In order for organizations to succeed in this ultra-competitive and increasingly intricate global economy, they should have the best talent available to them. This goes with the obvious need to hire, nurture and retain talented individuals in the greater interest of the organization. However, not many companies are aware of the concept of managing talent and treating it as a fundamental resource in the expansion of the company.
Furthermore, few organizations, if any, have a surplus of talent. There is considerable room to be filled at the top and mid-level leadership, as well as the general workforce. In such a scenario, talent becomes an increasingly rare commodity that needs to be dealt with absolute care and pragmatic foresight.
In the wake of the current recessive environment, the battle of talent will be less heated than it was before. However, this would entail increased pressure on the talent that is tasked with running an organization. They would be required to do more with less. This is where the A-list players, or talented individuals, are so good at, they adapt. Consequently, there would be strategic emphasis on retaining such individuals and grooming their successors. Despite the acute need of talent, many organizations, like Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, are cutting their workforces to remain financially competitive. This is where talent management comes in in full force, to not allow the management to cut too deep so as to make the company disadvantaged on the talent front, once the economy recovers.
The concept of talent management is not a nascent affair. It has been around for the past five to six decades but then it was a peripheral affair that was relegated to the human resource department as a not so critical baggage. However, in recent times there has been an ascertained relationship between better talent and better company performance. In fact a 2007 study conducted by Hackett Group has found that companies that invest more in the management of their talent have earnings 15% higher than other organizations in the same bracket. This might not look so much but for a company that plays in the billions, it means an addition of hundreds of millions of dollars to the annual revenue.
Furthermore in the current, hyper-competitive environment, conducting business has become a dynamic and complex affair. The ability to hold competitive advantage over your peers has been made quite unsustainable in the long run due to the rapidly changing business landscape. Products, and related business models, have shorter life cycles and thus the demand for innovation is very high. Add to this mix the complexity of global expansion and you can gauge the importance of effective talent to the organization.
In conclusion, the efficacy and need of talent management has never been considered more of a fact than it is now. However, an organization should never rush to plug an apparent talent management void. Rather, it should be a product of careful planning and be tightly in sync with the business aspirations and strategies of the company in question so that it becomes ingrained in the corporate fabric of the company.