It's also about developing your existing talent pool
In the past, talent management was considered to be about attracting the right people to take up existing positions, and many people still consider that role as being about recruitment only. That's only one aspect of the job. For a company that is looking to transform itself, as many are in this age of digitization and cost optimization, talent management is about understanding what the new profile of employees should be. It means differentiating between a person who meets the requirements in terms of their experience and qualifications and the extent to which the profile of individual suits a future role they may play in the business beyond the role they are being considered for at a given point in time.
That means looking at how compatible their capabilities are the future and the strategy of the organisation. If you’re saying you want to innovate and you want to have digital platforms, that should influence the types of person that you bring in. If you want to bring in disrupters, you need to make sure you know how to keep them from leaving and joining other companies or starting their own businesses. Because you don't want your company to become a revolving door whereby you bring them in but they leave very quickly because the environment is not right.
Talent management as one of the core aspects of dealing with culture and leadership within an organisation whereby, typically, it's about identifying future leaders, whether they are already within the organisation or that need to be headhunted from elsewhere. It's about future potential and creating a model that underpins that. The questions to ask when evaluating talent, therefore, are: Can the candidate operate at more complex organisational levels? Do they have capacity and capability to unlearn obsolete habits and learn new skills relatively quickly? In other words, do they have learning agility?
Cultural fit is also important. But, once you want to change a culture, you don't bring somebody in necessarily for the existing culture, you bring them in for a future culture. That means thinking about creating the new culture before recruiting people that will fit in or making sure that the existing culture is amenable to disruption from new people coming into the organisation
