The 5 Biggest Talent Management Challenges Facing Companies Today

It’s true; business owners have a lot to focus on. From new business development to keeping existing clients happy, there’s a lot to think about. It’s no wonder talent management is filed under ‘Pesky tasks 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’re good at, what others think they’re good at, who they’d be best working 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.

Of course, it’s not always easy to spot talent in a busy workforce. Let’s look at the five talent management challenges that organisations are facing and a simple solution that can save you countless hours.

Challenge 1: Finding internal candidates

With global skills shortages, record staff turnover rates and resource constraints, organizations 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 employee’s strengths and link them to suitable career opportunities. Not doing so could impact the employee experience, with employees choosing to leave for further career advancement and personal development.

Challenge 2: Identifying growth potential

It’s incredibly difficult to develop an employee who is either unwilling to be developed, 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’d be able to identify high potentials early on.

Challenge 3: Boosting Performance

Even if you’ve identified an employee’s growth potential, HR departments are struggling to boost their performance. Why? Mostly because talent management is still done retrospectively.

At the end of each year, HR will sit down with employees to see where they went wrong. The problem with this approach, is that it doesn’t allow companies to anticipate problems and suggest actions to boost performance before it’s too late. Predictive performance analytics is key to making this happen.

Predictive performance analysis

Data and analytics helps organisations simplify processes and make decision-making better, simpler and faster. Predictive performance analysis uses data and information to make informed predictions about how well employees or job candidates are likely to perform in their roles. Check out our People Analytics solutions for more information on professional analytics services.

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 in the workplace. It can also help to 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 isn’t necessarily aligned to the employee’s growth needs.

The problem here, is that training viewed from an individual perspective may not align with the organisation 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 behaviours that complement this.

Challenge 5: Assembling Teams

We all know that building strong teams is imperative to a company’s efficiency. But how do you build a team when you’re 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.

Your People Data Holds the Answers

How can we prevent these talent management challenges? The solution is less complicated than you may think. Peopletree Group has developed a tool which simplifies the process of predictive performance. TalentPrint is a self-directed assessment tool which helps employees understand their strengths and match them to the best opportunities.

By implementing a talent data tool like TalentPrint, employees can figure out what they are good at, what they should be good at, and how to get better at it.

Unlock the power of your talent data. Watch the introduction to TalentPrint video below or connect with us for a free discovery session to unpack the right solutions to your unique business challenges.