What Should Your Talent Priorities Be?

This is a question confronted by many companies, both large and small. And as is the conditional nature of solutions to so many challenges, such is the case with this; the answer is: It depends…

If you’re involved in a start-up that needs to keep hiring costs down while attracting the best and brightest, what do you do?

If you’re in a business needing to build internal ‘capabilities’ to stay competitive, what do you do?

If you’re hiring in a mature company or one that has high turnover, what do you focus on?

The best answers to these questions are drawn from 3 disciplines: recruitment, talent development, and talent retention.

Let’s take the first question as an example. For a bootstrapping startup, recruiting from colleges is key (building a talent pipeline). Doing this successfully might mean spending more time branding your company as THE place for which to work. However, if the startup is too young to adequately attract talent from Tier 1 schools, then knowing how to identify and market to Tier 2 schools – that could provide equally as good of talent – is absolutely essential.

In the second question above, where a company needs certain capabilities built (e.g., data science, sales, software development, etc.), then the focus is on talent development.  This includes everything from basic tools training to leadership development for the high potential employees.

For a mature company – the IBMs of the world – the focus might need to be on all of the above, using multiple talent levers to build a sort of organizational ‘moat’ against competitors. This can even include defending against disruptive start-ups that might one-day threaten your market share AND your talent share.

We’ve worked really hard to provide services in the areas above, and know what it takes to brand your company in a certain way as to attract the best and brightest.

But ‘first things first’: Your priority in talent management is to prevent a single point of failure. To do this, be sure your core capabilities never reside in one or a few individuals. If that happens and that one person leaves (or a few), your business will be in jeopardy. Companies can’t take this risk.

So what do you do?  Here is a 2-step simple framework:

1. Hire and train more people to exemplify that ideal employee (recruiting).
2. Codify the knowledge that resides in the few individuals (talent development).

If 1 and 2 are hard to accomplish due to not knowing what the ideal employee profile is or what to codify, then have the boss ask the talent directly to hand over the secrets (with a bit of wisdom from Dr. Evil of Austin Powers fame)…

Dr. Evil: OK people, you have to tell me these things…throw me a freakin’ bone here. I’m the boss, need the info.