Talent management strategies

The debate around talent management it’s becoming more and more heated as the war for talent reaches levels never seen before. The questions are often: Which strategy is the best? Which model? Are there universal rules that apply to all companies?

Probably, before asking ourselves these – crucial – questions, we should take a step back and start from the mother of all questions.

How can we make our best employees happy enough to keep thriving and choosing our company while – at the same time – making this process sustainable for the company and goal oriented?

That’s a tough one, I get it. Let’s simplify.

When I need to explain what talent management is, I always go back around ten years to the words of my first manager.

As a newly graduated intern, I was not even near to the definition of the best employee. But I was – according to my manager – definitely a talent. The first project I was assigned was rough. For months, I felt like I hadn’t the bare minimum of competencies needed in that role. I was struggling, and one day, I almost exploded.

My manager stared at me like I was an alien and candidly told me: “raise your hand. Tell me what you need. This company wants you to be in the best position to thrive, but we need to know you need help.”

Is this what talent management really is? Not entirely. If that company had a good talent management strategy – and not only a good claim:

• I would never have found myself in a situation where I was about to give up the job because I felt I didn’t have the minimum skills to manage the project – and therefore, I was extremely frustrated and unhappy
• I would have felt I could raise my hand immediately to express my difficulties

But none of this happened. Talent management is not only saying, “we value our talent“.

Talent management is the strategic and ongoing process of identifying, attracting, developing, and retaining talented individuals to meet the organization’s – and employees – needs.

And there’s a specific model that works.

As we said, talent management is a matter of planning, attracting, developing, and retaining. But this seems a little simplistic. We prefer a more complex model that includes 7 functions that have recently been labeled as core talent management functions by a review of the latest studies on the topic. We get it, it seems difficult; let’s look at the first four steps of this process.

The first step of a good talent management strategy is forecasting and aligning the organization’s talent needs with its long-term goals. This might sound simple, but it requires a not-so-obvious future-focused mindset. I couldn’t count the times I’ve seen companies “planning” for short timeframes and totally losing the long-term vision – and the best talents along the way. 

Now that we know which kind of talents we need in order to succeed, we have to identify the talent persona. This means to create an actual identikit of the individuals – with exceptional skills or potential for a particular role – we need to attract/search. 

Pay attention here: a lot of companies simply jump this step. Huge mistake. Saying, “We’ll need a high-skilled PMO in the next 3 years,” is not enough. What defines a high-skilled PMO? Which previous experiences? Which attitudes? Write it all down.

Knowing the roles you require and the people you want it would be easier to identify the best strategy to attract them. Effective communication, employee branding, and recruitment strategies are the main areas to work on in order to attract talent. And let’s not forget to put together an offer that is aligned with the seniority, responsibility, and effort you require. Unaligned compensation and benefit packages are the fastest way to attract the wrong people and ward off the right talents.

If until now we were strategizing, that’s the moment to wrap all the ideas and make it happen. The process of acquisition includes:

• creating job descriptions
• writing down a specific hiring plan for each role
• sourcing candidates through various channels
• evaluating their qualifications, skills, and cultural fit
• negotiating offers

Ultimately, talent acquisition requires making informed hiring decisions with the goal of securing the best possible candidates to drive organizational success.

Good job; if all went well, the talents you were looking for have now become your employees. Don’t be fooled into thinking that this is enough. To achieve long-term sustainability and cut recruiting costs, you still need to go through three steps –  and be on point: developing your talents and planning the deployment and retention. In a minute, we will further analyze these phases, but let’s take a step back.

Why do you need to manage your – already achieved – talents? Well, it’s actually not only about cost efficiency or not losing them (after all this hard work).

There are five main benefits¹ coming from a well-crafted talent management strategy.

1. 1. Assure the long-term company goals are met – on a budget
   2. Increasing the company’s adaptability to market and economic factors – the so-called “resilience”
   3. Improve competitiveness and overall performance
   4. Decrease turnover (and its costs) and motivate the employees
   5. Make the high-performance and highly motivated staff even more committed to the company

It seems, after all, making talent management a priority is a worthy pursuit. So let’s have a look at  the final steps: develop, deploy, retain.

