06. Talent Acquisition & Talent Management

 

Large IT organizations every year rent tens of thousands of employees through multiple sourcing channels for their growth and talent replenishment. Assuming that for each hire at least ten potential profiles are scrutinized and evaluated, the Talent Acquisition (TA) personnel ends up processing half a million-candidate profiles having multiple technical and domain skills. The scale and tight timelines of operations lead to possibility of suboptimal talent selection due to misinterpretation or inadequate technical evaluation of candidate profiles.

 

Many business executives have rightly said that talent is more critical factor in both domestic and global front. Talent acquisition is the long-term strategic approach to Recruitment. It includes identifying, attracting, developing, engaging & retaining qualified workforce. Talent acquisition involves all the sub processes around finding, attracting and engaging highly talented individuals into your organization. Today more organizations have identified Talent acquisition as a strategy to align with organizational goal. The need for qualitative recruitment has become the essence of Talent management strategy. As per the survey conducted by Deloitte Consulting in the year 2007, the biggest challenge for organization was hiring the right people to meet their strategy objective and retaining them. Acquiring the right talent is always difficult. Talent should match job requirement and must be possible to achieve strategic goal of organization. Today world job market is facing problem of “Talent Shortage” [i.e., talent not matching job’s skill set and requirement]. No proper match between demand and supply of right talent. Today’s corporate requires a person with multitasking skill. Organizations have developed more specific and refined skill set for different positions.

 

KNOWLEDGE BASED TALENT ACQUISITION

The central theme of knowledge management is to leverage and reuse the organisation’s intellectual capital to maximum effect. Similarly, the main theme of organisational talent acquisition is to get the right number of people with the right set of skills at the right time in the right place to do the jobs. Organisations can do this by aligning the knowledge management strategy with its employee recruitment and of The Business Review (ISSN: 1996-3637), Vol: 1, No: 2 selection process. In a nutshell, this process can be easily described by the following simple equation:

Organizational Practice of Knowledge Management

Employee Hiring (Recruitment & Selection)

Knowledge Based Strategic Talent Acquisition Technique

 

 

=

 

Figure 1: The Equation of Knowledge based Talent Acquisition Technique Generation

KNOWLEDGE BASED TALENT ACQUISITION STRATEGIES

Talent acquisition had traditionally matched ‘people-skills’ to specific job requirement. By concentrating on the previously discussed paradigm shifts, organizations today are facing an increased demand to acquire knowledgeable and competent people, who match the wider context of working within the organization. Terms like ‘person-job fit’ are transforming into ‘person-organization fit’. Even though high-performance organizations are emphasizing more value on their ‘recruitment and selection’ processes, majority of the small and medium enterprises (SME) as well as other local conglomerates (large or small) attach low criticality in developing a strategic knowledge-based talent acquisition process. (Haas 2008), (Hubbard 2007), (HR Practices Survey Bangladesh 2007). The need of strategically designed talent acquisition format has more keenly felt than ever before. Following are the articulation of crucial ideas and advice from the industry experts, researchers, policy shapers about the trends in, and challenges to conducting knowledge-based talent acquisition strategies in the climate of the recent competitive global business environment.

 

Talent Management

Talent management is the pool of activities which are concerning to attracting, selecting, developing and retaining the best employees in the strategic roles (Scullion & Collings, 2011). They further point out that talent management recognizes people who excel at particular activities and performance upon whom support is offered to enable them to 'push the envelope' while capturing and sharing what they do differently so as colleagues can emulate them (Scullion & Collings, 2011).

 

Organization should have ability and capacity to recognize the people and the capability that may create value and deliver the competitive advantage for the organization; in addition, talent management also aims at developing and deploying the right people at the right job on the right time and providing them the right environment to show off their abilities in a best possible way for the organizations (Uren & Jackson, 2012)

 

Talent management has become a challenge to all the organizations in a global context irrespective of the country (Gardner, 2002). Furthermore, the anxiety for the scarcity of the talent is a universal issue. All organizations around the globe are competing for the same talent. Global integration trend shows the standardization in talent recruitment, management and development to make sure their competitive advantage in the market. Therefore, organizations are adopting best global and local talent management practices (Stahl et al., 2007) There are several benefits of talent management such as employee engagement, retention of employee, increased productivity, culture of excellence and much more (Ballesteros & Inmaculada, 2010).

 

 

 

Critical factors of TM that must be considered

 Coleman (2008) suggested certain factors which can help the successful implementation of talent management strategy. The talent management strategy should be integrated and aligned with organizational strategy and it is also of vital importance to articulate the talent management strategy. Talent management is linked to culture and people of the organization. People and culture are the heart of the organization for creating the successful talent management strategy. The biggest challenges for the managers to manage talent is not the technical one, it’s the cultural one.

Overcoming the cultural hurdles is a very difficult task especially when holding knowledge is considered more important than sharing it with others (Cole-Gomulka, 2007). The reason of the sentiment is that the nature of the employees is competitive and they are more tending towards holding the knowledge than comparing because sometimes they don’t want others to have the same competencies as they are having. Another important issue about the talent management is the compensation, if the right incentive is given to the people who share talent than the sharing of knowledge become effective (The Banker, 2004). The compensation and reward system must support the sharing of knowledge and talent. It is important to reward those employees who contribute more in knowledge sharing in the organizations and on the same time it should be made sure that employees understand the importance of talent management (Cole-Gomolski, 2006).

 

 

 

References

 

Ballesteros, S. R., & Inmaculada, D. F. (2010). Talents the key for successful organization. Unpublished thesis, Linnaeus School of Business &Economics, Linnaeus University.

Coleman, D. (2008). Learning to manage knowledge. Computer Reseller News, 775, 103-04. Davis, T., Maggie, C., & Neil, F. (2007). Talent assessment, a new strategy for talent management. Gower, United States

Cole, G. A. (2007). Management Theory and Practice, 6th Edition, Thomson Learning, London. Cole-Gomolski, B. (2006). Chase uses new apps to ID best customers. Computerworld, 31(35), 49- 50. Coleman, D

Gardner, T. M. (2002). In the trenches at the talent wars: competitive interaction for scarce human resources. Human Resources Management, Wiley periodicals, 41, 225-237

Haas, M. (2008) ‘Know Better’, HR Monthly, (2): 40-43.

HR Practices Survey Bangladesh 2006-2007 (2007) Human Capital Ernst & Young Private Limited India and Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Bangladesh.

Hubbard, G. (2007) ‘Wheel of fortune’, HR Monthly, (7): 30-32.

Scullion, H. & Collings, D. G. (Eds) (2011). Global talent management routledges. New York & London.

Stahl, G. K., Björkman, I., Farndale, E., Morris, S. S., Paauwe, J., & Stiles, P. (2007). Global talent management: How leading multinationals build and sustain their talent pipeline. INSEAD Faculty and Research, Working Papers, 2007/24/OB.

Uren, L., & Jakson, R. (2012). What talent wants: The journal to talent segmentation, Jackson Samuel, www.jacksonsamuel.com.