Talent management: putting examples into practice to attract and retain talent

In this article, we take a closer look at talent management, which has become much more than just an HR trend, but the focus of attention for all companies.

We'll look at what it is, why this talent management phenomenon is interesting for HR onboarding and how to put it into practice using HRIS. You can no longer ignore talent management in your HR policy! Find out more.

See all software Talent Management

What is talent management?

Talent management is a branch of Human Resources that aims to attract, develop and retain the high-potential profiles that will enable a company to significantly increase its competitive advantage.

Talents" are employees whose know-how (skills, expertise) and interpersonal skills (aptitudes) surpass the average of all employees.

Talent management is based on an initial planning stage aimed at defining the concept of talent and the KPIs.

The challenges of talent management

Attracting, developing and retaining talent is much more than just a challenge! It's a question of survival for companies in an ever-changing world of work.

Why is effective talent management a strategic issue?

The ability to attract the best professionals and the ability to retain them are essential to ensuring that your company is as competitive as possible, and there are a number of reasons for this:

• An ultra-competitive labour market: in the current context, there are many opportunities for talent. It's no longer just a question of recruiting efficient potential employees. To attract the best talent to your company, you need to sell them on a project, a vision and even a culture. If you don't offer a working environment that meets their aspirations, you run the risk of seeing the most interesting profiles go to the competition. 🏃

• The cost of staff turnover: every time an employee leaves, there's a double penalty! The team is affected by the loss of knowledge, and recruiting, training and integrating the new employee represents a significant investment in time and money.

• Changing expectations: today's employees are looking for more than just a salary! They want a meaningful job, flexibility, a better quality of life at work with a good personal and professional balance and prospects for career development. Ignoring these needs means losing the war for talent before it's even begun.

The risks of poor career management

Poorly managing the potential of new talent and the skills of existing in-house staff is a major risk for your company:

• talent drain: an employee who does not feel recognised within his company or who has no development objectives will want to change. They'll start looking elsewhere, and take their precious know-how with them.

• negative impact on the company's image: unhappy employees are employees who talk. A bad reputation, or a reputation as a company where you're just passing through, can quickly drive candidates away.

• Reduced motivation and productivity: if your employees are disengaged, their personal investment takes a hit. The result? More absenteeism, and less innovation for your company.

Why is this HR speciality so coveted?

The success of major companies in the new technologies sector has brought to light the fact that employees with exceptional skills and abilities can change the destiny of their company. By attracting, developing and retaining their high-potential employees, innovative companies are outpacing their competitors and creating barriers to entry for newcomers.

It is relatively easy to copy a technology even if a patent has been filed, just as it is easy to invest a little more than your competitor. On the other hand, you can't copy an exceptional team that innovates, federates and executes better than anyone else.

Talent management tools

To attract, identify, manage and retain their talent, companies can rely on a number of tools. AI, platforms, HR software... how do you find your way around?

What tools are needed for better talent management?

To effectively manage your resources and complexities, it's time to turn to specialist tools! Recruitment, training, engagement, HR data... Here are the essential solutions for optimising and anticipating each stage of an employee's career path.

ATS (Applicant Tracking System) for recruitment

These systems centralise applications and automate recruitment monitoring. They filter CVs according to defined skills, so you don't have to sort through 500 profiles by hand. 🥵 Implementing an ATS considerably reduces recruitment times and proves invaluable during your process of hiring new employees.

HRIS (HR Information System) for tracking resources

HRIS are a very practical way of centralising all your HR data, making it easier to monitor your employees' objectives and skills. Employment contracts, training, appraisals and career development all come together in a single tool for ultra-fluid process management.

LMS (Learning Management System) for training

Programmes dedicated to the management of continuous professional training and the development of team skills! These systems offer the e-learning pathways best suited to each individual and to your company's needs.

Engagement platforms

These allow you to measure employee fulfilment with feedback and surveys on well-being at work. These platforms encourage employee recognition and motivation, while reducing staff turnover. They also help to improve corporate culture.

