CIOs as Talent Master: Three Aspects to Retool Talent Management

People are always the most important asset of the business. The digital dynamic continues to evolve with increasing speed of change and rapid integration of business across the globe. Talent Management is throwing fresh challenges and calls for radical change to be embraced. Talent Management has adapted to the changing workforce in the changing workplace, and added additional best of breed talent and engagement systems to their existing core. Talent Management is positioned to make a true impact on the bottom line with the shifts from managing the human resource to investing human capital.Talent management is no longer the responsibility of just HR: All functions in the organization have a stake in strategic talent management practices. It requires cross-functional collaboration between HR, executive team, managers, finance, marketing, IT and others. At the dawn of digital era, what are the emergent trends and how to retool talent management?
Talent analytics is no longer 'nice to have,' but 'must have,' practice for the digital organization: The analytics brings important indicators on how talent and organization should focus and invest in human capital and organization efforts on people. In HR, you need to make this activity as HR's routine work and spent a lot of efforts to tuning and practicing. Data-driven talent management will bring business leaders together across the organization to share their experience and insight wherever there is a GAP in the system, help to streamline and identify root causes immediately, and give practical guidance for improving talent management and using it in creative ways to gain predictive insight and competitive advantage. Talent management should determine its orientation more specifically in the forthcoming era. Is it business management oriented or "people" oriented? The talent analytics scenario includes the following steps: 1) creating a vision and path for workforce analytics. 2) Engaging workforce planning, deployment, and development based on performance. 3) Doing social network analysis to improve effective communication and collaborative innovation. 4) Embracing futuristic trends such as visualization and proactive presentation. Focus on talent empowerment, not just “data boom.” 5) You also need to utilize available data and leverage analytics to inform decision making. HR often falls short in this area. So HR has to work collaboratively with IT to utilize technology to gather the data from multiple sources and allow sophisticated analytics.
Multichannel recruiting: The term social hiring, social media hiring, social recruiting etc. are interchangeable. You can define it as a process for quickly attracting the appropriate candidates using a number of current technologies and messaging platforms, in an integrated manner. One of the keys to success is integration.Talent management needs to be well integrated with culture management, knowledge management, and performance management more cohesively. In the company of the future, we need to move from Information Age to the digital era where action and empathy (emotion) are re-emphasized for competencies going forward. Leveraging digital talent management pipeline and take integral approach becomes more strategic imperative. Social computing provides a convenient platform to engage diverse and intellect minds in brainstorming and sharing the wisdom. The thought leaders or social influencers emerge because their voices get amplified by “who they are,“ not just “who they know. Digital tools becoming more widely used, and more companies adopting social media platforms, Social touch in recruiting is a phenomenon, it is not just a fad, but an actual characteristic of how "C"-the connected generations from baby boomers to Z-Gen communicate and collaborate, how the new knowledge created and how the work gets done and how the challenging problems get solved. And digital footprint of individuals or an organizations become their identity and brand, and more often than not, the inability to attract good candidates is caused by ineffective social hiring or digital recruiting. The main purpose is not to catch the trend, but to discover the authenticity.
Develop and grow talent via the mix of formal and informal training or position rotating: Each organization must be able to articulate clearly what constitutes “talent.” There is different talent requirement to fit in different positions. Talent is not equal to experience, just like wisdom is not always proportional to one's age. What you can and should do is to provide the opportunities (talent development) for people to hone their talents and let them shine. The key point is to customize training to the needs of the organization. Identify areas of improvement individually (tech strengths), provide training on the specific aspect. Have couple of training sessions which enable them to jump to next level of hierarchy or band. It’s not enough to just invest in dollars on an employee, and not just training for the sake of training; but training that will help company and employee.  The newer thoughts, newer trends, newer knowledge are all that captivates learners with new curiosities to learn and quickly absorb and adopt so that it becomes easy for the coming generation to adjust to the needs of the changes necessitated with the evolving new thinking and trends. The focus should be on trust, being patient, understanding the person's abilities (strength /weaknesses) and keeping the monetary bit for the last. Take advantage of the latest digital technology and online training, develop the tailored training solution in the most effective and efficient way to match the needs and demand. Over the short term, there may be savings from lack of employee training, but eventually, it will hit the top as well as the bottom line: employees not at their best performance levels will impact not only winning new and repeat business, but also meeting or exceeding customer expectations. A successful high-performance team is good for business and an important factor in employee retention as well.
Talent Management is and should be the agent of change. They need to be involved in all steps of change. Talent Management continually needs to show their value. Well define the set of competency to tailor your organizational needs: So it has become necessary to develop strategic core competencies for digital professionals. Leverage the new digital technologies, be open minded for the changes, embrace the new way to do things, and retool talent management to reach both individuals and businesses’ potential.
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