Talent management: strategy and best practices

Let’s start with the talent management definition: it’s a process of acquiring qualified experts for your company and ensuring their satisfaction and high performance.

Talent management is the responsibility of HR: while they are mostly associated with vacancy filling, the employee journey after hiring is also an important part of HR management. This journey includes onboarding, allocation to the company’s tasks, performance management, and learning to help an employee improve their skills. Effective communication should be ensured for a successful and efficient journey.

HR departments may use talent management systems (TMS), meaning they can optimize their time by automatizing their work processes. In addition, such systems provide statistics, helping HR managers understand how the company is performing and identify areas that should be adjusted. Lastly, TMSs facilitate communication between staff and management, integrating all information flows in the company and helping proceed with them.

Global talent management means attracting skilled people to the company from around the world, or at least your country, not limited by your locality. Let’s see several examples of efficient strategies and discuss why they are good. Actually, all these four components are better to be combined, but different companies may require different proportions of each.

• Corporate strategy should be developed first, as it’s the foremost element to ensure talent training and retention. The main element of any strategy is its purpose, so it revolves around the company’s vision and mission. According to Swiss scholarly research, companies with clearly defined corporate strategies have the best performance in staff training and retention. That’s because employees know why they work when they see a clear talent management and development strategy, understanding that their job has sense and fulfills them.
• Setting the company’s goals clarifies which skills and talents are necessary to accomplish your mission. If they are defined as precisely and tangibly as possible, new talents may be allocated to do them directly after the onboarding.
• Focusing on training and development to teach employees new relevant skills and strengthen their current ones. While some companies focus on hiring already skilled talents, investing in training your employees pays off significantly. For example, if your company works with content, you can launch training programs on using AI tools for quick and efficient content creation, greatly enhancing your performance. Various learning management systems, such as ours, help companies to organize efficient training & development.
• Flexible communications include clearly planned video or physical meetings, established personal communications between team members, and general chat for them. Personal ideas and feedback are two crucial components of this strategy. If everyone has the opportunity to express their propositions and insights while evaluating the work and insights of others, overall efficiency increases, and the risk of misunderstanding is minimized.

The company’s HR can choose a talent management strategy that suits the company best. For example, a multinational remotely working team must certainly work with flexible communication and clearly set goals; in other cases, it’ll drown in misunderstandings and may even dissolve. A high-technology startup should focus on corporate strategy and training & development to ensure the usage of the latest technologies with minimum expenses.

We summarize the human resources talent management process in the cycle below.

It’s a spiral-like process that begins with talent searching, hiring, and onboarding. After that, managers use corporate training to improve their skills and monitor their performance using various metrics and communicating with employees. As the employees’ skills grow, their responsibilities or job positions may change. Thus, succession planning begins the next stage of the cycle. If an employee doesn’t perform well or doesn’t like the company, they leave, and the company must start the cycle again.

So, let’s now focus on specific practices rather than broad strategies and models and see how they can be applied in the best way.

To monitor employee satisfaction and productivity, the company should adopt, assess, and monitor several talent management metrics. They are quantitative expressions of your working atmosphere, covering the full cycle from hiring to working and training. Let’s describe several of them, which are the most actual nowadays.

• Turnover rates can be divided into three categories: voluntary, involuntary, and top talent turnover. The first and second show, correspondingly, the number of employees who left the company voluntarily or were fired, divided by the total number of employees. Top talent turnover is the percentage of high-skilled employees (those with top-level skills and high performance) who left the company voluntarily or not. These rates assess the company’s attractiveness to employees.
• Retention rates are the percentage of employees who stay with the company after each quarter or year, according to the time period you’re measuring. They show your company’s stability and also indicate its attractiveness for talents.
• Employee satisfaction may be assessed with anonymous surveys or job review websites. Anonymity ensures that employees will respond frankly without fearing facing other consequences. Also, if your company is present on various independent job review websites, your employees probably provide some feedback here, and you may check it.
• Work quality may be measured by various methods: for example, checking whether an employee accomplishes all their tasks or directly assessing how much revenue each action brings to your company. The first method measures the efficiency of employees’ work, while the second one shows the performance quality of the company as a whole.
• Training speed is actual if you use a learning management system or at least motivate your employees to strengthen their skills regularly. It’s the average time of the corporate course completion, after which an employee's productivity grows.
• Hiring quality includes the average cost and time spent on each hire. Costs include HR team salaries and advertising, while time is how quickly the vacancy fills with a talent. The fewer costs and time spent, the better hiring quality.
• Hiring equality shows whether there’s any discrimination on racial, national, gender, or any other ground based on the hiring and working cases. This metric becomes increasingly actual: providing equal opportunities for everyone is much more ethical and leads to increased productivity and innovations.