AI and automation in talent management

To achieve your objectives more quickly, take advantage of the many benefits of automation and artificial intelligence:

• CV sorting and profile matching: in just a few seconds, hundreds of profiles are studied. AI can identify and spot the most relevant talent thanks to its specific algorithms, and help improve the candidate experience thanks to an accelerated recruitment process.

• HR chatbots: you don't always have the time to manage all the requests for information. Chatbots replace you and can answer questions from candidates and employees 24/7. Onboarding and integrating new employees is simplified because these bots provide all the key information about your company.

• Predictive analysis and human capital management: AI comes to your rescue to identify signals indicating a risk of departure. It also helps you to anticipate training and internal mobility needs. With AI, decisions are taken on the basis of reliable data rather than an intuitive point of view. Beware, however, that you may miss out on atypical profiles that could well match your needs but don't necessarily tick all the boxes expected by the algorithms.

The role of managers in talent management

It's undeniable that managers have an essential role to play in managing the skills of their teams. In the day-to-day working environment, managers are :

• real talent detectors: it is often under their very eyes that an employee will create, succeed and develop! Managers can more easily help to identify potential. They are also the ones who will be able to define training needs and pass them on to management. 📋

• key players in commitment: the manager's job is to motivate his team! By creating a working environment conducive to personal fulfilment, employee loyalty begins to develop. 💪

• vectors of the company's values: it's the managers who represent the corporate culture on a day-to-day basis, and who may or may not make people want to stay with a company. 🧲

• responsible for two-way communication: it is indeed the manager who finds himself at the heart of the internal organisation. They must act as the link between employees' expectations and the company's strategies. ↔️

To retain talent, management must be benevolent rather than controlling. The manager-coach, who supports and inspires, will have a greater impact on the plan to retain the best profiles than someone who imposes actions without involving the teams externally.

Impact of talent management on the employer brand

An effective talent management approach doesn't just benefit you internally! It also shapes your company's image and attractiveness on the job market.

Human resources management: the secret of an irresistible employer brand

Effective personnel management is synonymous with an attractive company. The best profiles are yours for the taking! Fulfilled employees will become natural ambassadors of your brand to their network. Conversely, a high staff turnover gives an unstable image and does little to attract job-seekers.

👉 To attract potential talent, make sure your employees are satisfied and avoid negative reviews on company rating platforms. A company with a positive perception generally receives more applications from qualified people in its field.

Concrete actions to boost your employer brand

To ensure a good image and attract the most coveted talent, we recommend implementing the following best practices:

• Highlight the company culture: through videos, employee testimonials, internal events documented on social networks.

• Highlight internal success stories: presenting possible career paths not only motivates internal teams, but also reassures future employees that they will be able to progress within your company.

• Communicate transparently: avoid empty slogans and clearly set out HR values and practices.

• Focus on quality of life at work: flexibility, work-life balance, recognition of efforts, etc.

• Present your CSR commitments: these days, a socially responsible company is much more attractive to talent.

Examples and best practice

It generally takes more than 10 years to build a talent management system that generates significant revenue. There are exceptions, such as Google, Facebook and Apple, which have succeeded in making their Human Capital the main driver of their hyper-growth in less than 10 years.

Meta (Facebook)

This company went from a student project to a global social network and then to an ultra-profitable mobile platform in record time. How did they do it? By working with only the most talented people.

Facebook is the first company to measure the value of each employee in dollars: an engineer is worth between 500,000 and 1 million dollars. When the value of an employee approaches its maximum, the company recruits and increases its productivity.

Whereas the integration of new arrivals lasts a day in traditional companies, Facebook's onboarding lasts 6 weeks, during which the newly recruited employee has access to all of Facebook's code and works on different projects.

At the end of the 6 weeks, they are asked which project they enjoyed the most. This is an excellent idea, because it's impossible to know which project is right for you when you're applying for a job.

Apple

The Californian company founded by Steve Jobs is the most valuable company in the world. It has dominated sectors in which it did not even exist before (music, telephony, media). Apple has built a strong culture so that everyone is ready for the next revolution. For example, if you've excelled at one task, you're immediately assigned to a new one you know nothing about.

