RH En Anglais - Talent Management

THE BENEFITS & DRAWBACKS OF A TALENT MANAGEMENT APPROACH

Senge (1990) defined the learning organisations as ‘a place where people continually expand their capacity to create the result they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free and where people are continually learning how to learn together.’

As part of the performance management cycle, the main objective of a learning and development strategy within a company is to build a motivated, engaged and high-performing workforce that responds rapidly to constant change. Those methods are usually implemented in function of three main factors: the size of the company, the financial resources held by the company and the firm’s policy regarding training and learning.

There are four steps to the learning and development scheme: needs recognition, training scheme development, implementation of learning and development scheme, and results evaluation. Those learning and development schemes can be implemented through several methods such as external training, on-the-job learning, coaching, mentoring, job shadowing or classroom-based training.

Although these methods provide an objective idea of the employees’ efficiency, this performance is often only measured in economic terms but does not reflect their intrinsic abilities. Plus, the process of managerial learning can be associated with ‘identity regulation’ in some firms where employees have to fit in the mould and lose their individual character traits (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002). That is why a company can choose to resort to a talent management programme.

When using a talent management strategy, some key points are crucial: first, employees have to be made adjustable by training them to work together as multidisciplinary and multicultural teams. This indeed implies that the company is able to anticipate the future environment it will have to cope with. The second point consists in using analytic data to have a better comprehension of the human capital on the firm and thus choose the right people with the right skills for the right job. Finally, it is fundamental to nourish the talents held in the company from within the organization.

The main advantage of a talent management scheme is that the abilities and skills are kept within the company. We could think of it as a virtuous circle: employees gain or develop skills; they are more motivated because they feel that the company put trust and effort in them, thus working harder and being more productive. Also, it consists of a whole process of choosing, developing, motivating and retaining these people in a contemporary environment, thus reflecting a long term vision of the work force and more accurate measurement of the performance and the potential held by the company.

On the other hand, this kind of programme is costly and asks for a lot of resources, being hardly achievable for small companies. Also, some argue that such process only focusses on a small percentage of employees in the company, thus neglecting the majority of them.

TALENT MANAGEMENT AS A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO EMPLOYEE RESOURCING

In an increasingly complex and competitive economic environment, business’ success depends primarily on the quality of their employees and both the strategic and the organizational factors are at stake. At the strategic level, training employees is considered as an investment as the company is expecting a ‘return on investment’. At an organizational level, the firm has to identify its existing skills in order to implement a coherent training policy and make sure it offers an individualized employee management.

But the quality of the work force primarily depends on employee resourcing, which can be defined ad ‘that part of personnel and development which focuses on the recruitment and release of individuals from organisations, as well as the management of their performance and potential while employed by the organisation’ (Pilbeam and Corbridge, 2002).

Attracting the ‘high potential’ from outside would thus be the first step to a successful employee resourcing. In order to do so, companies have to ‘sell themselves’ on the job market. Nowadays, the marketing approach is very popular as it enables organizations to develop their capacity to attract and appeal to potential candidates and act in favour of the motivation and retention of the workforce. By adopting these practices, organizations are opting for strategies that could help them stand out in the context of changes in the labour market, in particular by promoting the development of a ‘brand-employer’ image. This approach aims at the development of the human resources within a company throughout the methods, tools and mind sets of marketing. It considers human resources as a strategic stake that allows the organization to attract the best talent by distinguishing itself from other job offers, thus retaining those employees with the implementation of strategies that consider their needs and adapt where possible. Employee resourcing therefore involves ‘the range of methods and approaches used by employers in resourcing their organisations in such a way as to enable them to meet their key goals’ (Taylor, 1998)

The second step of the employee resourcing process is to gain commitment from the workforce. According to Woodruffe, in order to retain your employees, you have to ‘implement the strategy of gaining commitment by showing commitment’ (1999:141-149). In other words, the organization has to show commitment to its employees throughout coherence within the enterprise in valuing people.

Some authors define the ‘ability to attract and retain the best people’ as a ‘key source of competitive advantage’ (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 1995). For a resource to qualify as a source of sustained competitive advantage, ‘the resource must add value to the firm, it must be rare, inimitable and non-substitutable’ (Barney, 1991). In other words, the success of a firm does not only depend on the financial resource but on the commitment, attitudes, productivity and ability of its employees to work together towards a same goal. Ulrich (1991 cited in Woodruffe 1999) suggests that employee attachment to the company is high where there is a shared mind set between employees and management which results in shared decision-making processes used to reach organisational goals.

EMPLOYEE RELATIONS: CONSULTING EMPLOYEES ABOUT THE OPERATION OF TALENT MANAGEMENT

According to Gennard and Judge (2010:152), employment relations must take into account ‘the economic and corporate environment

...