Talent Management

Q.1 Explain the need for Talent management. What are the consequences of
failure in Managing Talent?
Answer. organization requires talented people and also a proper process to manage
them for various reasons. They include:
A. The war for talent: - forty percent of corporate officers said company growth
was limited because they dont have the right talent. Competition is keen for
skilled employees at all levels hiring for fit.
B. Demographics: - It relates to a particulars population or a group within it.
Demographics are driving the competition for talent management and will
have greater impact in the near future.
C. Cost of turnover: - It is extremely expensive to replace valued talent.
According to research reports, estimate of turnover costs ranges from 75% to
1.5% of an employees annual salary and benefits.
D. Changing expectation of employees: -Unlike the generation of employees
have a different set of expectation from their employers generation x and y
and many baby boomers are often driven by a set of work values such as job
enrichment, continuous learning and development, challenge, autonomy, work
life balance and meaningful work that add value to their career.
E. Push for productivity: -There is a considerable push for productivity and
performance improvement in most organization today. As a result of
downsizing, reduced budgets, and technology, organizations have higher
expectation for individual and team performance which is possible only
through strategic talent management.

Consequences of failures in managing talent

Organizations have to face the following problems, if they fail to manage talent.
Loss of key leaders: the result of failure in managing talent can lead to loss of
key employees and sometimes not finding even an approximate.
The repeated turnover of key employees from an organization will affect the
very work culture within the organization.
Poor performance of employees can affect the targets and productivity of an
organisation.
Financial crisis due loss in productivity.
High turnover cost or replacement cost.

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Q.2 What are the building blocks of effective talent management system?
Explain any one.
Answer. Following are the building of talent management which we are going to
discuss:
a.
b.
c.
d.

Competencies that get result

performance management
evaluating employees potential
recruiting super keepers.

Performance management:
Performance management is the process to measure performance of an employee
in a work place climate designed to courage greater productivity.
Thus performance management can be defined as a continuous process of

Identifying performance of individual and team

Measuring performance of individual and teams
Developing performance of individuals and teams and
Aligning performance with the strategic goals of the organization

The constituents include:

Planning work and setting expectations

Continually monitoring performance and
Developing the capacity to perform
Periodically rating performance and
Rewarding good performance

Planning in an effective organization work is planned out in advance. Planning refers

to setting performance expectation and goals for groups and individuals to channel
their efforts towards achieving organizational objectives. Getting employees involved
in the planning process will help them understand the goals of the organization what
needs to be done why it needs to be done and how well it should be done.
The regulatory requirements for planning employees performance include
establishing the elements and standards of their performance appraisal plans.
Performance appraisal used to measure the relatives value of an employee through
the process of obtaining evaluating and recording information about that employee.
Monitoring: monitoring means consistently measuring performance and providing
ongoing feedback to employees and work groups on their progress towards reaching
their goals.
Developing: performance management process provides an excellent opportunity to
identify developmental needs. Developing in the instance means increasing the
capacity to perform through training.

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Rating: within the contest of formal performance appraisal requirements rating
means evaluating employees or groups performance against the elements and
standards in an employees performance plan and assigning and assignments a
summary and standards summary rating of records

Q.3 Define talent planning. What are objectives and steps of Talent Planning?
Answer. Definition of talent planning
Organisations are finding it difficult to get, expand, and maintain skilled employees
because of increasing need for talent, aging labour force, and various globalisation
challenges. In this situation, talent planning1 plays a very important role. It helps us
to add real-time, enterprise-wide clarity to examine the workforce and then place
talent where the impact is more visible and effective.
Target planning helps an organisation to predict its upcoming workforce demand and
then estimate the numbers, nature, and sources of potential employees.
The effective talent planning includes:
Understanding the requirements of the organisation.
Knowing the right people whom we are looking for.
Ensuring that the right person is doing the right activity
Objectives of talent planning
The main purpose of talent planning is to establish defined competencies and sets
criteria to measure its talent & skills. Other objectives include attracting and
recognising key people, providing the resourceful employees as per the requirement
and developing of best practices in recruiting and resourcing.
It is evident by recent investigations that worlds top class organisations adopt longterm strategic talent planning to capitalise on their recruitment and retention
approaches.
The major objectives of strategic talent planning include:

determining workforce gaps in order to meet business requirements.

recognising successful performers.
identifying new and emerging job roles.
planning alternative workforce tactics.
creating procedures for knowledge transfer.
developing faster career paths for very high potentials
creating capacity to implement strategies.
knowing the needs of the organisation.

