How should I approach ongoing talent management?

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At its simplest talent management it is how you as a business spot, recruit, and keep the staff with the skills your organisation needs to grow and succeed.

Good talent management's first focus is always productivity. So it is proactive about spotting and nurturing potential within your staff and from outside the company; allowing it to grow and harnessing it to achieve planned change and growth.

Exactly what this change and growth is will change with the times. What it always should be is centred on is predicting and meeting strategically important areas of need.

The skill of talent management is in ensuring, whatever challenge your organisation faces, there will be talent ready to meet it, to manage it and to overcome it.

• Know who your talent is – Don't make the mistake of thinking all your talent is in the upper echelons of management. Think more creatively. Extend your definition of talent to include those in specialist functions and customer-facing or other frontline roles. More and more successful organisations are realising that the people best placed to take them forward are often not those already basking in management positions.

• Define your strategic needs – Assess your current and future strategic needs first, then look for those within and without your organisation with the key skills to meet them.

• Let staff know the talents you seek – Once talents gaps have been defined, let all your staff know the competencies and skills you require. You may choose to allow staff to nominate themselves, their colleagues or their friends to your talent pool. Remember that if you're conducting any kind of internal referral programme then you will need to reward accordingly.

• Establish assessment methods – Identify reliable methods of talent assessment and ensure people understand how they will be assessed and how the information will be used in developing their careers. Good feedback on all assessment and development activities is vital.

• Meeting the cost – The cost of talent management should be offset against and equalled by the overcoming of market constraints, the filling of talent gaps and the meeting of strategic objectives.

• The measure of success – Whereas more traditional HR functions measure success through numbers of staff hired, talent management measures its success by its overall impact on productivity. Its ultimate measure is ROI measured by the ratio between money spent on talent management and the value of increased revenue.

Talented people want to work somewhere they will be challenged and stimulated, where they can grow and learn, and where they will be recognised for their efforts.

As a rule, they leave because they are demotivated, not because they will get more money elsewhere. Make talent management a key part of your strategy and your high potentials employees will stay and become intrinsic to the future success of your organisation.

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