“To win customers — and a bigger share of the marketplace — companies must first win the hearts and minds
of their employees.”-State of the Global Workplace Gallup Report
One of the buzzwords in today’s world of Human Resource Management is talent management. This is what
all the big businesses are talking about and the small
ones are trying to emulate. So the big question is what
is talent management all about?
Talent management is the science of using strategic
human resource planning to improve business value and for organizations to reach their goals. Everything
done to recruit, retain, develop, reward and make people perform forms a part of talent management
and strategic workforce planning. Talent-management
strategy needs to link to business strategy to make
sense. So basically, Talent management means the strategic and deliberate way in which organizations source,
attract, select, develop, train, retain, promote and
move the employees through the company. But the fact
is that the word ‘talent’ is differently interpreted in various contexts. Organizations adapt the meanings as
they think is fit for themselves. Research at CIPD has
come up with the following observations —
Talent consists of those individuals who can make a
difference to organizational performance either
through their immediate contribution or, in the longerterm, by demonstrating the highest levels of potential.
Talent management is the systematic attraction, iden
-tification, development, engagement, retention and
deployment of those individuals who are of particular
value to an organization, either in view of their ‘high
potential’ for the future or because they are fulfilling
business/operation-critical roles.
These above two definitions underline the importance
of recognizing the fact that simply attracting individuals
with high potential is not enough. It is equally important to develop, manage and retain those individuals as part of planned strategy for talent management.
It is also essential that commensurate systems are
adopted to measure the ROI on these recruits.
Talent Management as Workforce Management
Workforce Management is just another expression that
is used for talent management. According to Chartered
Institute of Personnel Development, "Workforce planning is a core process of human resource management
that is shaped by organizational strategy and ensures
the right numbers of people, with the right skills, are in
the right place at the right time to deliver short- and
long-term organizational objectives.”
Features of Talent Management Strategy
Key issues when developing a talent management strategy include the following.
1. Alignment to corporate strategy
Strategic analysis from the business perspective should
feed into an HR forecast, which can help shape an organization’s tailored approach to talent management.
2. Inclusive versus exclusive approaches
Some organizations adopt an inclusive approach to
talent management creating a ‘whole workforce’ ap-
Fig 1: Key dimensions
of Strategic Workforce Planning
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October 2014 |CONSILIUM