Talent management
Talent management describes the entirety of personnel policy measures in an organization to ensure that critical roles and functions are filled in the long term.
Talent management is a segment of human resource management that is aimed at target groups that are important for corporate success and for which there is also a comparatively high personnel requirement in the company. Accordingly, prioritizing target groups is usually the first step in developing a talent management system.
origin
Talent management can be understood as a reaction to changed conditions in the global markets, which overall contribute to increasing competition for qualified and talented employees:
- The demographic change is increasingly leading to a shortage of specialists and executives mainly in the western industrialized countries.
- The change towards a knowledge society is creating an increased need for qualified and creative employees
- In the western industrialized countries, innovation and the ability to innovate became the decisive factor for competitiveness . This goes hand in hand with a special need for innovative staff
- There is a general trend that the loyalty of qualified employees against their employer falls
- The Internet has dramatically increased the transparency of the labor market , which has made competition for qualified and talented employees more fierce
- Globalization results on the one hand in a higher supply of highly qualified employees, on the other hand there is also the risk of talent emigration.
This competition was literally given the title of the book "The War for Talent" by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod, in which the first approaches to talent management are outlined.
Basic principles
Talent management is characterized by a number of basic principles that are reflected in different ways in the practical approaches to talent management.
- The lack of qualified personnel in the labor markets forces companies to actively recruit employees. Approaches from marketing (especially branding ) and sales come into play here. Traditional, more passively oriented measures of employee recruitment are increasingly failing in attracting scarce, qualified personnel.
- Companies have two options to react to the shortage: (1) Use active, competitive methods of recruiting and retaining staff to find, retain and win external staff for critical roles and functions. Or (2) to systematically develop long-term talented employees in order to be able to meet long-term needs internally.
- In this sense, talent management is competitive, active, at times aggressive, and puts talent at the center of activities. In this respect, talent management is comparable to entrepreneurial efforts that place the customer at the center of thought and action.
- The term talent is used inconsistently in talent management. On the one hand, talent is used in the sense of its traditional definition in the sense of talent and potential, but also in the sense of people with talent.
- Talent management focuses on critical target groups and thus on rather small groups of (potential) employees and managers. In this respect, talent management tends to be an elite approach.
Disciplines and Measures
Talent management encompasses a large number of individual measures and in this respect represents a compositional personnel policy performance. A distinction can essentially be made between internal and external measures that can be assigned to the tasks of acquisition, identification, development and deployment, with the first two tasks being more external the latter two are more internally focused.
Extraction
The overall goal of recruiting is to build and maintain long-term, close, personal relationships with promising, talented candidates and employees. The development of a target group-oriented employer brand , the candidate experience , talent relationship management and employee loyalty play an important role here.
ID
The core task of talent management is to find internally and externally talented people (candidates, employees) who are very promising for the company in the long term. Externally, this is done through active personnel marketing measures ( active sourcing ) and primarily through the use of natural social networks through employee recommendation programs . Internally, talented employees are usually identified in the context of dedicated, so-called talent review meetings, in which employees are assessed by managers based on their performance and future potential. Employees who perform well and who are also given high potential are usually referred to as high potentials .
development
Development is primarily an internal task of talent management, in which high potentials experience certain development measures. A central instrument here is the systematic assignment of particularly challenging tasks (stretch roles), assignments abroad, but also the offer of special training measures, such as the possibility of completing a master’s degree alongside their professional activity . In addition, high potentials often receive professional career advice. As part of regular employee appraisals, high potentials receive continuous feedback on their performance, which contributes to their learning development. However, external measures are also conceivable for people who are currently not employed in the respective company, such as the award of scholarships .
commitment
The tasks described above lead to the talent management task of systematically deploying high potentials and promising (external) candidates. This is done with the ultimate goal of fulfilling critical roles and functions as best as possible. Internal talent markets ( talent pools ) and methods of succession planning play a central role here.
Talent management framework
A functioning talent management requires a number of important framework conditions that a company can specifically influence. This framework is of great importance for understanding a talent management system. This design framework includes the factors leadership, organization, controlling, technology, culture and integration into human resource management.
guide
Managers are the most important actors in talent management. You are essentially responsible for the successful implementation of the disciplines outlined above. The starting point here is the visible commitment of top management to the importance of talent management for corporate success.
organization
A functioning talent management system requires clear responsibilities. While the executives, as the most important actors, are responsible for implementation, the HR department has a particular coordinating role. A major challenge is to ensure that managers have the necessary skills.
Controlling
Talent management requires the collection of relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) . Typical indicators are:
- The number of identified high potentials per organizational unit
- The proportion of internal staffing for critical roles and functions
- The performance, satisfaction and loyalty of identified high potentials
- The awareness and popularity of the company on the job market (especially among the critical target groups)
- Speed in filling critical roles and functions ( time-to-fill )
technology
Companies are increasingly using suitable information technology to implement talent management. Technology particularly supports the recruitment, use and determination of KPIs.
Culture
Talent management requires an appropriate corporate culture that puts talent at the center of thinking and acting. Talent management is not seen as a task of the HR department, but rather recognized as a key factor in terms of competitiveness . This value attitude is lived by all actors.
literature
- Adrian Ritz, Norbert Thom: Talent Management: Identify talents, develop skills, retain top performers. 2nd Edition. Gabler 2011, ISBN 978-3-8349-3174-0 .
- Dietrich von der Oelsnitz, Volker Stein, Martin Hahmann: The talent war. Personnel strategy and education in the global battle for highly qualified people. Haupt-Verlag, 2007.
- Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, Beth Axelrod: The War for Talent. Mcgraw-Hill Professional, 2001, ISBN 1-57851-459-2 .
- Maximilian Lackner: Talent Management Special. Leading the gifted, researchers, artists ... successfully. Gabler, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8349-2353-0 .
- Volker Heyse, Stefan Ortmann: Talent Management in Practice. Instructions with worksheets, checklists, software solutions. 1st edition. Waxmann Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-8309-1983-4 .
- Anne Dreyer, Magdalena Nowak: Education and Talent Management 2012 . Study as part of the German Education Prize 2012. PDF
- Armin Trost: Talent Relationship Management. Recruiting in times of a shortage of skilled workers . 1st edition. Springer, 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-17077-5 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Volker Heyse, Stefan Ortmann: Talent management in practice: Instructions with worksheets, checklists, software solutions, Waxmann Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-8309-1983-4 .
- ↑ Frithjof Arp: Emerging giants, aspiring multinationals and foreign executives: Leapfrogging, capability building, and competing with developed country multinationals . In: Human Resource Management . 53, No. 6, 2014, pp. 851-876. doi : 10.1002 / hrm.21610 .
- ↑ Frithjof Arp, Kate Hutchings, Wendy A. Smith :: Foreign executives in local organizations: An exploration of differences to other types of expatriates . In: Journal of Global Mobility . 1, No. 3, 2013, pp. 312-335. doi : 10.1108 / JGM-01-2013-0006 .
- ↑ Frithjof Arp: Typologies: Which type of foreign executives are committed by local companies, and which type of local companies oblige them? . In: Journal for Personnel Research . 27, No. 3, 2013, pp. 167-194. doi : 10.1688 / 1862-0000_ZfP_2013_03_Arp .
- ↑ See for example the tool [1] (2007)