Talent Management: end-to-end process control

NorthgateArinso Ireland explains the drive towards Talent Management in today’s rapidly changing business environment.

Businesses around the world are challenging their HR teams to think strategically about talent management. The principles behind this move are compelling: a cohesive talent management strategy will streamline processes, provide excellent services to staff throughout their careers and at the same time reduce costs. Ultimately, it should help in enabling HR to make a tangible contribution to company goals. Tying together all the elements of workforce management will enable the company to source the best talent from around the world and support knowledge retention as senior staff retire.

Getting the basics right
With a clear vision for what cohesive talent management can achieve, there are some key factors to take into account to make it a reality. Your planning should centre around three key stages of (i) evaluating what is currently in place, (ii) assessing how to execute your strategy and (iii) making the process efficient. You can then deliver effective talent management.

Evaluation
To implement a talent management strategy, you first need to evaluate your existing HR processes and technical solutions. There may be different systems in place, not only in each country but also in each office. The tools for enabling HR are often put in place as and when they are needed, without thinking about how they’ll work together across borders or offices. Similarly, HR processes often need to be tailored to local working practices and so have been evolved independently across the business network.

To make talent management work, it needs to be comprehensive throughout your organisation. So the starting point must be to ensure the organisation has the right technology and processes in place. This will mean the HR team, together with the management team, can focus on and add value by managing the company’s talent rather than on simply operating separate transactional processes.

The technology chosen must fit with the needs of your company. It needs to be a platform that can form the basis of a global talent management system, handling:

• Recruitment and retention
• Employee lifecycle and succession planning
• Performance management
• Learning and personal development
• Reward and recognition
• Managing exit

Once you have evaluated the processes and systems in place for each of these elements, you need to think about how each integrates with the others. Without the right integration, HR will not have a full view of each person within the workforce, their skills and performance and where they are positioned in the employee lifecycle and thus true talent management will remain elusive.

Execution
Organisations are starting to recognise that talent management strategies cannot become reality if the different elements remain in different ‘silos’. The solutions to draw the elements together are readily available and can be chosen from HR solutions that are enterprise ready, embrace end-to-end HR processes and can be accessed anywhere in the world.

HR directors can now construct a talent management strategy that supports their business needs, rather than one directed by the technology available. This may sound strange but until now HR has had to buy the solution that seems to fit their needs, rather than one tailored to their needs. Now, HR providers are starting to wake up to the need to provide a more holistic solution, flexible enough to meet an organisation’s varied talent management needs.

The right technology platform needs to be able to handle not just basic HR processes but also issues like the management of knowledge transfer. As Western Europe’s biggest ever generation, the post-war ‘baby boomers’, starts to retire, this is becoming a major issue. Talent management needs to be not just about replacing these people with new recruits but also about how HR supports the business in retaining their knowledge and insight.

The technology you choose needs to provide the right level of reporting data – be it to staff, line & departmental managers, the HR & Finance departments or the Board. This is necessary not just for compliance (though this is an important consideration and one that can vary across markets) but also for the effective running of the company. The right data needs to be available to the right people to enable effective decision-making – where the real talent management takes place.

Efficiency
Once the strategy has been decided and is starting to be executed, HR directors can assess ways to make managing their talent more efficient.

For organisations that are not keen to bring on board a large-scale HR application, talent management outsourcing is an area that, while currently in its infancy, will see extensive growth in the coming years.

HR outsourcing is becoming increasingly popular with organisations that feel quite comfortable about outsourcing their internal processes, such as payroll, pensions administration, flexible benefits administration and even the management of recruitment and learning programmes. Indeed, some organisations have already outsourced all their HR operations to a third party. The natural progression for this, to my mind, is to outsource the entire talent management process.

Talent management can be outsourced in full or in part, as best works for the organisation, to take advantage of external expertise and economies of scale. Because the outsource provider can handle all the ‘dull but worthy’ elements of talent management, outsourcing provides the HR director with greater control of their processes. Of course, firm SLAs must be in place to ensure that the work is executed to the highest standards and that all parties understand which elements remain inhouse and which are outsourced.

The HR director can then provide greater strategic input to the business – not just because they have better services and information, but because they have more time to focus on the needs of the business.

Look to the future
As organisations embark on talent management outsourcing, I believe the next steps will be:

• More use of technology: this does not mean a proliferation of software, but rather increased use of the technology in place, so that it better serves the HR needs of the organisation

• Increased use of self-service options by employees and managers: much of the transactional side of HR (requesting holiday, recording illness, choosing benefits, applying for courses) can be automated with the right software. Ensuring staff use the systems available to them is a vital step in moving towards full talent management outsourcing, as they need to be engaged in the systems that will give the provider the data they need

• Self-development of careers: once staff feel comfortable using self-service HR solutions, they will quickly start to use the systems to manage their own career – choosing the training that will benefit their career path and selecting the benefits they’ll most appreciate

• Answers to issues around flexible working (as they affect performance and succession): with a holistic view of what’s going on in the workforce, it should become clear who is benefiting from current flexible working initiatives, who else could benefit and how to make such initiatives work for the business – intelligence HR directors miss out on when the right systems are not in place

Recruitment, learning and performance management should be top targets for outsourcing. There is absolutely no reason why mapping, self-paced e-learning and assessment management cannot be handled by a third party. When that company also hosts the IT systems you use, you’ll start to see real economies of scale.

Conclusion
Talent management needs to start with the right strategy, leading to choosing the right processes and provider. Once it is in place, HR directors will have a unified view of the whole talent management picture. This gives a strong base on which to make strategic decisions to support the future growth of the business – and means HR directors can get on with the job they joined up to do, looking after their people.  

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