Improving Talent Management by learning from Marketing

We believe that HR teams can look at improving Talent Management in their organisations by borrowing five techniques from marketing.

Think of your employees as consumers of the career you offer – keeping them engaged will keep them loyal.  Aim to understand and meet their needs - just as your organisation attempts to meet the needs of your customers.

Your marketing colleagues don’t think of your customers as one homogenous group - and know that one-size does not fit all, so why is Talent Management often approached in this way?

Marketing teams gather data about consumer behaviour, they’ll segment the audience, develop an enticing proposition and they’ll target specific products and offers to defined customer groups, put in place retention programs and analyse data coming back to them.  How does this play out when we talk of talent as consumers?

1. Identify your ‘audiences’. Pinpoint who your talented employees are - and keep a record of their skills and competencies. Engage with them as early as possible in their careers. Aim to build your talent pool.
2. Uncover their needs. Find out what each individual wants, what drives them and how they think about their careers. Good talent management is about balancing what the organisation needs with what the individual has and what the individual wants.
3. Try to give them what they want. Different employees will be engaged and motivated by different things, depending on their expectations, working preferences, development needs and the relationship they want to have with you. So, your policies and benefits need to be flexible. But this doesn’t mean you’ll need an unmanageable number of engagement options. Like new car packages, they can be bundled for different talent groups.
4. If you lose them, win them back. If you can’t offer what your talent wants in the short- to medium-term, they’re probably going to leave. However, by joining another employer, they’ll inevitably gather new experience that could be valuable to your business in the future. So keep the door open for them to come back.
5. Make good use of analytics. With Talent Management, perhaps more so than any other aspect of HR, there is unexploited value in data. Talent systems can help you to understand people’s capabilities, how they’re performing, their potential and exactly what will engage and motivate them. They also enable you to create ‘role profiles’ for specific jobs and explore multiple career paths. By making these insights readily accessible, you can give line managers the tools to have better focused and more productive talent conversations.

Our event will explore this in more detail - and get in touch if you'd like to attend.

Read our full article which appeared on HR Magazine.