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INSIGHT
Robust
Talent Management
Katherine
Wiid argues that talent management is not simply about how
you bring people in to the business. It is also about how
they leave.
by Isabella Chan
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July 2010 |
HRM
: What would you say are two of the key elements of a robust talent
management selection and retention strategy?
Katherine : I would say that getting the acquisition
right and hiring good people that fit the business is essential.
The second element is to have some form of talent management programme
once the candidate is onboard. Coming back to the first point
regarding talent acquisition - the focus for me always has to
be on the selection aspect.
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HR
Matters Magazine
Issue 11 | July 2010
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Katherine Wiid is is the Director
of Recrion, which she founded in 2001, to focus on
providing career management, talent management, redundancy
support and recruitment services.
Katherine possesses more than 20 years experience
in recruitment and HR and has a track record of assisting
business teams to focus on ways to improve their people
management processes. Acting as a partner to her clients,
she has been involved in the strategic analysis, design
and delivery of people processes to aid business performance.
This has involved bringing together specialist teams
to deliver projects ranging from the introduction
and rollout of a centralised recruitment process for
an organisation resulting in cost savings of £1.2
million in one year as well as the development of
new competency frameworks and reduction of 30% in
staff turnover in a call centre within a six month
timeframe.
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What I am particularly interested in, is finding new ways of profiling
candidates as opposed to say, psychometric tests. With Language
and Behaviour (LAB) profiling for example, you can, as part of the
interview, ask questions to understand the candidate’s language
and behaviour, and what motivates them in the workplace. You can
tell more about them from profiling than from psychometric tests.
There is no doubt that there is a place for psychometric testing.
However, the thing that I would question is that no matter how hard
you encourage candidates to be themselves and “authentic”
when answering the questions, the results will often be skewed.
In any case, it’s also a very mechanical process with the
use of computers and paper and that whole atmosphere of being tested
as such. With language and behavioural profiling, it’s really
much more of a conversation. In essence, people don’t really
realise that they are being profiled and you get a truer picture
of what people are really about.
The beauty, you see, in LAB profiling is that once you understand
all the candidate’s motivations in the work context, you can
adapt your communication, management style and motivation strategy
to get the best out of them. Your employee benefits from understanding
that little bit more about themselves. Further, it leaves a good
feeling to know that their individual style and motivations are
being taken into consideration.
The whole process of talent management is really about getting your
talent to actively promote and participate in their personal development
and about having a career management programme in place. There are
many organisations that choose not to have these open dialogues
about an individual’s career potential as they fear their
people will leave.
It is often these same organisations that don’t handle exit
interviews well and miss out on the opportunity of finding out why
their talent has left and what they can do to retain those left
behind. In my experience, very few employees will actually open
up to the HR team on exit with enough honesty about their reasons
for leaving to make the process worthwhile.We carry out a lot of
exit interviews on behalf of our clients and it’s amazing
really.
As an impartial third party, we are able to probe for the underlying
reasons as to why they have moved on and unlike HR, can offer them
anonymity in exchange for their openness. We can take their feedback
and pass it to HR to act on and make changes that people within
the business will benefit from. This sends out a clear signal that
“we care about you and have had constructive feedback that
we are acting on”.
One of my clients is a call centre and was experiencing a high degree
of churn. The management wanted to find out why people were leaving.
Following the successful outcomes of our initial exit interviews,
we recommended that they make having an exit interview within 48
hours of resignation part of their HR policy and include it in the
employees’ contract of employment. By managing expectations
HR demonstrated that they cared.
The result? The churn rate reduced by 30 percent in a six month
period.
To summarise, talent management is not simply about how you bring
people in to the business but also how they leave. 
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