During our last growth cycle corporations had it easy. Above average unemployment in developed economies meant that keeping employees engaged had not been a focus. But as developed economies continue to grow in 2014 we can expect those disengaged people (estimated at 70% of the workforce by McKinsey) to lift their noses from the grindstone and start eyeing the exit.

1. As the economy changes,
says Infor’s Tarik Taman, the
talent function will have to
up its game.
ARE YOU READY FOR
THE TALENT EXODUS?
D
uring our last growth cycle
corporations had it easy. Above
average unemployment in
developed economies meant that
keeping employees engaged had not been
a focus. But as developed economies
continue to grow in 2014 we can expect
those disengaged people (estimated at
70% of the workforce by McKinsey) to lift
their noses from the grindstone and start
eyeing the exit.
Compounded by demographic changes (it’s
reported that Millennials, for instance, will
stay in a job for an average of three years)
there can only be one result: a substantial
increase in staff turnover.
That’s expensive.
COSTLY CHURN
It’s expensive on two counts: first, on
recruiting costs. If recruitment costs are, say,
15% of an annual salary and your staff
turnover is at 20%, then recruitment could
account for some 3% of your payroll. With
payroll making up typically 70% of an
organisation’s overall costs, that a significant
reduction right off the bottom line.
Second, increased staff turnover has
associated hidden costs. These include
reduced productivity as new hires get up to
speed, and lost knowledge and skills that
walk out the door with departing
employees, feeding your competition your
best and brightest. Every manager running
a team with high churn will tell you it’s
hard work maintaining productivity when
people keep changing.
Too often, large organisations suffer the
frustrating paradox of employees feeling
their talents are not put to best use, while
on the other hand, vacant jobs seem
difficult to fill. Fit the job with the right
internal employee and you have an
engaged staff member, attuned to
corporate culture, with much of the
knowledge and skills they need for the job.
In short, you have an employee virtually
ready to go and have saved yourself
substantial recruitment costs. This
employee will work better not only
because they have the knowledge skills and
are a good cultural fit, but also because – if
the process is handled right – they will see
this as another step in their career
development within the organisation.
Win-win...
Providing your people with a clear line of
sight to their future, vs. traditional talent
management (which regards people more
or less as inventory) is the basis of what I
November 2013 Inside Learning Technologies & Skills 135

2. ARE YOU READY FOR THE TALENT EXODUS?
call Talent Optimisation. In my view, Talent
Optimisation is a business-led approach
aimed at helping the organisation’s,
managers and employees make the most of
its talent.
To ensure employees are fulfilled, an organisation must have
in place processes to ensure it plays to their strengths, works
on their weaknesses and considers both against
organisational need.
DON’T MANAGE, OPTIMISE
How does Talent Optimisation work? It is
based on knowing what you have got –
knowing the skills of your employees, their
desired career paths and the skills needs of
current and future job roles. Once you know
this, you have a lot of potentially very
valuable data. It will tell you when a person
has, for example, 70% of the required skills
to fill a specific internal job vacancy. It will
reveal whether they are prepared to move
location to enhance their careers; how they
are developing their skills in a particular
direction, and how they expect to have
grown new skills sets by a given point in the
future. It may also share behaviours, values
and characteristics which will help
determine their fit to a role or a team.
Given this degree of detail, it’s possible for
a manager to look across their organisation
and find not only the best person for a role,
but the one most willing and most able to
flourish in that role. It’s also possible to
backfill using the same data for other
employees. This can cascade down the
organisation to less senior roles where
recruitment is either less costly or can be
accommodated as part of the
organisation’s general new hire program.
This apparently simple shift in
emphasis from people-as-inventory to
letting people-flourish is actually a rather
fundamental change in outlook. Too often
recruitment is carried out to meet an acute
need without much pre-planning. In
contrast, the Talent Optimisation approach
views a job vacancy as an opportunity to
advance the careers of at least one, and
ideally several, employees; resulting in both
faster time to competence and increased
commitment to the organisation.
In short, Talent Optimisation is taking a big
data approach to Human Capital
Management, but with a human touch.
Employee competency profiles become the
key to engaging talent, optimising their
deployment and maximizing their
longevity. It creates the transparency of
your skill base across the enterprise that
becomes the ‘glass pipeline’ of talent
within an organisation.
strategic impact, is where Talent
Optimisation succeeds. It makes it possible
for managers to do their work as well as for
individual employees to thrive, and
executives see the need for it.
Yes, they are.
If this is both possible and desirable, why
has nobody previously adopted this
approach to Human Resources? Treating
people not as inventory but as valuable
individuals, whose advancement helps both
the organisation and the individual should
not be revolutionary, but it is – because it
is only now that technology has made it
possible to deal with individuals as
individuals even en masse. In the past the
only way to run a large organisation was in
a regimented, hierarchical style with no
space for individualism.
In recent years, the importance of talent to
business has been strongly backed by CEOs
across a wide range of surveys. In particular,
the 2013 Conference Board CEO Challenge
Report shows CEOs focused on the
importance of people where human capital
was ranked highest of the CEO’s ten top
global challenges, ahead of government
regulation (No. 6) and global political,
economic risk (No. 5).
Today, we are becoming used to
personalisation in our lives as consumers –
just think of your experience shopping at
Amazon for example – and we will
increasingly expect the same treatment at
work. Combined with the right
management and the right processes, the
right data on individual strengths and aims
can make work a very different, much more
fulfilling experience.
To ensure employees are fulfilled, an
organisation must have in place processes
to ensure it plays to their strengths, works
on their weaknesses and considers both
against organisational need. Talent
Optimisation, as I describe it here, is both
business-led and agile enough to make a
difference to the daily working lives of
managers. That ability to provide data both
for immediate tactical use as well as for
It’s time we stopped limiting our ambition
to managing talent, and time we began
really allowing it to fly – it’s time to start
optimising talent.
WANTS, NEEDS AND EXECUTIVES
This may be what an organisation needs,
but is it what it wants? Are executives
actually interested in skills and talent
today?
136 Inside Learning Technologies & Skills November 2013
Tarik Taman is General Manager HCM
for Infor.
http://blogs.infor.com/infor-hcm/
https://twitter.com/TamanTarik