Business leaders have a lot to focus on. From new business development to keeping existing clients happy, there is a lot to think about. It is no wonder talent management is often filed under 'things HR needs to take care of'. But the reality is that a company's ability to recruit, manage, develop, and retain high-potential employees is vital for growth.
Being able to truly understand your talent - what they are good at, what others think they are good at, who they would work best with, and what teams they could successfully fit into - is the difference between an efficient, growing organisation and a stagnant one. Businesses need to evolve their talent strategies if they hope to remain competitive in the race to attract and retain top talent.
Let us look at the five talent management challenges that organisations are facing today, and a practical solution that can save you countless hours of guesswork.
Challenge 1: Finding internal candidates
With global skills shortages, record staff turnover rates, and resource constraints, organisations are being tasked with sourcing top internal candidates to fill vacancies. A major challenge in talent management is having a clear view of the talent you have - informed by data - to know who to develop, how to develop them, and when.
Just as employees are expected to align their strengths with a company's needs, organisations must match their business requirements to their employees' strengths and link them to suitable career opportunities. Not doing so impacts the employee experience, with employees choosing to leave for further career advancement and personal development.
Challenge 2: Identifying growth potential
It is incredibly difficult to develop an employee who is either unwilling or unable to be developed. The more someone is both willing and able to develop themselves, the greater your return will be on the time, money, and effort you invest in that person's development.
One of the biggest problems organisations face is that they are unable to identify their employees' potential and willingness to grow and change. If they could do that, they would be able to identify high potentials early on - and invest in the right people at the right time.
The high potential identification gap
Most organisations identify high potentials based on current performance alone. But performance in the current role is a poor predictor of success at the next level. Potential requires a different data set - one that measures learning agility, behavioral range, and growth orientation.
Challenge 3: Boosting performance
Even if you have identified an employee's growth potential, HR departments struggle to boost their performance. Why? Mostly because talent management is still done retrospectively.
At the end of each year, HR sits down with employees to see where they went wrong. The problem with this approach is that it does not allow companies to anticipate problems and suggest actions to boost performance before it is too late. Predictive performance analytics is key to making this happen.
Data and analytics helps organisations simplify processes and make decision-making better, simpler, and faster. Predictive talent analytics helps HR professionals and managers anticipate future performance, find areas for improvement, and make decisions about hiring, training, and development to ensure better outcomes. It can also help predict and prevent turnover and attrition.
Challenge 4: Collating training needs
In many organisations, training happens in isolation. Talent management teams typically provide training to new employees once off. Afterward, employees must convince their managers to approve additional learning and development, where the benefits for the company may not be obvious, or the training is not necessarily aligned to the employee's growth needs.
The problem here is that training viewed from an individual perspective may not align with the organisational perspective. However, not viewing training from the perspective of employees may result in them leaving for better development opportunities. Employees must be able to identify their own development needs by comparing their strengths to the company's needs, and then developing specific skills and behaviors that complement this.
Challenge 5: Assembling teams
Building strong teams is imperative to a company's efficiency. But how do you build a team when you are not sure who works best together? HR needs a way to combine people with complementary strengths into teams to take projects from concept to implementation.
Without structured data on behavioral attributes, strengths, and working styles, team assembly defaults to familiarity and proximity - which rarely produces the best outcomes.
Your people data holds the answers
How can you prevent these talent management challenges? The solution is less complicated than you may think. The key is having a structured, data-driven approach to understanding your people - what they are good at, what they should be good at, and how to get better at it.
By implementing a talent data tool that uses behavioral assessment, employees can understand their strengths, match them to the best opportunities, and identify specific development areas. This gives HR the evidence base to answer the critical 'who' questions that business leaders ask.
Talentprint - Understand Your People at Scale
Talentprint is a self-directed behavioral assessment tool that helps employees understand their strengths and match them to the best opportunities. It gives HR the data to answer all five challenges - from identifying high potentials to assembling high-performing teams.