9 Talent Management Questions to Test If You are On the Right Track

9 Talent Management Questions to Test If You are On the Right Track
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Talent Management Questions to Test If You are On the Right Track
If you truly want to attract, develop, engage, and retain a high performing workforce, you have to break through talent management barriers – outmoded ways of thinking about talent in old-fashioned and ineffective ways.

The Goal of Talent Management
Talent management is no longer about providing isolated and unconnected recruiting, training, employee relations, and retention programs.  We believe the goal of talent management is to create and sustain organizational excellence through people to consistently drive your business and people strategies forward.

9 Talent Management Questions to Test If You are On the Right Track
You will know you are on the right talent management track when you answer yes to all nine questions:

  1. Hiring Top Talent
    Do you consistently hire employees that help achieve your short- and long-term strategies?
  2. Retaining Top Talent
    Do you retain 75% or more of employees who are critical to your future success?
  3. Developing Top Talent
    Do employees have the necessary skills and knowledge to be successful in the short- and long-term?
  4. Assessing the Impact of Talent
    Does the quality of talent give your organization a competitive edge?
  5. Providing Necessary Resources
    Do employees have access to the resources required to do their job?
  6. Encouraging Discretionary Effort
    Do people make the extra effort in their jobs?
  7. Meeting Team Goals
    Do 75% or more of teams meet their performance goals?
  8. Having Proportionate Rewards and Consequences
    Do people understand the benefits of performing and the consequences of not meeting your stated goals?
  9. Being a Great Place to Work
    Do 75% or more of employees recommend your company as a great place to work?

While the above talent management questions touch upon the attraction, development, engagement, and retention of top talent, we believe that learning and development can be used to bring all of the people components together.

Use Learning and Development as the Link
Done right, learning and development can be the link between recruiting, engaging, retaining, and managing your workforce. These days, you can’t think of people functions in isolation.  Each must be working cohesively together to accomplish a predetermined people and business objective.

For example, people leaders need to think of learning as ongoing and as occurring in a wide variety of ways — from on-the-spot teachable moments to change initiatives that occur over long periods of time. Traditional one-time learning events add minimal value and, on average, only change the on-the-job behavior of 20% of attendees.  Not a great return on investment.

Truly effective learning must be relevant to the participants, their boss, and the company as a whole.  The more you can involve front-line managers and employees themselves to identify the on-the-job situations that matter most to their short- and long-term success, the more you can design learning solutions to help them to succeed in their role.

Use Training Measurement to Improve Adoption and Accountability
To manage and improve almost anything, you need to have a way to monitor progress — to know what is working and what is not so you can adjust accordingly.  For any training you design and deliver, ensure that you can answer three training measurement questions:

  • Adoption
    Are people using the new knowledge, skills, and processes?
  • Impact
    Are we making an impact?
  • Reinforcement
    Are managers involved, supportive, and reinforcing?

The Bottom Line
The above talent management questions can let you know if you are on the right track.  Using relevant learning combined with effective training measurement can boost the on-the-job performance of your people to help improve your ability to attract, develop, engage, and retain top talent.

To learn more about how to invest in talent management, download The Surprising Research-Backed Talent Management Recipe for Success

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