Dealing with a large staff turnover is never an easy HR challenge to resolve. Talent management is an essential element of human resource management for companies to deal with in order to avoid the best talent leaving for other companies with better potential especially when dealing with newer generations. For example, a recent study mentions that:

47% of actively disengaged Millennials strongly agree that they will switch jobs if the job market improves in the next 12 months, compared with 17% of engaged Millennials.
Harvard Business Review

Talent management statistics tell us that answering employees’ needs is crucial in retaining employees. For this reason, we decided to take a looks at some tips for improving talent management practices, including the need for an efficient HR system customized to your business goals.

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What is Talent Management?

Talent management is a broad topic that includes many HR processes and categories. In general, talent management is the full scope of how the HR department treats its human capital resources during the entire employee life cycle. This includes the recruitment process, onboarding, development, motivation, and more. Keeping and leveraging the right talent in a company through a talent strategy is essential for organizational development.

Talent management can also be considered strategic HR for HR teams to improve employee retention. This is important as newer generations are now part of the workforce and different techniques of management should be put into place. According to Gallup:

Gen Z and millennials now make up 46% of the full-time U.S. workforce

These new generations want a different talent management than how business used to to be. They prioritize “their desire for ethical leadership” from opportunity to learn and grow to quality of management”.

Why Should SMEs Concentrate on Talent Management?

Large companies have the means to invest a lot in talent management and commit to high-potential initiatives by creating talent management hierarchies and departments dedicated to attracting and retaining the talents that are critical to their core business. By aligning talented people within the company to organizational goals, employee development and loyalty is likely to improve. But small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often don’t have the same means regarding talent management and must make choices based on resource planning with limited assets.

“Small business” means “small workforce“. When a company’s know-how relies on just a few employees, each resource, taken individually, becomes a critical talent and skill. And when one of the employees is no longer able to perform his duties, for example by a competitor acquiring the talent, the entire company is at risk. That is why it is essential to pay particular attention to competitors’ approach to talent and to reflect on your own management of talent and key skills.

Moreover, in times of crisis, what makes a company attractive to talent and young graduates is the security and career development opportunities that the company provides. When talent management is neglected in favor of old-fashioned management, it affects turnover as well as individual and global motivation. This can be seen in a Gartner study that reports:

65% of staff is rethinking the role of work in life

This is the staff that is already trained and which resources went to which causes weaknesses for the company. The HR department must focus its management processes on human capital management and not only attracting talented employees, but also keeping them. This will give you a competitive advantage in the war for talent.

What customers are looking for in their collaboration with an SME is expertise first and foremost and also flexibility. These elements should be found in talent management and, among other things, in the process of developing skills and making employees experts in their roles. The positive differentiation for SMEs is therefore the management of individual key skills that, when put together, will produce a truly unique overall collective skill set.

Obstacles to Effective Implementation of Good Talent Management

There are multiple obstacles of various natures. First, HR professionals are generally “stuck” in the day-to-day management and administration of the company’s HR management, so they very rarely have the opportunity to think about a talent management strategy. Even if the right questions are asked for talent development, HR professionals usually have neither the time nor the human and financial resources to change their HR strategy or how they manage talent.

As a result,

Skills

Leadership