Benefits, Opportunities and Challenges of Talent Management

Benefits of Talent Management

Talent management can be a discipline as big as the HR function itself or a small bunch of initiatives aimed at people and organization development. Different organizations utilize talent management for their benefits. This is as per the size of the organization and their belief in the practice. It could just include a simple interview of all employees conducted yearly, discussing their strengths and developmental needs. This could be utilized for mapping people against the future initiatives of the company and for succession planning. The benefits are:

• 1. Right Person in the right Job: Through a proper ascertainment of people skills and strengths, people decisions gain a strategic agenda. The skill or competency mapping allows you to take stock of skill inventories lying with the organization. This is especially important both from the perspective of the organization as well as the employee because the right person is deployed in the right position and employee productivity is increased. Also since there is a better alignment between an individual’s interests and his job profile the job satisfaction is increased.
• 2. Retaining the Top Talent: Despite changes in the global economy, attrition remains a major concern of organizations. Retaining top talent is important to leadership and growth in the marketplace. Organisations that fail to retain their top talent are at the risk of losing out to competitors. The focus is now on charting employee retention programs and strategies to recruit, develop, retain and engage quality people. Employee growth in a career has to be taken care of, while succession planning is being performed those who are on the radar need to be kept in loop so that they know their performance is being rewarded.
• 3. Better Hiring: The quality of an organization is the quality of workforce it possesses. The best way to have talent at the top is have talent at the bottom. No wonder then talent management programs and trainings, hiring assessments have become an integral aspect of HR processes nowadays.
• 4. Understanding Employees Better: Employee assessments give deep insights to the management about their employees. Their development needs, career aspirations, strengths and weaknesses, abilities, likes and dislikes. It is easier therefore to determine what motivates whom and this helps a lot Job enrichment process.
• 5. Better Professional Development Decisions: When an organization gets to know who its high potential is, it becomes easier to invest in their professional development. Since development calls for investment decisions towards learning, training and development of the individual either for growth, succession planning, performance management etc, an organization remains bothered where to make this investment and talent management just make this easier for them.

Apart from this having a strong talent management culture also determines how organization rate their organizations as work places. In addition if employees are positive about the talent management practices of the organization, they are more likely to have confidence in the future of their organization. The resultant is a workforce that is more committed and engaged determined to outperform their competitors and ensure a leadership position in the market for their organization.

• 6. Financial Benefits: There are pros and cons of every management philosophy and the associated processes. Talent management is no exception to it. While many organizations simply decline to have it under their umbrella because it costs the exchequer, still others approve of it equally strongly as an effective people management process.

Before we discuss the financial benefits of talent management the following may be of our interest and worth a thought:

1. Most of the organizations are short sighted, when it comes to people management.
2. People management may not go well with pure capitalists.
3. Organizations and industries are growing at a fast pace, faster than the rate at which talent is produced.
4. There is dearth of talented and skilled professionals both at the top as well as bottom.
5. Due to cut throat competition and a consequent lack of talented professionals the attrition rates have increased across all industries, especially so in services industry.
6. Poaching has become common place; employee retention has become the Achilles heel of corporations.

All the above mentioned statements clearly indicate that the talent is unable to keep pace with the growing industry and also that the industry has failed to breed the pool of talented individuals as per its requirements. A fast industry growth meant that there would be a need for talented professionals for upcoming avenues and unfortunately corporate seemed to miss out on this. Business houses nowadays have diversified interests in different industries, employment opportunities are fast coming up but unfortunately the talent is pool is shrinking. This tells upon the finances of an organization in a big way.

Opportunities and Challenges of Talent Management

There is no dearth of professionals but there is an acute shortage of talented professionals globally. Every year B schools globally churn out management professionals in huge numbers but how many of are actually employable remains questionable! This is true for other professions also.

The scenario is worse even in developing economies of south East Asia. Countries like U.S and many European countries have their own set of problems. The problem is of aging populations resulting in talent gaps at the top. The developing countries of south East Asia are a young population but quality of education system as a whole breeds a lot of talent problems. They possess plenty of laborers – skilled and unskilled and a huge man force of educated unemployable professionals. These are the opportunities and challenges that the talent management in organizations has to face today – dealing with demographic talent problems.

Now if we discuss the problem in the global context, it’s the demographics that needs to be taken care of primarily and when we discuss the same in a local context the problem becomes a bit simpler and easier to tackle.

Nonetheless global or local at the grass roots level talent management has to address similar concerns more or less.

It faces the following opportunities and challenges:

• Recruiting talent
• Training and Developing talent
• Retaining talent
• Developing Leadership talent
• Creating talented ethical culture

1. Recruiting Talent: The recent economic downturn saw job cuts globally. Those who were most important to organizations in their understanding were retained, other were sacked. Similarly huge shuffles happened at the top leadership positions. They were seen as crisis managers unlike those who were deemed responsible for throwing organizations into troubled waters. It is the jurisdiction of talent management to get such people on onboard, who are enterprising but ensure that an organization does not suffer for the same.
2. Training and Developing Talent: The downturn also opened the eyes of organizations to newer models of employment – part time or temporary workers. This is a new challenge to talent management, training and developing people who work on a contractual or project basis. What’s more big a challenge is increasing the stake of these people in their work.
3. Retaining Talent: While organizations focus on reducing employee overheads and sacking those who are unessential in the shorter run, it also spreads a wave of de motivation among those who are retained. An uncertainty about the firing axe looms in their mind. It is essential to maintain a psychological contract with employees those who have been fired as well as those who have been retained. Investing on people development in crisis is the best thing an organization can do to retain its top talent.
4. Developing Leadership Talent: Leadership in action means an ability to take out of crisis situation, extract certainty out of uncertainty, set goals and driving change to ensure that the momentum is not lost. Identifying people from within the organization who should be invested upon is a critical talent management challenge.
5. Creating Talented Ethical Culture: Setting standards for ethical behavior, increasing transparency, reducing complexities and developing a culture of reward and appreciation are still more challenges and opportunities for talent management.

For Citing this Article use:

• Gangula, A. (2016). Talent management practices in information technology sector.