Talent Management
Although the term, Talent management, is popular recently, there is no specific definition to describe what is TM. Lewis and Hackman (2006) did a complete review about what is TM. They distinguished TM into three types according to the past literatures. First, TM was defined as a collection of typical human resources practices including recruitment, human resources development, and career management, etc.
The only thing which was different was that HR needs to do it faster and across the organizations. Lewis and Hackman described it as giving HR functions a new cloth, but there is no concrete result which can provide companies a better way to manage employees or talents. The second thought defined TM as processes to make sure there is enough flow of employees who fit the jobs. In this definition, TM can ensure the right people are available at right time (Naschberger, 2007). It is somewhat similar to the so-called succession planning. In order to maintain the stable talent flow, companies can take two kinds of actions depends on the strategies, external and internal environment, directly hire from outside or develop by themselves (Cappelli, 2008). The third perspective regarded talent as unqualified goods which need and worth to be managed with precedence over others. The organizations created the additional processes and opportunities to those talents which make them more available when the organizations need them (Blass, 2007). In this perspective, employees are divided by performance level and then distinguished the employees with high performance as talents regardless of the positions or departments. Different from the way focusing on talent, Collings and Mellahi (2009) thought that organizations should use a systematic way to identify the key positions which can
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contribute more to organizations, and then develop the pool of high potential and high performing employees to fill the roles. Ashton and Morton (2005) also suggested companies should focus the resources on some positions which can make differences for company. At the same time, organizations should put effort into maintaining their continued commitment to the organizations. (Collins & Mellahi, 2009)
According to Ashton and Morton’s research (2005), interestingly, there were several organizations represent that if TM indeed align with business strategy, the definition of TM for the company will also follow the priority of business strategy and change. It might be one of the reasons that no one can give TM a specific definition.
To sum up, the final goal of TM is to satisfy organizational needs. To achieve it, the organizations must set out plans to anticipate the need for human capital (Cappelli, 2008), build up the talent factory ensuring the talents are available at right time and right place (Ready & Conger, 2007), use a series additional processes and reinforced human resources function to identify both positions and talents and then provide appropriate development plan. Except the above, organizations should keep focusing on talents’ continued commitment to organizations in order to retain the talents and decrease the turnover rate.
Current Status and Problems of TM
So far, according to an ASTD study (Green, 2011), most of organizations did not fully and widely use those essential and good practices in TM. So many companies have put lot of effort into TM, but the leaders represented they still could not feel the impacts of doing so (Ashton & Morton, 2005). They met the problems that these companies could not have enough and qualified talents when they need. Ready &
Conger (2007) did a survey from 40 companies around the world and it showed that these companies did not have sufficient pipeline of the talents or so-called
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hi-potentials to fill important roles. Cappelli (2008) concluded two reasons for the above problems from his observation and history. First, some companies fell into the problems was because they overly relied on outside recruiting. When the supply of talents from external environment was not sufficient, it was difficult to find the right talents in time. The other problem was because organizations were too confident about anticipating the need of talents in the future. It might work when the environment was stable; however, it won’t be accurate anymore when the environment always change and be full of uncertainty. It not only wasted resources but also decreased the confidence and support from high level managers (Cappelli, 2008). It was dangerous for those companies, because one of the prerequisite of successful TM practice was to get the support from high level manager or the participation of them. Without high level managers’ supports, the processes of implementation will be easy to be lack of enough resources and difficult to have close alignment with business strategy leading to the dispersion of focus (Ashton & Morton, 2005; Green, 2011; Ready & Conger, 2007). Therefore, the failure of aligning business strategy lead to ineffective result of TM (Mihelic & Plankar, 2010).
The Strategies and Implementation of Talent Management
According to the study from ASTD and other researches, there are several components which we should focus on and optimize in TM programs including performance management, succession planning, recruitment, compensation and rewards, engagement, hi-potential employee development, individual professional development, leadership development, training and learning, etc. (Farley, 2005; Green, 2011; McDonnell, Lamare, Gunnigle, & Lavelle, 2010). Shortly, organizations should put more effort into integrating four sets of talent practices including workforce planning; recruitment and staffing; training and development; retention management
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(Avedon & Scholes, 2009; McCauley & Wakefield, 2006; Miller & Desmarais, 2007).
