Making talent management software complete

Talent management software should look after all areas of your organisation, including recruitment, people development, success factors and succession planning.

Stephen King once wrote: “Talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing.”¹

This ‘process of honing’ should be a vital characteristic and aim of a talent management strategy, from initial recruitment through to retirement. And having a complete talent management software solution in place can help smooth out this process.

Talent managers and HR departments have access to a plethora of resources during the recruitment process in today’s business world. And with so many job platforms and resources available, shouldn’t finding and hiring the right person be simple?

The truth is that businesses are losing billions per year due to bad hires².

Hiring the wrong person for a role might seem like a waste of time and resources, but what is the actual cost to an organisation?

Research carried out by the Recruitment & Employment Confederation aims to help organisations calculate the cost of a bad hire³.

While the factors contributing to the cost of an employee may differ according to the organisation, there are six basic areas that end up costing a business when they hire the wrong person.

1. The employee’s salary
2. Wasted training
3. Recruiting and training the employee
4. Lost productivity of the employee
5. Lost productivity of the team
6. Staff turnover

Bill Richards, managing director of Indeed says: “Hiring is one of the most important aspects of business growth, but one of the most costly if done wrong. In today’s tight labour market there is a full-blown battle for talent, and employers need help navigating the terrain.”

And it’s not only the financial cost to a company that should be considered. A bad hire can also end up costing a company in terms of morale and employee engagement, or more specifically disengagement, as an unenthusiastic employee can drag down the energy and enthusiasm of other staff⁴.

Investing in talent

With so many costs associated with a wrong hire, it’s important that you take all the precautions possible to make the right hire and invest in talent for your organisation. Talent management is important in any organisation, but it’s not only about hiring the right people - it’s about managing, developing and retaining your talent too. Talent management can play a vital role in an organisation’s business strategy, which means that it is imperative that your organisation invests in talent.

Proper investment in talent can help an organisation attract highly skilled employees, as well as motivate existing employees to remain at the company⁵. And perhaps more importantly, investment in talent management will help ensure that an organisation will continuously have skilled employees on hand to fill critical roles.

Finding the talent

But finding the talent is easier said than done. In a connected world, it seems that online job portals and job boards might be the perfect solution to find skilled and experienced employees. While these offer a partial solution to the recruitment process, there are other recruitment avenues to explore.

A problem with relying on job boards during talent acquisition is that they often attract unqualified candidates, wasting applicants’ time, as well as that of the person who has to sift through all the applications. But using talent management software (if it’s complete) can help make a big difference and improve the process for all the people involved.

Talent management software

Integrated talent management software is a suite of applications targeted at helping HR professionals through the entire employee lifecycle⁶. This software automates selected processes of an employee’s work life, from initial application to retirement.

There are four key sections to talent management software:

1. Recruitment

When it comes to recruitment, the goal should be to hire the best people for the role. In order to do this successfully, the recruitment process should offer an outstanding impression of the organisation, while attracting the right people for the role, in terms of experience, qualifications and skills. But this positive impression should continue once a person has been brought into the fold of the company and continues their journey within the organisation.

2. People development

If you want to retain your staff, an organisation needs to invest in developing its employees, whether that is through in-house training, upskilling and compliance training, or career development. Retaining quality and skilled employees includes offering them the chance to grow and thrive within the organisation, rather than them seeking those opportunities elsewhere.

3. Performance Management

Employee performance is a key measure in any organisation. But do your employees know that they are performing well?

Employees should have clearly defined goals to work towards. Not only does this help guide their performance, but it acts as motivation as they strive to meet their goals. No matter how regularly you do them, performance appraisals offer managers the opportunity to give their staff feedback on their performance, and employees should have the chance to ask questions. It’s also a great time to set future goals.

4. Succession planning

It’s important to have succession plans in place for the sudden replacement of key positions within your organisation. There are many reasons that a succession plan may be required, in the most dramatic instance, it would be the sudden death of a high-ranking employee, but in other cases, it could simply be that a person is retiring or leaving the company. No matter the reason, it’s important that a well thought-out and prepared succession plan is ready to ensure that the organisation keeps running at top performance.

Tech company IBM is a great example of a well-conceived succession plan⁷. Ahead of the retirement of former CEO Samuel J. Palmisano the company announced that then SVP Virginia Rometty would replace Palmisano when the time came, making her the company’s first woman to hold the position. With this plan in place, the company ensured that when it came time for Palmisano to retire, the transition would be smooth.

For most organisations, it’s standard practice to have a CEO succession plan in place. But this shouldn’t be reserved for the top echelons of your organisation. Succession planning should be best practice throughout your organisation to ensure smooth leadership and employee transitions at every level of the business.

With the right talent management software in place, you can ensure that your organisation has effective leadership teams in place to make the transition of leadership as smooth as possible without impacting workforce performance. And having a well-developed talent management strategy and supporting talent management software in place will allow your organisation to train up your employees to fill these critical roles, providing you with an internal pool of qualified and talented successors.