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accomplishing organisation excellence.

developing keepers, super-keepers, and solid citizens.
distributing training and development resources.
optimising investment in employees.
ensuring leadership.

Steps of talent planning

The five key steps in strategic talent planning2 include:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Planning workforce
Imaging and branding.
Sourcing methods.
Screening and assessing candidates.
Marketing and communicating.

1. Planning workforce: It involves clear understanding of the organizations

business objectives and the competitive environment that particular organization
works in. This process is a mixture of understanding and predicating demand,
simultaneously being knowledgeable and conscious about talent supply situation
from the existing sources. This step also involves listing the jobs expected in the
annual budgeting process and factoring in revenue. It is developing and most
dynamic process, and is one of the most critical stages of any strategic process.
2.Image and brand: It is a very difficult job to make people aware of the
organizational image and brand. It involves constant interaction and also a plan to
create general awareness via advertisements to let people know that it is a best
place to work. The organizations must be able to answer questions like, what makes
it different or unique? or Why would people like to come and work for them? it is
also necessary for the organizations to ensure their advertisements, web presence,
and overall corporate promotions to support this image.
3. Sourcing methods: This includes developing a versatile sourcing tactic. It is
essential to think about the candidates who are very active and responsive to the
organizations brand and image building messages. At the same time, it is also
necessary to improve the skills to tap inactive candidates.
Many sourcing methods like referrals from existing employees, web based search,
search through companys website are adopted to interact with potential candidates
who are not designated but may be given designation some time later.
4. Screening and assessing candidates: This step talks about the heavy
investment on educating managers in behavioral interviews and the recruiters who
are considered to be the main screeners. It also tells about the role of recruiters in

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screening and assessing the candidates. Automate screening lessens the volume of
candidates and really increases candidates satisfaction.
5.Market and communication: Organizations website acts as a precious tool in
helping candidates to know about their status and also to get feedback and
information. It is an important to create systems to constantly interact with
candidates personally and also send newsletters and e-mails. CRM (candidate
relationship management) systems provide information to candidates about the
existing openings and also let them know about their status. it is necessary to ensure
the systems selected fit the strategy and make economic sense.

Q.4 What is meant by talent acquisition? Explain some of the talent acquisition
strategies.
Answer. Talent acquisition
Talent acquisition is an individual process that comprise of all the sub processes
involved in recognizing attracting and finally employing highly talented and skilled
people who are more production for the company. When used in the context of the
recruiting and hr profession talent acquisition usually refers to the talent acquisition
department or team within the company.

Talent acquisition strategies

Given below are some of the requirements for staffing, recruiting, talent management
and as human resources professionals:

To identify and set success indicators for high quality performers: There
is a necessity for establishing success indicators for each position recruited
along with high quality performers themselves. For example, number of sales
a performer has made in a month, number of reports written resulting in
consulting tasks, amount of income a performers group has produced, and so
on. There are no many standards to go by, but still it is evident about who the
major contributor in an organization is and what is the job of the organization
and the higher authorities of that organization and here, job of the HR
professional is to measure those contributions.
Work with managers to develop high performers profiles in each group:
The commonalities and the things recognized during the screening process
are identified which predict success. For example, competencies, activities
those high performers do, working techniques or processes. There are many
organizations that assist in determining crucial success factors and also help
in developing tests to discover them in candidates.

