Tuesday 26 October 2010

Talent Management

The concept of talent management has evolved into a common and essential management practice and what was once solely attached to recruitment now covers a multitude of areas including organisational capability, individual development, performance enhancement and succession planning

Organisations find greater value in formulating their own meaning of what talent is than accepting universal or prescribed definitions and there are considerable differences in how talent is defined across different industries and sectors. That said it is helpful to start with a working definition for both ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’:

- Talent consists of those individuals who can make a difference to organisational performance, either through their immediate contribution or in the longer-term by demonstrating the highest levels of potential.

- Talent management is the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, evaluation, retention and deployment of those individuals who are of particular value to an organisation, either in view of their ‘high potential’ for the future or because they are fulfilling business/operation-critical roles.

*source CIPD

The issue with many companies today is that their organisations put tremendous effort into attracting employees to their company, but spend little time on retaining and developing talent.

This definition underlines the importance of recognising that it is not enough to just attract individuals with high potential. Developing, managing and retaining those individuals as part of a planned strategy for talent is equally important, as is adopting systems to measure the return on this investment. More organisations are also now broadening their definitions, looking at the ‘talents’ of all their staff and working on ways to develop their strengths.

If you want to develop your staff and help them understand the implications of talent management, visit Trainer Bubble and download our Talent Management training course materials.