Regardless of industry or company size, an organization’s ability to attract and retain talent plays an outsized role in its ability to meet its highest-priority objectives. In addition to offering top-tier products or services, you’ll need the right talent on hand to successfully develop, market, sell, deliver, and support those priorities.
Whether that means adding to your ranks of permanent employees or exploring other options—like contingency-based recruiting—you’ll need sound strategies for finding and hiring the best available talent.
What is your talent management strategy today, and how is it working out? Is the framework the right one to meet the goal to flex to the projects you need? Does attracting great talent—and keeping it in-house—feel more difficult than it should? If so, you’ll want to keep reading. This article will explore the importance of talent management and offer some pointers for getting it right.
Why Is Managing Talent So Important?
Without effective talent management practices, an organization seriously limits its ability to innovate and grow—in turn, this impacts its ability to be a competitive player within its industry. Companies that prioritize talent management tend to be more productive and, more importantly, they increase their ability to retain their best employees (which is much more cost-effective than replacing employees, especially if it’s happening often).
What Is the Primary Purpose of a Talent Management Strategy or Framework?
Generally speaking, organizations develop talent management strategies and frameworks in order to attract and retain highly skilled talent. So, what is the difference between the two—and how do they relate to each other? Consider the following definitions:
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A talent management strategy is an actionable plan for ensuring that the right staff is in place for the organization to achieve one or more specific goals. If there’s one thing that a majority of the most successful talent management strategy examples have in common, it’s that they achieve a balance between being focused on specific outcomes and being flexible enough to explore different staffing avenues, whether that means permanent or temporary hires (or a mixture of the two).
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By contrast, think of an organization’s talent management framework as the underlying infrastructure or foundation for developing and executing successful talent management strategies. It provides a consistent and repeatable process for evaluating needs and implementing the right staffing solutions.
What Are the 5 Core Functions of Talent Management?
A typical talent management framework accounts for five core functions, which essentially align with the different stages of the employee lifecycle:
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Finding and Hiring the Right People: Effective talent management starts with identifying and prioritizing the needs and objectives of the organization and then finding the best-qualified talent to meet or exceed them. With Lorien as your recruitment partner, you can access top-tier talent when you need it most, ensuring your business stays agile and competitive.
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Developing Talent: Money invested in employee onboarding, training, and ongoing development is money well-spent. Empowering employees with opportunities to grow their skill set not only makes them more beneficial to the organization, and it also shows they are valued—and makes them more likely to stay with the company.
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Managing and Rewarding Performance: Finding consistent, effective ways to measure, monitor, and improve employee performance is undoubtedly is one of the most important components of talent management. Start simple, by answering the question “What does success look like” for a given role, identifying meaningful metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure, and communicating clear expectations. Think, too, about how you can incentivize and reward key performance milestones.
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Improving the Employee Experience: Employees who feel positively about the work they do tend to perform better than their less-engaged counterparts. Through effective talent management practices, organizations can better understand and optimize the employee experience. This includes empowering employees with meaningful development opportunities, as well as the support and resources they need to be successful.
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Optimizing Workforce Planning and Strategy Development: The organizations that get talent management “right” aren’t just better-positioned to meet their short-term objectives and demand for staffing—they’re also able to develop a broader talent management framework they can modify and adjust over time. That way, they can remain agile and respond to changes in the industry or the company’s shifting priorities, ensuring ongoing innovation, productivity, and growth.
You can learn more about the role of talent management in achieving success—and each of the core functions covered above—in this recent McKinsey & Company article.
What Is the Most Important Aspect of Talent Management?
It depends on who you ask, really.—Aarguments could be made for any of the five core functions covered above as being the most important overall aspect of talent management. This underscores the importance of understanding how to develop effective talent management strategies within the context of a broader talent management framework.
The most successful organizations are often the ones that achieve the best balance between empowering their employees and achieving key business objectives. In other words, if you focus too much on empowerment and lose sight of the objectives—or vice versa—talent management becomes much more difficult than it needs to be!
Meet Lorien, Your Partner in Talent Management
When it’s all said and done, the most important aspect of any talent management strategy is how well it aligns with the short- and long-term priorities of the organization. In other words, there is not necessarily any “perfect” talent management strategy, and these strategies certainly aren’t one-size-fits-all.
Whether you need help recruiting, developing, or retaining talent, Lorien is ready to partner with you. We provide a wide range of services, including both permanent and temporary workforce solutions. We can also help to enhance your overall talent management strategy. In addition to our staffing solutions, you can count on our expert team for unique recruitment approaches tailored to specific industries and in-demand skill sets, including AI and machine learning, cybersecurity, software engineering, and more.