Eventually, let’s elucidate several practices crucial for a good workflow.

While now you see how companies manage their employees without tension and coercion, we’ve also mentioned that this process may be automated, saving you a lot of time and money. So, next, we’ll review and discuss several platforms for that purpose and show you how to select the most suited.

Talent management tools include software intended to automatize everything we’ve discussed above. So, they proceed with data gathered at each stage of the talent management cycle, store them and provide statistics. Additionally, they serve as a platform for communication between personnel, enabling them to discuss work questions, leave feedback, or ask for advice. They may be integrated with LMS to improve training performance by monitoring the educational process and helping management make better decisions.
So, which features you can find in most TMSs? Let’s see.

• Data gathering and analytics include staff information, performance metrics, and financial statistics of the company. The TMS dashboard shows general information about the company’s human resources.
• Employee profiles enable staff to access their user accounts with information about their name, position, skills, and current responsibilities. Also, they may use these profiles for communication and networking.
• Recruiting management for the HR department includes integration with popular job search websites and facilitates searching for candidates with the required skills and characteristics. This section also contains tools such as digital signatures to sign work agreements and other documents quickly.
• Succession management is all about planning the employee’s path in the company. In this section, leadership defines the company’s missions and sets goals to guide and allocate employees. Based on these, employees may see what they should do in the company and which competencies they should develop.
• Goal and performance management is where the company’s leadership sets weekly, monthly, and yearly goals and then monitors their completion based on the data flow. Also, this section often includes the possibility to add feedback to the employees’
• Compensation management and reporting include statistics based on the completed goals, financial performance, and other metrics. Here, the company’s management may calculate a fair salary based on these statistics and make other staff-related decisions.
• Learning and development section is where employees' skills may be evaluated to plan their improvement. Here, third-party LMS vendors are often integrated to provide a seamless experience of various online courses dedicated to improving required skills.

As you see, these features cover the talent management cycle fully. See below what an interface of a typical TMS (Remofirst) dashboard looks like: it includes a list of workers, their countries, expenses, and quick statistics.

Top talent management software helps you improve your workers’ productivity and well-being. They enable quick and reliable allocation, as all information about the work goals and required skills is present in the system and can be proceeded.

Integrated talent management means that all stages of the talent management cycle are interconnected and, thus, performed in the best way. For example, if a vacancy opens, it’s quickly caught by the system, while HR managers instantly start to search for new candidates and analyze the results of interviews with them.

They also enable instant monitoring of all employees’ performance and compensate them based on this performance, which is an efficient, fair, and satisfying way of paying salaries.

To summarize the TMS functionality in 5 basic sections, see the diagram below.

A good talent management system should speed up the human resource problem-resolving time, enhance staff communication and education, and shouldn’t create additional problems. Let’s review which criteria you should use to evaluate them.

• Implementation time, which you’d better clarify when contacting TMS support. Make yourself familiar with all possible problems that may arise, so you’ll prepare to overcome them.
• Cost-efficiency, which means that you’ll save time and money after setting up the talent management platform, and these savings will be larger than expenses on it. So, make these calculations before the implementation.
• Necessary features and how they fit you: check your business strategy, review the talent management cycle once more, and see which features are essential for it.
• Company’s culture and strategy correspondence: if you own a small local business, you’ll probably need to different TMS than if you have a small multinational remotely working team.
• References: you’d better explore not only customer reviews but references of the actual TMS implementation in other companies. Read about these cases and study the implementation examples to make sure that the chosen TMS is reliable and know more about its possible issues.

Therefore, each company’s leadership should create its talent management program based on its corporate culture, mission, and goals. It includes the strategy of talent searching, hiring, onboarding, allocating, and training, as well as helping them build their future in the company. A TMS automatizes this process, connecting information flows and analyzing data. It provides connections with job search websites and learning tools and enables a communication platform for all staff members.

Let’s wrap up by pointing out several good talent management software solutions. Choosing a TMS is not an instant task, and this article’s purpose doesn’t include the assessment of various systems’ diverse features. Instead, we’ll provide a brief description of each and point out for which working contexts it fits best. See them in the table below.

While CleverLMS doesn’t provide tools for job website monitoring, it helps you onboard, track, and manage your employees as efficiently as most talent management systems, generating reports and providing various metrics. And taking that, it costs
much less: no more than $5 per user per month. See our features to make sure of its capabilities as TMS, and try the 30-day free demo. Feel free to write us about any issues, propositions, or feedback!

BY ELIJAH OBI