When it comes to Talent Management, organisations are struggling to identify and develop internal talent.
It’s true; business owners have a lot to focus on. From new business development to keeping current clients happy – there’s a lot to think about. So it’s no wonder why Talent Management tends to get filed under, ‘Pesky tasks HR needs to take care of’. The problem is that the ability to recruit, hire, retain, and develop your most talented employees is crucial to an organisation’s growth. Being able to truly understand your talent – what they’re good at, what other’s think they’re good at, who they’d be best working with, what teams they could successfully fit into – is the difference between an efficient, growing organisation and a stagnant one.
Of course, it’s not always easy to spot talent in a busy workforce. Here are the five areas that organisations find the most challenging when it comes to Talent Management.
Identifying Growth Potential
It’s incredibly difficult to develop an employee who is either unwilling to be developed, or unable to be. 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 an employee’s willingness and ability to grow and change. If they could do that, they’d be able to identify high potentials early.
Boosting Performance
Even if you’ve identified an employee’s growth potential, HR departments are struggling to boost their performance. Why? Mostly because, up until recently, Talent Management was done retrospectively; at the end of each year, HR would sit down with employees to see where they went wrong. The problem here is that it doesn’t let you anticipate problems and suggest actions to boost performance – before it’s too late. Predictive performance analytics, through tools such as TalentPrint, is key to making this happen.
Collating Training Needs
Training in organisations tends to be done in silos; either a Talent Management team commits to training new employees once off, and not very often after that. Or employees need to jump through hoops to convince their bosses of training they’d like to do (while the benefit to the company isn’t necessarily clear). The challenge is training that is viewed from both the individual and organisation’s perspective. People need to be able to identify their own development needs, by comparing their strengths to a company’s needs.
Finding Internal Candidates
Just as employees need to be able to match their strengths to a company’s needs, organisations need to be able to match their business requirements with talent’s strengths – and then connect them with relevant career opportunities. One of the greatest challenges in Talent Management is having a clear, data-driven, overview of the the talent in your organisation, so you know who to develop, in what way, when.
Assembling Teams
We all know that building strong teams is imperative to a company’s efficiency. But how can you build a team when you’re not sure who works best together? HR needs a way to find out how to combine the people with complementary strengths into teams to take projects from concept to commercialization.
How can we solve these challenges? By implementing tools – like TalentPrint, which helps employees figure out what they are good at, what they should be good at, and how they get batter at it. These tools collect robust talent data, that is easy and clear to understand, so that HR can make informed decisions about how best to develop their internal talent.