What is Talent Lifecycle management?
Old models of talent management typically functioned as a series of individual departments handling various stages of an employee’s journey throughout their career. Recruiters would oversee acquisition and onboarding while employee development would handle training and assessment, etc.
Although this allowed for a cleaner delegation of these responsibilities, it created a fragmented experience for employees which in turn led to poor employee satisfaction.
Talent lifecycle management offers a holistic perspective on these traditionally disparate elements and gives you a clear picture of the skills you have available today and those you’ll need to meet the future needs of your business and customers.
The Talent Lifecycle Model
Skills audit
The starting point for effective talent management is a skills audit that provides a data-led understanding of the talent in your organization and the relative proficiency that individual employees possess in those skills.
It is vital that any skills recorded during your audit are assessed under a set of universal criteria, rather than self-reported. Otherwise, your data comes at the mercy of individual employee biases and their own ability to objectively assess their competency.
Once your skills audit is underway, start identifying the skills your organization needs currently and is likely to need in the future. Focus on what will have the greatest impact in filling existing gaps, meeting your market’s needs, or leveraging technologies that are core to your business or industry.
The combination of these two data sets will lay the foundation for future talent development programs and recruitment campaigns.
Collaborative management
Speaking of data, the findings of your audit as well as insights into skilling priorities should be centralized in one place with ready access for all relevant departments.
Anyone contributing to talent management, from people experience teams to recruiters, should share a synchronized view of the skills in your organization. Allowing all of these departments to have direct shared access to your skills data will also remove the risk of an information bottleneck forming and dampening their collective efficiency.
Skills maps
Establishing this platform will allow a new picture of your talent to emerge. You’ll begin to see, in one place, the trajectory of your employee’s growth including where they’ve come from as well as where they might be best placed to create value in the future.
Why is Talent Lifecycle Management important?
Securing top talent
Developing an informed view of the skills in your organization means you can recruit according to proven requirements and with an objective measurement of a candidate’s suitability. You will simultaneously increase the efficiency of your recruitment efforts and circumvent many traditional methods prone to unconscious biases, thereby improving your DE&I (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) performance.
From a purely utilitarian point of view, that last benefit offers two significant advantages: An uptick in financial performance and greater allure to candidates aged 26-40.
Employee engagement
A comprehensive skills database, as well as ready investment into employee development, demonstrates to your talent that you recognize their value and want to invest in them further.
Research shows that employee retention can increase anywhere from 30-50% at companies that maintain training and skilling programs.
Your database can also be used to construct clear and visible roadmaps for career advancement which your people can use as a reference for their professional ambitions. Informed internal mobility is preferable to additional recruitment for both fiscal and cultural reasons and creating a framework that promotes it will foster increased loyalty in your organization.
Specific growth metrics
Growth speaks to more than your bottom line; it includes any positive momentum toward a major business goal. Creating a proactive and holistic appraisal of your talent allows you to correlate the adoption of specific skills and recruitment modalities with pre-established performance targets.
Stages of the talent management lifecycle
Skills-based recruitment
An established skills database shared across all your talent management teams creates a recruitment feedback loop. Initially, it allows you to target the people you need with greater accuracy, but it can also be used to elevate your reputation among would-be candidates.
Amazon’s 2021 Gallup survey revealed that among workers aged 18-24, learning new skills ranked only behind health insurance and disability benefits when considering the benefits of a new role.
Onboarding
Once you have secured new talent, your onboarding process should include opportunities to develop strong relationships between the new hires and their team. This is a chance to show off your growth-oriented culture, gain further insight into their needs and ambitions and integrate them into your community.
Training, development & mentorship
Start by giving new hires an introduction to your training/skilling programs, a glimpse of how you structure career roadmaps and ensure they have a firm understanding of how the two interact. Once you understand their desired long-term trajectory, you can start assessing their current skills level and using that data to bolster your existing skills matrix.
Retention & performance coaching
To retain your top talent, you’ll need to identify them using ongoing assessment and analysis – supported by your skills matrix and guided by their individual KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). If an individual isn’t measuring up, consider touching base with them to find out if their morale is low or if they are struggling due to a skills gap.
It is much more efficient to leverage your existing training tools and coach someone up to standards than it is to replace them, you’ll also earn their trust and loyalty which will pay dividends for you later.
Succession
Leading companies plan for tomorrow’s talent today, effective succession is about minimizing the loss of expertise in your organization when senior team members leave. Proactively address this issue by incentivizing mentorship and peer-to-peer training among your teams.
Alongside safeguarding knowledge for the future, this will also help tighten relationships and passively foster power skills (or soft skills) as your people interact with and learn from each other. You can lay the groundwork for these interactions by offering leadership and communications skills training to your senior staff.
A smooth exit
The goal of your talent management team when an employee inevitably moves on, whether through retirement, attrition, or termination, is to make the process as smooth and amicable as possible. If that individual continues their career elsewhere, their exit experience will be an outward reflection on your organization.
Use this opportunity to conduct an exit interview and, if an employee is choosing to leave, find out what they’re seeking and use those insights to inform people experience strategy. Provide fair severance packages and offer generous referrals to ensure that their final experience of your business is a positive one, leaving them more likely to recommend you to their associates.
Talentwize’s Talent Lifecycle management offering
Know your people
Our holistic framework for talent management and development includes dynamic reporting on your employee’s existing skills gaps and personalized onboarding and training schemes to close them. Using our skills matrix, we create personalized development pathways for technical and power skills to empower your people to progress.
Grow your people
Ongoing reporting helps you to identify your business’ competency needs and we track their improvement via our skilling initiatives. Our intuitive dashboards also provide direct insight into their impact on employee performance while bite-sized learning content helps your people to solve urgent individual challenges quickly.
Retain your people
Our career pathing tools offer an intuitive view of job progression paths to allow you and your employees to map future trajectories of competence. Tenure is weighed against performance to identify top talent and promotional readiness while those at risk of stagnation are highlighted for additional attention and opportunities. Your people also receive notifications to inform them of open roles aligned with their professional ambitions.
If you are searching for an all-in-one Talent Lifecycle management solution, Talentwize has you covered. Contact us today for a free demonstration of our offering and further insights into how we can optimize your organization’s talent.