Although TM consists of several functions and elements, most of scholars and researchers suggested that organizations should not continue to regard TM functions as discrete elements (Heinen, 2004; Hughes & Rog, 2008; McCauley & Wakefield, 2006). Avedon and Scholes (2009) advocated that if TM can be integrated to a system, it will be the most effective. Ashton & Morton (2006) represented that if the TM is not integrated into a system, the investment will be dissipated with patchy results.
According to ASTD’s research (Green, 2011), effectively integrating TM is a major opportunity for organizations to compete with others. In this regard, it is necessary to pay attention on the alignment of TM functions, since integration and linkage play such an important role in TM.
The following will discuss the main issues in TM including, workforce and talent planning, talent attraction, talent development, talent retention and the measures of TM.
Workforce Planning for Talent
Before everything start, organizations should do a workforce planning to know the extent of talent gap according to organizations’ business strategy. When the organizations need to do TM decision, it would be the best for leaders to hold a wealth of data about talent in their organizations such as compensation, skill profiles, training history, performance management data, etc. (Farley, 2005). Schweyer (2004) mentioned that having a clear understanding of internal workforce is the first step of TM. At this time, managers or HR need some specific tools, processes and holistic approaches to help to support the analysis of talent gap and the following processes. A long-term and structured system in hand is the prerequisite of good TM practice(Ashton & Morton, 2005). During the workforce planning, the core step is to
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anticipate the future need of talents. However, Cappelli (2008) thought it only worked when the business environment and labor market were stable. In order to decrease the risk of wrong anticipation, he suggested companies should use the software to do a short-term simulation according to the high level managers’ anticipation instead of doing a long-term anticipation.
Besides Cappelli’s suggestion, Ashton and Morton (2005) represented that to face the complicated economic condition, the segregation of talents is needed. The segmentation based on the thought that even though the organizations supposed to be fair to every employee, they may differently treat some talents who can bring the competitive advantage to organizations from others. McCauley and Wakefield (2006) argued that a successful TM practices must focusing their resources on their “most highly-valued talent”.
Before doing the segmentation planning, companies should make sure the goal of TM is clear enough, since the goal will guide the whole segmentation process. There are several ways to segment these talents. Zuboff (1988)identified workforces by two questions. Does the employee easy to be replaced? Could the employee add value to organizations? The one who is hard to replace and with high value are regarded as a company’s human capital (Stewart, 1998). In Lepak and Snell (1999) ‘s resource base view, they identified four quadrants of human capital characteristics and there are two quadrants are relevant with TM. The first quadrant was considered as the core contributor of business’s achievement of objectives. McDonnell et al. (2010) argued them are the heart of TM”. The second quadrant was the employees who belong to high-potential group. In this group of employees, they might not have the best performance or work for the most important position so far, but they were viewed as the future leader who was expected to offer high value-added competencies (Lepak &
Snell, 1999).
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Talent Attraction
The competition between companies is getting more intense and the demography shows that the workforce population keeps decreasing (Collins & Stevens, 2002). It leads more and more organizations regard attracting appropriate talent as burning issues (Lyons & Marler, 2011) and increasingly start to put much effort into increasing the attractiveness of organizations to potential talented people in labor market (Highhouse, Zickar, Thorsteinson, Stierwalt, & Slaughter, 1999).
Nowadays, talented people are much more difficult to attract and retain (Seldeneck, 2004) since most of talented people have the right to choose the companies or vacancies which meet their expectation (Collins & Stevens, 2002).