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Identify potential high performers and their working strategy: This step
helps to aim at advertising towards high performers and make a decision on
the events that are worth attending and help to get the kind of people that an
organization is looking for. This step requires attention on competitive
intelligence(CI). Competitive intelligence is a process of identifying, collecting,
evaluating, and distributing intelligence about the products, competitors,
customers, and other features of the environment. This is required to help
executives and managers in strategic decision making for an organization. CI
is very familiar in most of the organizations; and hence, many companies use
CI professionals to search for information about production competency and
equipment installation. The same approach is applicable to recruiting. The
details about the location of good and talented people are collected from
competitors, sellers, and suppliers. Employee referral program can be used
for the same purpose.
Gather and capture important information about candidates: The
information gathered is precious and it must be shared with other recruiters by
storing it in some database. The place where such kind of information is
stored is referred to as Blog. A Blog is a personal online magazine or a journal
that is often updated and planned for public use. Blog helps both internal and
external community of recruiters to exchange information gathered. When
blogs are properly used then lots of working hours and bunches of money is
saved.
Identify the significance of developing people: The recruiting function has
to be more like a talent agency which has not happened in the past. Talent
agencies help in identifying talent and also developing it for planned
purposes.

Q.5 Why Employee engagement is important? What are the factors of

Employee engagement? Describe some of the best practices in Talent
engagement.
Answer. Importance of employee engagement
An organizations ability to achieve increased productivity and advanced business
results is strongly associated with its skill to handle employees engagement.
The performance of engaged employees is usually better and are hence more
encouraged. There is a major connection between employees engagement and
productivity.
Factors of engagement

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The employees engagement and retention influenced by many organization factors
which include.

A culture of respect where excellent work is appreciated

Accessibility of positive feedback and mentoring

Opportunity for important and professional development

Clear job expectations

High level of motivations

Adequate tools to achieve work responsibility

Availability of efficient leadership

Basic practices of talent management

The best practices adopted by organization across the world have been outlined by
the research reports. They are:
1. An effective performance management system is the management system is
the comer stone of engagement from goal setting to reward, recognition and
incentive programs.
2. 75% of high performing companies hold managers accountable for engaging
their employees. This is in comparison to 35% across the entire study group
that holds managers accountable.
3. High performing companies engage employees by cutting across functional
silos to create a sense of connectedness through communities of practices
cross functional team and by creating common work areas.
4. Top performing companies rank cross functional teams and councils as the
most effective vehicle to help employees understand how their as well as
team and business unit efforts contribute to corporate performance.

Q.6 Describe some of the major challenges in Talent Management.

Answer. Talent management challenges
1. Develop a value proposition that appeals to all the generations of
employees: -organizations are struggling to create a positive employees
experience that valued by all employees because of the presence of different

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generation within todays workplace. Young employees of age 22 may have a
colleague of age 55.
2. Developing a robust leadership pipeline: -Corporations in general face the
potential threat of not possessing a robust talent pool from which future leaders
can be selected. This problem arises due to the fact that the number of people
with such talent is less.
3. Developing the abilities of employees to take up global leadership
positions: - Assessing expertise in specific functional or technical arenas is
relatively straightforward. Determining if individuals have people skills, leadership
abilities are global diversity sensibilities is difficult.
4. Key knowledge and relationships transfer: - The retirement of a significant
portion of the workforce challenges all companies. Organizations that depend on
inferred knowledge like those in customer relationships need to have effective
transfer of knowledge and relationships among employees.
5. Exodus of talent: - One of the greatest threats faced by organizations is the
exodus of mid-career talent. These are the people on whom the company has
pinned hope for future leadership and invested heavily in. therefore it is
necessary for organizations to develop talent management practices that help in
retaining such talent people.
6. Attract young and old: -The talent management practices should be such that it
attracts both young and old talent.
7. Strategy and talent pipelines being out of sync: - When the organization
strategy and the talent pipelines are out of sync, the organization end up
grooming lots of superbly qualified candidates for leadership in dead-end
specialties.