Good old internal mobility. Sometimes, moving people across business units – even to different countries² – is what causes them to really thrive. Long story short, very few companies have structured procedures to facilitate internal and geographical mobility.

The consequences are:

• not seeing where the talents could really thrive
• losing talents who could have simply been moved to units more aligned with their skills or desires while continuing to make an important contribution to achieving company objectives

So if you are crafting your talent management strategy, don’t forget to answer the question, “What about someone who’s not in the right place – but still an employee full of potential? Do we have procedures to support him/her?”. That’s crucial for the last step of this talent management thing: retention.

There’s no winning talent strategy that does not include excellent talent retention. Come on, all this work to lose your talents due to inefficient management of their engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty?

Making a plan of how to retain the best employee involves offering:

• Career development opportunities – we addressed this topic before
• Competing compensation and benefit plan – we are going deep into this one in a minute
• A good work-life balance – 72% of employees say it is really important³
• Recognition and reward programs
• Employee engagement and feedback channels
• Strong company culture supported by events and targeted initiatives
• A good exit plan with interviews and feedback analysis – never heard about the talent lifecycle?

Before a deep dive into compensation and talent lifecycle, let’s state one last CRUCIAL thing for a winning talent strategy: metrics.

Measure, evaluate, repeat: this is the key to every winning strategy – and the recruiting world is not an exception. I won’t explain the metrics in detail, but it’s worth saying that monitoring things like turnover rate, employee engagement rate, productivity rate, training ROI, and employee satisfaction is non-negotiable.

As we said before, a compensation plan that’s not aligned with what the company is searching for is always the fast lane to losing the opportunity to hire excellent people.

But I can say without fear of being contradicted that we lose from the start when we think compensation is only about salary.

As McKinsey wisely says: “money matters, even if it is not a panacea”.
Compensation is really more about creating satisfaction. It could be good health insurance, a comprehensive smart working policy, or an exceptional training plan in partnership with prestigious universities. It can also be about:

• the effort to create a community and to give value to each diverse community within the company – aka, make everyone feel heard and represented
• the initiatives to spread the company culture and create an actual attachment – no, giving away free branded merchandise is not enough
• the higher purpose to which employees feel they are contributing with their daily efforts

Putting all these things together and doing them all well is no joke, but it is crucial to keep valuable people in the company. And if, despite everything, they decide to leave? We better learn something.

There’s one last step in the talent lifecycle – and in the talent management strategy – almost everyone forgets the offboarding. We attract, recruit, onboard, engage, retain…and then? If this talent we invested years in leaves? This happens, and we need to learn as much as we can about why things went this way.

Thus, the offboarding should include at least a structured interview and a feedback analysis to understand what makes the employee choose to leave – and if we could have done something before the resignation letter.

After all, creating a talent management strategy is not that easy. But it would feel smoother if we kept these 5 things in mind.

Talent management is more than “recruiting”

It is unifying recruiting to organizational goals and sticking to the plan.

Consider outside factors

Considering outside factors is crucial to correctly assess the future needs of the company – a talent war, the shortage of some kind of professionals, an incoming recession, and the increase or decrease in demand for certain products are some examples.

Consider internal factors

Considering internal predictions is important too: company growth projections, future resignation, future skills gap due to business growth, or the development of new branches.

Make it fair

If we want to retain the best talents, we must create a fair talent management strategy, avoid favoritism, and reward merit. Otherwise, sooner or later, someone will feel cheated and, in addition to leaving the company, they will (rightly) ruin the company’s reputation, discouraging other talents from applying for open positions.

Make it personalized

Not all employees value the same levers. In talent management, it is essential to personalize the path of each talent based on their skills, seniority, expressed needs, and preferences. The challenge here is to balance being fair with maximizing personalization of employee treatment. And this is one of the reasons why we at headcount exist.

At headcount, we align our recruitment strategy to our client’s talent management strategies in order to attract the best talent in the pharma, biotech, medtech, and life sciences industries.

We know the challenges of these industries, both in Switzerland – where our HQ is – as well as  in Europe and the USA, where our focus lies.

Is your talent management strategy weak? Do you feel like you’re missing out on attracting real talents? Or after all your efforts, the best employees always leave? Contact us.