Employer should try to make the organizations known and attractive to overcome the difficulties of attracting and acquiring talents (Joyce, 2009). In this regard, building their own employer brands, a series different activities which can help the organizations to attract potential talented applicants (Yaqub & Khan, 2011), is one of the most effective ways to deal with the short supply of competent talent(Srivastava &
Bhatnagar, 2010). Chapman, Uggerslev, and Carroll (2005) mentioned that employer branding has a direct relationship with TM which combine various HR practices. TM could decide the employer reputation of the organizations in the future. Aligning employer branding with other TM practices could effectively enhance the organizational attractiveness for both external applicants and internal employees (Celani & Singh, 2011; Yaqub & Khan, 2011). Moreover, the risk of over investing resources in the talented employee (Cappelli, 2008) also can be reduced by establishing good employer brand since an attractive organizations can comparatively put less effort into developing its talent pool (Celani & Singh, 2011)
Except the concept of building employer brand, understanding and considering what the talented people desire to have, their job preferences (Herbert & Timothy,
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2006), and find the most appropriate person to contact them were essential. According to Rynes and Bretz (2002), the person with good ability and high social achievement will result in different work expectation and preferences from others. Most of those high ability applicants and high achievers will put interesting and challenging work as their priority. Besides, they also seek a job which can provide them high level training (Rynes & Bretz, 2002), better career growth (Seldeneck, 2004; Yaqub & Khan, 2011), competent pay and good performance bonuses(Rynes & Bretz, 2002; Seldeneck, 2004).
Before the organizations take action to recruit talents, checking and defining their own business culture and job structure are necessary prerequisites to make sure the fitness of target applicants with companies (Seldeneck, 2004; Srivastava &
Bhatnagar, 2010).
With an active strategy, companies sometimes need to actively search the talented people out of other companies. Seldeneck (2004) suggested that organizations could find the organizations which culture is similar as the target as the first step, and then use networking to determine if the target employees’ skill, ability, knowledge and personality is appropriate or not. Besides the recruiting strategies, the characteristic of recruiter is critical, too. A good recruiter most of time have strong interpersonal skills, deep understanding about the company, and also enthusiasm of the company and applicants (Herbert & Timothy, 2006). Seldeneck (2004) mentioned that organizations should use the talent who have passion, integrity, vision, etc. to lure and recruit the external talent into their team.
Talent Development
After companies get talented employees in hand through a series of recruiting and selecting processes, company needs to start to think about how to develop them to
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the talent who is ready to fill the important vacancy at any time. The purpose of talent development is to invest in developing those best people and help them to well take advantage of their strengths and improve their weaknesses (Fulmer, Stumpf, & Bleak, 2009; Garrow & Hirsh, 2008). Fulmer et al. (2009) argued that the first step of successful talent development implementation is to identify what is required for those employees to learn and develop for the future. McCauley & Wakefield (2006) also mentioned organizations should do the need assessment which can help identify the needed competencies an organizations needs and then developing program can be linked to business strategy (Fulmer et al., 2009; Garrow & Hirsh, 2008; Miller &
Desmarais, 2007). In order to overcome the uncertainty of the environment, Cappelli (2008) suggested organizations should try to widely develop their employees with more general competencies which could be used in different jobs. After organizations link the development activity with its goals, there are several choices and principles organizations can apply. Garrow and Hirsh (2008) provided few types of TM development-focus for organizations. The first type was “step by step” which means developing employees to make them can meet the immediate needs of organizations for all levels. It was a short-term focus type which can make sure there are enough qualified employees in place in important position. The second type was leadership focus. In this long-term development program, companies focused on developing the future leaders with a long-term development program. Leadership development was also regarded as one of the most important and effective way for organizations in TM development. A successful implementation of leadership development program needed the support from stakeholder whose interest matches the goals of the program. Organizations was suggested to use other HR processes to reinforce the leadership program, for example, it can link with succession planning or reward system to let them know it is important and highly valued for their future
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(Miller & Desmarais, 2007). The third type is “Functional, level, or workforce group focus”. It was a group which consisted of hard to recruit and retain employees whose skills was a shortage and organizations needed to specially take care of (Garrow &
Hirsh, 2008).
To achieve the goal of TM development, Fulmer et al. (2009) provided few effective methods to apply for the talents and high potential programs, which were rotation program, action learning, and coaching.
