Managing Talent

Talent management is a hot topic among business leaders. In the human resource management master's degree program where I used to teach, we added a course on talent management that quickly became one of the most popular classes (it didn't hurt that the professor was a really great teacher in addition to knowing what she was talking about). It's good to have a course focused on emerging topics because it's not unusual for folks to use the terminology without a good idea what it means. Talent management is much more effective when you understand all its aspects.

The view that many people have is that talent management is about grooming employees for future leadership positions, finding your high potential folks and managing their careers. That's part of it, but only a part. Your talent includes much more than just your future leaders, and managing that talent begins long before they show up on your doorstep. Some of the phases of talent management include:

Identifying your needs Before you start hiring people, you need to know what you need. Creative firms often want a pretty specific skill set, and you should spend the time figuring out what talents you need in your workforce.

Recruiting Have a strategy for recruiting. Don't hire too many too fast, but also make sure you can support an expansion of your firm if that's the direction you go. Identify the recruiting venues and methods that are best for finding the types of Creatives you really want.

Onboarding Getting people started out right in your company is critical. This forms their first impression of the company and you want them to be motivated when they start, rather than frustrated. Postponing their start date, not having their workspace ready, having no one available to help them navigate their in-processing...all of this can really affect someone's enthusiasm.

Make the best use of your talent You hire people for a reason, so use them for that reason. Don't waste their time on extraneous functions and don't waste their talent by using them for projects that don't need them. If you realize you've hired people with the wrong talents, you need to adjust your recruiting and retention strategies.

Continue to develop As your industry evolves, your Creatives' talents need to evolve as well. Many people want to work with a company that will help them continue to grow and develop. This is also where it's useful to start identifying people who might move into leadership positions down the road and start getting them ready for that.

Retain You have some Creatives who can come and go, as your needs change or as they reach the limits of their talent. Others you want to keep. You need to understand which is which, and try to keep those you want while making it easy for the others to leave.

Offboarding You might wonder why you should worry about making sure people leave as smoothly as they came in. Well, in addition to the possibility that you might want to hire them back someday, remember too that your alumni are a great source of referrals, and it helps to have them leave with a good image of your company as their last memory of it.

Since Creatives are pretty unique, rather than interchangeable, you need to pay close attention to managing your talent. It's about much more than just succession planning for your CEO. Talent management is about finding the right people, making the best use of them, helping them grow, and keeping a good relationship with them whether you're trying to keep them in place, let them go, or move them up. It takes some thinking to do it right. So, think about it.