Have your cake and eat it – Nurture the best talent and save money
Friday, July 16th, 2010
Recent talent research points to fantastic savings that can be achieved whilst ensuring you retain the very best talent in your organisation. Figures from the Association of Graduate Recruiters, for example, show if a business can increase retention from 50% to 70% it can on average save 15% of its total recruitment spend. How much could you save your company?
The key to making these kind of savings is having a good understanding of who the talent is within your organisation and ensuring you have processes in place to retain them.
However, research carried out by Taleo suggests that organisations simply don’t have the appropriate data to know who their talent are. Their research suggests that 82% of HR leaders questioned recognised the importance of having data on talent ‘bench strength’ whilst only 41% of them felt they had access to reliable data on it.
It’s clear that ‘parachuting’ talent in to the organisation is more expensive than ‘growing your own’. Not to mention the risks involved in terms of cultural fit in bringing people in from outside. But if you don’t know who and where your talent is how can you hope to retain them?
5 Tips For Growing Your Own Talent
1. Spot your talent early - put in place schemes at all levels within the organisation to spot talent. Make sure you don’t lose really good talent because you only focus your search from middle management up.
2. Assess potential not performance - it’s easy to make the mistake of assuming individuals who perform well in their current role will have the potential to progress through the organisation. To effectively identify your talent, assess key characteristics that research suggests predict potential.
3. Understand what talent looks like in your world - talent is context specific, whilst there are generic areas which help us to identify potential, this has to be put in the context of your own strategy and challenges.
4. Keep them engaged - once identified the next thing to focus on is keeping hold of your talent. Play to their strengths, ‘high potential’ individuals like to be constantly challenged with ‘real’ development opportunities that allow them to show others what they can do.
5. Coach them to deal with potential derailers - some of the characteristics which make your people talented, if overplayed, can become derailers. Help your talent to be more aware of these potential derailers. With greater understanding individuals can recognise and amend their behaviour.
So what are you doing to nurture talent and drive the future of your organisation?
Dan Redland
If you would like to discuss talent strategy and how Indigo Assessment can help, call 020 7924 8760 or email me at DanielR@indigoassessment.co.uk
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