COMMENT Does this sound familiar? Talented individuals leave for opportunities elsewhere; your teams say they were unaware of great internal opportunities; and leaders and recruitment teams struggle to find internal candidates quickly so instead look outside the organisation.
Accessing, assessing and uncovering talent already existing in our business, ready for the right opportunity, at the right time, is the ultimate goal of any HR team.
Clearly, there are positive cost implications for the bottom line, but more importantly it engenders commitment from employees, who feel seen, recognised and championed. It gives them evidence that the business wants to not only nurture the talent they are currently demonstrating, but actually identify and build new skills that can be deployed in areas that they hadn’t previously considered.
Now, perhaps more than ever, we want to support and develop talent through the organisation rather than recruiting from the external market. But how?
Avoid assumptions and identify skills
Avoid making assumptions about employees based on their current role or roles they have undertaken within your organisation. We need to understand someone’s full potential and career aspirations, so we can map these to potential roles and the skill sets required in all areas across a business.
Identify the future skills likely to be needed in the organisation in order to develop and match these to people from your existing talent pool. To do this effectively, data and insight are essential. They allow businesses to understand where they are today and plan for where they need to be. Harnessing and understanding this data can be a challenge, but the analytics it provides is fundamental to effective talent management.
Transparency is key
We need to make it easy for people to see what opportunities there are across an organisation and provide transparency regarding how career progression happens where they work. In addition to many changes affecting the workplace, we are transitioning away from the concept of traditional career ladders, which see people move up vertically within business areas, so the partnerships on the ground between individuals and their managers are a key component for uncovering your existing talent.
Changing the focus of management
More businesses are starting to focus manager development on how they coach their teams for career growth, instead of mentoring for a specific technical skill set or pathway.
The key to this collaboration between managers and employees includes identifying experiences that can allow people to develop or learn new skills in a supportive and safe environment. They need chances to be championed for these opportunities so that their full potential can be assessed. This is even more important as organisations become flatter, meaning each promotion requires a larger step-up in responsibility and the expertise required.
Training plays a large role in the uncovering of talent and has become more agile and responsive, allowing employees to identify the best training tools and programmes for them, and is used by organisations to facilitate and encourage a growth mindset.
Helping an employee to understand where their strengths lie will also help them to identify roles that are aligned to these, in which they will excel and thrive. The property industry has seen the skill set that it needs expand rapidly in the past decade to encompass growing trends, particularly with regard to sustainability and technology, and this is requiring many organisations to reskill and/or upskill their employees, at an ever greater speed.
To uncover existing talent, we need the data, insight and understanding of our employees’ career aspirations and potential, along with a clear understanding of business needs and growth to match these. Underpinning this, to be truly successful, we need to develop a working culture that supports, drives and rewards internal mobility and progression.
Jennifer Howells is head of talent management at JLL
