Developing your talent strategy: five tips for success
Attracting, developing and retaining your best employees is no easy feat – particularly in such a competitive job market. Here’s how you can recruit and keep your incredibly valuable people by using a strategic approach.
The UK talent market is tough for employers right now, with 80% of UK employers struggling to find the talent they need. Despite some recovery after the pandemic, record numbers of vacancies continue to go unfilled. Employers are having to offer more flexibility to engage their staff – but could they be doing more to build long-term resilience to changes in the job market?
As HR leaders look to the future of their workforce, many are reimagining their talent management strategies to drive resilience and build value. In this article, we take a look at five top tips for developing a talent strategy for the future of work to ensure success.
1. Plan for effective succession
For any talent management strategy to be truly effective, there needs to a foundation of succession planning in place. However as even more C-suite turnover is expected in 2024, and 84% of HR leaders citing “barriers” to providing learning and development to their leaders, filling the gaps for senior roles may prove particularly challenging. This is coupled with the fact two thirds of HR managers continue to be dissatisfied with their existing leadership development programs – showing there are plenty of obstacles for those wanting to develop succession in the business.
Despite this, it’s key that every business has a pool of trained workers to draw upon when leaders and other key employees step down or move on to pastures new. These individuals should be ready to fill key roles and hit the ground running. As part of your planning, these successors should ideally have been developed over time to meet the job role’s criteria and key competencies for the next position in their career.
With comprehensive succession planning in place, many businesses will find themselves well-placed to foster a talent-oriented culture that actively recruits and develops skilled workers and top talent.
2. Identify talent requirements
The first step of any successful talent strategy requires a deep understanding of your organisation’s overall goals. Whether revenue growth, new product development, global expansion or something else entirely – the talent your business needs to achieve these goals will vary greatly depending on what you’re aiming to achieve.
For many businesses, these goals will lend themselves to specialisms in certain areas. For revenue growth, you may look to prioritise sales and marketing whereas in product development, you may look for skilled R&D managers or Quality Assurance specialists; whatever your goals, it is key that these strategic priorities are reflected in your talent plans.
3. Identify your skill gaps
Similarly, the goals of your business will directly impact the skills you’re looking for in your new employees, as well as the ones you want to develop in your existing workforce. Once your goals have been agreed and the roles required to reach these goals, it is important to document an inventory of skills needed for each role to be successful.
You can cross-reference these with the expertise that suitable employees have already and carry out a skills-gap analysis in order to identify where your workforce’s abilities are currently lacking. This gap will help you discover the distance between current employees’ competencies and where you need them to be in order to meet your business goals.
4. Invest in learning and development
Effective, ongoing learning and development is a critical part of successful talent management strategies. As technology, abilities and roles evolve, so too should the skills of your employees. And yet, the average number of days of workplace training received each year has fallen by 19% per employee in England since 2011, with publicly funded qualifications declining by 70% since the early 2000s. (Click here for more information.)
Safe to say, L&D needs to be on the priority list for HR leaders this year. Continued learning and development allows employees and leaders to be prepared for future responsibilities and to unlock the new opportunities – helping you achieve the first recommendation on this list!
L&D can be organised on a company-wide, departmental or team level, or it can be bespoke to the individual – whatever you need to develop skills that you’ve discovered need growing from your skills gap analysis.
Failing to invest in L&D will only stand to widen any skill gaps further. As talent pools shrink, it is critical that leaders invest in internal talent and up – or re-skill them in order for your company to thrive.
5. Continuously track and evaluate
Often, people are the biggest expense for a business so it is critical that HR and leadership teams have a deep understanding of the effectiveness of the existing processes your company uses to attract, develop, retain and engage employees with the necessary skills and aptitude to meet the business’ current and future needs.
Some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you may choose to calculate and track include employee retention, turnover, satisfaction, performance, L&D spend, time to hire or absenteeism. The KPIs that you choose to calculate and monitor will vary depending on the goals and setup of your business but it is important to have hard evidence to refer to in order to continually improve.
Using key insights into your workforce can help your leadership team to inform decisions and monitor trends in your workforce. These trends in your data will help you to track the performance of your talent management strategy over time, make adjustments, evaluate impact and deliver and mobilise the most suitable talent for your business to achieve its goals.
More information
If you’re looking for HR Software to help you track your KPIs, support your recruitment process, and develop your people, look no further. Check out Moorepay’s HR Software or read the brochure today.