Rotation
Extensive business experiences from different functions have become one of the essentialities for talent in business world(Avedon & Scholes, 2009). Yost and Plunkett (2009) suggested that on-the-job experiences will benefit the talent development program and one of the great methods was to introduce job rotation programs for the high potential or talented employees. Conger (2009) mentioned that rotating across disciplines, division and geographies which was acknowledged as the most effective way to help talent grow up since they believe they learned leadership and career development best on the job. The purpose of rotation programs is to cultivate the working skill of employees, and provide breadth and depth of experience which can help them to establish the needed knowledge of business. And it also can move the trainees out of their comfort zones to push them working in new and different ways (Krewson, 2004). In the rotation program, the trainees will enter different functions or do different jobs in specific period, and there will be a colleague or supervisor who is responsible for guiding, training, and evaluation. The outcomes of the rotation programs will depend on individuals’ practical manipulate and observation (Werner &
DeSimone, 2009). Krewson (2004) provided three elements companies should take care during rotation programs. First, the specific goals of rotation program must be identified in advance and make sure the trainees understand. Second, the expectation
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of companies about the trainees’ performance must be clearly transferred. Third, the period of each rotation phase must be set up and fixed.
Action learning
The second method is “Action learning”. Action learning uses real project or problems as the training content, and asks participants to take action to solve the problems (Swanson & Holton III, 2009). The projects most of time can reflect the real challenges of organizations. At the beginning of action learning, the assignment and background materials will be received by participants, and then they have to conduct field researches. The results will be discussed with consultants or coaches and then present to executive committee. Action learning not only enhances the problem solving skills but also creates a networking opportunity to assemble current and future leaders to cooperate together (Ruddy & Anand, 2009a).
There are several things organizations should take care when organizations want to conduct an action learning. In action learning, the project selection need to have direct link to a business imperative, and the expected outcome of the project should be defined clearly. The facilitator should provide opportunities for participants and sponsors to reflect their opinions. Furthermore, in order to motivate and guide them to right direction, the involvement of senior management and professional facilitators will be important (Conger, 2009). The final recommendation from the trainees will be presented to executive committee and might become the official strategies or improvement of organizations.
Coaching
Coaching or mentoring is essential in a TM developing program, by pairing the row talents with experienced mentor, the row talents will get opportunities to learn valuable experiences from their mentors. Through mutual interaction and learning, the benefits for organizations include enhancing their effectiveness of leadership talent
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development, retention of valued talent, increasing productivity, and greater job satisfaction of participants (Larson & Richburg, 2004). McCauley & Wakefield (2006) also mentioned that the coach or mentor can become the communicated bridge between organizations and talents and help them to establish “talent mindset” which motivates them to regard daily experiences into valuable learning opportunities. Davis and Barnett (2009) generalized several characteristics of a good coach including ability to build strong interpersonal connection, professionalism. Good at sound coaching methodology such as delivering feedback constructively is also important for coaches.
Talent Retention
It is the nightmare for organizations that well-developed talents intend to leave after organizations invests big amount of resources on them. The ability to retain the best employees become one of the most critical competitive advantages for an organizations (Hughes & Rog, 2008), since the costs of losing talents and the benefit of decreasing turnover rate are very significant(Sutherland & Jordaan, 2004).
Cappelli (2008) noted that good retention practice also can increase the return on investment (ROI) of internal talent development. Thus, well managing retention is regarded as a basic and essential step for successful TM (Mihelic & Plankar, 2010).
According to the survey of Deloitte in 2005 (as cited in Hughes & Rog, 2008), if companies cannot effectively manage their retention and recruitment issues, it is difficult for companies to maintain the organizational productivity, efficiency, innovation, etc.
Mitchell, Holtom, Lee, and Graske (2001) induced five reasons of employees’
leaving. The first one was shock to the system which meant employees think about leaving in response to some event no matter it is positive or negative. The second one
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was that they just follow their own career plans. Third was that they leave just for
was that they just follow their own career plans. Third was that they leave just for