Understanding the Components of Talent Management

When thinking about your organization’s future, it’s important to think not only about goals, objectives, and initiatives, but obviously how to achieve them. A major contributor is obviously your employees. Aligning the organization’s business strategy with its workforce is called talent management, and it involves aligning the right person with the right role with the right tools.

Talent management includes seven components that, when implemented strategically, combine to keep an organization on the leading edge.

1. Strategic Employee Planning

Developing your organizational goals and strategic plan is the first step. Next you must think about how to reach your goals and implement the plan. More specifically, you must identify the key roles and personnel who will get you there. You may already have the positions and people in place, or you may need to adjust the current structure to fill the gaps.

2. Talent Acquisition and Retention

Bringing new talent into your organization is important, yet equally so is recognizing and cultivating talent you already have in-house. Hiring from within your organization is more cost-effective, so when you’re working at talent pooling, remember to look internally as well as externally.

3. Performance Management

Aligning the right person with the right role is the heart of performance management. Its ultimate goal is to ensure that roles align with business strategy to achieve goals. It enables you to ensure that you’re aligning a talented employee with a role that suits them, develops goals for success, supports their development, and moves the organization forward.

4. Learning and Motivating

Semantics become important here, because learning is more than training. Learning is the acquisition of information and skills, which yields knowledge and experience. Implement learning programs that include activities and tasks that support the organization’s culture and initiatives. When employees see how their growth impacts the organization, they’ll see just how valuable their role is.

5. Compensation

Alignment remains the important concept. Aligning your strategic goals with incentives means recognizing employees, rewarding contributions to success, and acknowledging their value to the organization.

6. Career Development

This ties back to the talent retention component and the notion that hiring from within is not only an option, but often preferable. Nurture potential leaders by providing professional development tools that can advance their career.

7. Succession Planning

Knowing the talent within your organization is a start. Knowing the key roles essential to its success is equally vital. Which roles are critical to success? Who currently fills those roles? What happens when those positions become available? Having a plan in place means that the decisions are already made, and that the organization will continue to run smoothly if a key position must be filled quickly.

Author Credit Bloomware