One of the main challenges that companies in the area of talent management face is the time that it takes to develop people once you have taken the necessary time and resources to identify their potential.
Every structured company has defined policies for the succession of their key positions. This is a way to ensure their operations, which is why there is a group of professionals known as “Talent Pool” or group of talents.
This is the group of top professionals who have been selected to assume greater responsibilities in the future, according to the goals set for that area and the development of their functions. For example, if our organisation is dedicated mainly to cybersecurity, we must look for professionals that are specialised in this area of technology.
Considering this, a survey published on Acsendo, a blog that specialises in talent management (Spain, 2018), states that over 50 % of recruiters don’t have a long-term strategy and post jobs only to fill openings.
Some benefits:
- Having a defined development and succession strategy will allow you to attract the best candidates that are fit for the job position, so the talent pool will be considerably large.
- It improves the company’s reputation, turning its recruitment process into an effective practice of employer branding, in which candidates, even when they aren’t employees, will have a positive perception of the company.
- It reduces costs: having a clear talent management strategy will strengthen employees’ sense of belonging and this will translate into a low turnover.
Thinking towards the future will help you to get ready for all the possible scenarios, which may or may not benefit the organisation, and the development of your talent is a key step: it is critical to have employee loyalty strategies to increase their productivity, trust and well-being.
I don’t have a Talent Pool! What should I do?
To think about each employee’s development is to think about the future potential and sustainability of our organisation. The first step of the process is to define which profiles your company needs today, as well as two and five years from now.
Here we share with you the main steps to create a talent pool in your organisation:
- Define profiles
These profiles are crucial, since they will establish the requirements that the people in each position must meet so that you can design action, development and succession plans, which are necessary to do each job effectively.
- Identify critical positions
An indispensable step to identify the talent pool is to know which positions are essential for the development of the organisation. Some aspects to look at are the role’s decision-making, type of relationship with customers or suppliers.
3. Use the tools in your favour
A pretty useful tool to select people with high potential is 9-Box, a Cartesian coordinate system in which the employee’s performance (goals) and their potential (competencies) intersect. Once this is quantified, it is possible to place the employee in one of the 9 boxes, which allows us to obtain a real basis on which to predict what their performance would be in the position they are aspiring to.
4. Don’t wait until the last minute
Developing plans within organisations are not processes that can be completed in just a few weeks. They need a selection scheme of the people with high potential and a development plan.
One of the instruments that help to drive and identify employees’ opportunities is the PDA Assessment (Personal Development opportunities is the PDA Assessment (Personal Development Analysis): an instrument that, through a simple, precise and scientifically validated methodology, allows us to describe and analyse the behavioural profile of individuals. The PDA Assessment does not qualify behavioural profiles as “good or bad,” but rather describes the characteristics of the assessee. From the self-awareness provided by this evaluation, each person will be able to find out the traits of their own style when it comes to leadership, decision-making, problem-solving, motivators, etc. Through this tool, we can also obtain a Leadership Matching report, which shows the leader’s management style describing how they naturally conduct themselves versus the natural style of behaviour of the person to be led. In the case of a compatibility study between a person and a position, it simply describes strengths and opportunity areas. Get to know the strengths of your behavioural profile! Complete the PDA Assessment for free here
