
Then comes the user experience at each level of the recruitment process. It was observed that 73% of candidates drop from the application process if it takes longer than 15 minutes. Similarly, a company is more likely to lose their best candidates if they fail to bring them onboard within 10 days.
To avoid these hiring mistakes and make skilled candidates a part of your growing talent pool, you need to adopt a more effective and tech-driven recruitment model. You can begin by creating a detailed job invitation — which mentions required skills for the job, specific qualifications, years of experience, and other key details — and sharing it on the preferred job listing platforms.
Secondly, to increase the chances of finding the right match, you must integrate AI solutions such as intelligent Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or automated job application pages into your recruitment process. How will that help? Equipped with NLP and machine learning capabilities, these tools can shortlist top candidates from hundreds of resumes in a matter of minutes and provide scores based on your desired correlations. This not only eliminates the need for the hiring manager to assess every resume individually but only aligns interviews for candidates who match the skills and experience needed for that particular job vacancy.
2. Introduce creative initiatives to improve employee engagement
Once you have onboarded new employees and assigned them their job responsibilities, it is time to ensure that they are motivated to fulfil the company’s goals and meet their yearly targets. According to a report by Gallup, it was found that companies with highly engaged employees observe 23% higher profitability and 18% more productivity than those with disengaged teams.
However, less than a quarter of the global workforce today feels engaged at work. Why? The blame, here, lies with increasing communication gaps between employees, lack of consistent support/feedback from employers, and negative work environment, among others. While these factors may not be recognized immediately, they can lead to a massive increase in employee turnover and capital resources in the long run.
Therefore, to build a committed and hardworking talent pool, you must actively identify and resolve employee engagement issues in the initial. One of the accurate ways of gauging employees’ expectations is to roll out monthly or quarterly surveys. These surveys can comprise questions on leadership, company policies, work culture, learning, etc., and allow employees to share their opinions anonymously. After analyzing what your employees expect, you can plan and implement new policies, organize team bonding sessions, and encourage leader-employee collaborations to foster thriving work culture and workforce performance.
India Inc is already following this approach. Following the pandemic-induced disruption, 47% of Indian companies enabled virtual health checkups for their employees, 35% of them introduced a mental health and well-being strategy, and 21% upgraded their HR process to accommodate hybrid work needs.
3. Create a robust talent pipeline
The third and most crucial segment of talent management is the retention of best-performing employees. But, presently, India is witnessing a 10% increase in its attrition rate, which led to nearly a quarter of the workforce in India leaving their jobs in 2021.
So, what is contributing to this surge? According to the Udemy report, 94% of Indian employees want their employer to develop a “culture of learning” and 61% of them would leave their jobs if their companies did not provide professional training.
Owing to the increasing skill gap in industries today, the employees across the spectrum are doubtful of their present work capabilities and would like their employers to help them develop skills in-demand in their industry. But, for an organization with hundreds of employees spread across several departments, recognizing which team or individual requires to upskill or reskill themselves can be a complicated and time-consuming task.
Therefore, to streamline your L&D initiatives to ensure that every employee receives personalized growth roadmap, you must begin by organizing your siloed employees’ data using API-based solutions, whether on cloud or in-premise. Doing so enables you to control the flow of your employee-related enterprise data while allowing you to deploy algorithms that evaluate the organization’s current and future requirements to recommend the best upskilling interventions and easily gauge real-time progress. Further, to increase employee retention rates, you can use an AI-based skill assessment platform to suggest the most relevant and customized courses to your employees and curate L&D schedules to encourage team collaborations frequently.
In their article on talent management, Marcia Avedon and Gillian Scholes wisely wrote, “Nothing defines success better than when the talent management practices are so ingrained in the organization that they are part of the management culture.” Today, for any company to flourish and thrive in a hypercompetitive market, it needs to approach talent management on a war footing. As mentioned above, an ideal talent management plan would be to regularly gauge employees’ skills, expectations, and aspirations and integrate talent development solutions at all levels — including hiring, employee engagement, and long-term workforce planning.
In short, make your talent management strategies preemptive, not reactive.