Talent Maximiser

What a bird told me about managing talent

I hope the recent HR feature on organisations failing to fill critical talent pipelines acts as a prompt to get organisations thinking about how they can use their existing staff to fill those critical but all too often, hard to recruit for roles. 

Obviously the article is promoting the use of talent management software to gather the necessary talent intelligence on critical talent roles, but it is not a pre requisite.  There are still many companies (even large ones) that spend time meeting with their managers and leaders to gather the information and store their insight in nothing more complicated than Excel.  There are pros and cons to both but that's for another blog posting!

Personally, I think it is great that organisations are being prompted as to importance for considering other ways, other than the obvious but arguable higher risk option of recruiting externally for hard to recruit talent.  It means all those individuals languishing within organisations who have more to give, are in need of a new challenge, feel trapped because of the economic climate, or simply want to develop in a new way stand a chance of being considered.

Employees are often not given the chances they seek because they are not performing well enough in their role to be considered high potentials, but what if that is down to the type of work they are doing?  In my experience of working with individuals who have derailed, or want to maximise their talents, in the majority of cases, they are not performing well because they are not playing to their strengths, or are in an environment that is conducive of success for them personally.  Tweak or change what they do, where they do it and watch them go from 'average' to 'exceeds'.

Organisations who want to change the "war for talent" paradigm into "an excess of talent" will take a longer look at who they have, what their aspirations are, their development needs and how they could be better deployed.  Maximising what you have is a much more efficient strategy for growing your talent pipelines then simply trying to grab it from somewhere else.  And as the old adage goes "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush". 

Does the Apprentice turn out winners, or losers?

 
Yesterday's new headlines in the UK said the 'loser won' in reference to the winner of the recent Apprentice series, after suffering 8 defeats.  Meanwhile the runner up was the clear favourite with an outstanding track record, losing only 1 task before the final. In different circumstances, if Sir Alan Sugar was looking for an employee, rather than a business partner then the headlines would have been correct.  However, in this situation the right person was picked for the role that needed to be filled, despite the process they had to go through. 

What if this had really been a process within a company? Would they have taken a risk on Tom? Companies often put people through a series of tasks to help find a single best candidate, but are they reflective of the role they will be doing?  Thankfully there is a starting trend for scenario based recruitment, where companies seek to recreate real life situations in an interview and people have to respond accordingly.

Another important point to draw out about the Apprentice process, and all too often a company's process is, the obvious fact that there was more than one talented individual in the pool.  Those who do not pop out at the top at the end can be left disenfranchised.  The process is set up to deliver one not many. Thankfully, I hear organisations are starting to think about how they can create processes that build pools of talent ready to be deployed across their organisation and not just individuals for a select number of senior roles.

It might not make as exciting TV, but creating an Apprentice format that looks for the pool of talent within the candidates could help drive talent innovation within companies. Thus the winner might be a single person but it could equally be a collaboration (much more suited to how the Gen Y's work). Imagine Tom, Helen and Susan working across a company - powerful stuff!