Managing company talent effectively with a strategic talent ...

by Will Corry on May 21, 2012 in Best advertising story, Lead story, View from the top

A big problem companies have with traditional personnel and training systems is that the information is so disparate in nature. While standard personnel folders carry all the basic information about an employee, the true evaluation reviews and related information tends to be held by the supervisor.

On top of this, training records of the employee sit with a third party, typically with a company training officer. As a result, identifying employees for the purpose of promotion or more training can turn out to be anecdotal at best, resulting in a mish-mash of good and bad candidates picked by a coffee table group of supervisors.

This sort of approach frequently results in a hit-and-miss group of candidates for improvement and succession.?
There is a bright side. A number of technology tools now exist that can leverage all the above information into a shared system. An employee?s training needs, performance results, and advancement opportunities can be merged into a valuable, aggregated portfolio. The results can be as much as a 15 percent increase in overall business revenue before taxes.

When the consolidation of disparate employee data occurs, management immediately has a full picture of the reviewed employee, including all of the available data on both training and performance progress, this results in choosing better employee candidates for recruiting, training and promotion based on statistical or quantified metrics versus person opinion guessing.

Some of the specific benefits from strategic talent management systems include:

? Progressive tracking of an employee?s entire training history. Instead of chasing down different training certificates that are either in the possession of the employee or the local training officer, the entire progress record can be found in one place and in electronic format for easy filing.

? A full portfolio snapshot of an employee. This combines practical performance with training. Again, performance evaluations as well as test scores when in hardcopy tend to be kept in different locations, and many times without good file-keeping. With an automated portfolio system, all the documents of an employee?s progress can be pulled up by a supervisor or personnel manager in one complete folder.

? A combined record of identified talents, allowing easier and quicker selection of qualified applicants. With an integrated system flagging employees for different skill-sets, a supervisor or personnel manager can run a simple query to see who already employed by a company can handle a new task or project. This avoids the lengthy process of having to hire outside for every new challenge that comes along.

? A history archive of relevant documentation on the employee. Talent management systems provide one of the best features a supervisor can ask for: combined documentation with the ability to see changes over time. This avoids the problem of making personnel decisions based on spotty file-keeping.

? Reporting on company-wide statistics. These can be assembled and reported for the purpose of proving equal opportunity employment in both hiring and promotion. By being able to run employee metrics in a combined manner with real-time data, a company can monitor its own organization-wide performance in hiring and promotion and spot equal opportunity problems long before an outside regulator does.

One of the most viable tools on the market right now for these purposes includes a talent management suite by?Halogen Software. This software package includes performance management metrics monitoring, 360 degree review tools, learning management tools, succession planning and other important features to give organization?s the ability to see through all the organizational fog as and pinpoint which employees have specific skill-sets, which ones are promotable, and which candidates may need further training and improvement.

Having this valuable, practical knowledge allows an organization to objectively manage staff, both in terms of full talent utilization as well as for succession planning. It also helps managers avoid anecdotal claims of favoritism and nepotism in a company.

Given the cost of recruitment and finding good talent, businesses today can?t afford not to consider better management of existing personnel and the great talent already in-house. Doing otherwise could be throwing away great opportunities that could help a company grow.

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Tags: company training officer, Halogen Software, management metrics monitoring, talent management plan, talent utilization, technology tools, training certificates, training history, training records Print article

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