To achieve higher goals, companies invest more. The opposite is true at Apple, which has adopted the Lean philosophy of doing more with less.

This method stimulates teams, encourages them to innovate and reduces costly trial and error as much as possible. Thanks to this management approach, Apple's revenue per employee is a surreal €2 million.

Implementing a talent management strategy

If the results achieved by these successful companies impress you, you should know that it is entirely possible to follow in their footsteps. There are two conditions to this objective: consider that the most impactful effects will come several years down the line, and that this requires rigour.

Here are the four stages in implementing talent management:

1. Planning

The first step is to define what talent is for the company or a particular team. Although the term has become very widespread, it does not apply to the same types of individuals.

Human Resources must therefore define skills and assign them weights according to whether they are useful, essential or disruptive. Next, criteria need to be put in place to measure the skill level of the talent. This also enables KPIs to be drawn up for use as measurement tools after the event.

Lastly, planning leads to an audit of the existing situation, which enables the levels of individuals to be assessed, often by department. This often leads to the detection of Gaps i.e. levels in the hierarchy that suffer from a lack of skills and leadership.

💡Whether with the help of an HR consultancy or a powerful tool like Yourcegid HR, you will need to structure this essential stage of your strategy.

2. Acquisition

The second phase consists of recruiting talent. This involves transmitting the company's culture as widely as possible in order to attract and inspire talent to apply for job vacancies or submit unsolicited applications. This works if the values at the heart of the company are strong, attractive and sufficiently imbued in the company's brand image.

👉This enables talented people to grasp the advantages of working for the company and therefore to switch to the recruitment process.

The selection then has to be made in several stages (test, interview, profile check). Criteo, for example (leader in targeted advertising on the Internet) selects its talent via 1 online test, 1 telephone interview, 2 interviews with direct collaborators, then 1 interview with the manager. Facebook and Google go through around ten stages.
The acquisition of talent culminates in recruitment (negotiation of the package) and the integration process, which aims to position the new arrival on the projects that are best suited to them and to pass on the fundamentals.

💡 The right HR software can help you facilitate your entire recruitment process, from acquisition through to hiring, integration and employer brand development.

🛠Softy, for example, is a comprehensive, intuitive and very easy-to-useATS software package that saves you considerable time through comprehensive and customisable talent management features : matching algorithm that analyses your applications according to your criteria, advanced search form to filter profiles, automatic CV library feed, and much more!

3. Development

No-one comes into a company with their full range of skills and know-how. That's the whole point of the development process, which begins with individual preparation to ensure that the individual welcomes training, coaching, performance reviews and mentoring.

👉 The second stage is then career development and training to improve performance and skills. Talent management software such as Yourcegid RH allows you to provide tailor-made training, which makes the difference between traditional GPEC and talent management.

💡 Managers and/or HR must regularly propose performance reviews in order to adjust support actions. These reviews are accompanied by coaching and mentoring aimed at developing skills rather than expertise.

4. Retention

The longer you keep talent in your company, the better the return on investment you'll get. The key is to think "long term" with talent. For example, instead of giving an incentive bonus on 31 December, it's more a question of getting employees interested in the results or making it easier for them to become shareholders in the company. Create personalised career plans, adapting the work to the employee (hours, location, methods) rather than the other way round.

Finally, it is more than necessary to work on a positive working environment, which is increasingly sought after by talent:

• pleasant offices
• modern and respectful management,
• appreciation of the work done,
• and respect are very important factors in retaining talent.

See all software Talent Management

Conclusion

Talent management makes it possible to acquire high-potential employees, develop them and retain them for as long as possible, with a view to creating competitiveness and profitability.

Real-life examples such as Facebook and Apple show that talent management is not only a vector for overall performance, but also a means of adapting rapidly to changing environments.

The major results of effective talent management come after several years and require rigour. An HR department needs talent management software, or HR software such as Yourcegid HR, to structure its planning and measure its own results.