Consilium Vol 1Oct 2014-Inaugural Issue | Page 28

“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 26 October 2014 |CONSILIUM