Talent Management Initiatives Top Priority for HR Professionals, Study Shows

By Cari McLean who can be contacted at www.knowledgeinfusion.com

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A survey of 3,000 International Association for Human Resource Information Management (IHRIM) members and Knowledge Infusion clients’ in HR management revealed an explosive growth in talent management initiatives in their organizations. The 2006 Talent Management Survey, conducted jointly by IHRIM and Knowledge Infusion, found that 77 percent of survey respondents see talent management increasing in importance during the next three years. According to Jason Averbook, CEO of Knowledge Infusion, the looming talent shortage, the increased focus on redeploying internal employees rather than recruiting and the realization that organizations must link training, knowledge and performance are the key drivers for talent management initiatives over the next three years.

“The issues that organizations are now focusing on are much more macro, and clearly people are waking up to the fact that these are critical issues,” Averbook said. “Organizations know that they need to do a better job of linking training, knowledge and performance together. They see that it has been done in silos in their organization and realize that they need to do a better job of linking them together. Also, for the first time during my 15 years in this business I am actually hearing people say and admit to there being a talent shortage. This is also the first time that we have seen organizations shift their focus from recruiting people to redeploying people.”

The survey cited talent acquisition, leadership development, aligning people and goals, performance management and talent management metrics as the top initiatives for 2006, which directly reflects the key drivers for these initiatives in the coming years. However, when it comes to satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the vast umbrella of initiatives that fall under talent management, the survey found that respondents were most dissatisfied with their current competency management, workforce analytics, performance management and succession-planning solutions. According to Averbook, the leading reason for this dissatisfaction is that organizations have generally been unsuccessful deploying these solutions enterprise-wide.

“Most organizations have deployed these initiatives for a small population, but they haven’t been successful in a global deployment of those products and those practices,” Averbook explained. “Organizations haven’t optimized their talent management processes to go to an automated solution, so when they tried to take their manual broken process and automate it, they ran into some issues, which made them dissatisfied with their software, which isn’t really the software’s fault. It is the organization’s fault. This just shows that when organizations want to take their manual processes and automate them, they have to revamp their business processes as well.”

Averbook said that in order for organizations to improve processes such as competency management, workforce analytics, performance management and succession planning, they need to take time to review and modify their business processes first as well as market them internally. “Many organizations roll out a performance management system or workforce analytics system and simply just put it out there. They don’t do a good job of making sure that people know why these systems are implemented, show people the value of the systems, etc.,” he said. “So if organizations don’t market these systems to their employees, the employees will just think of them as another online tool and won’t actually use them to their full advantage.”

The survey found that respondents were most satisfied with their portal solution implementations. Averbook said that because portal solutions are pervasive in nature—meaning they can easily reach all employees—organizations are generally more satisfied with these implementations.

Perhaps one of the most significant survey findings was that 42 percent of respondents report little to no effectiveness in the relationship between HR and training in creating and executing joint human capital initiatives. However, the good news is that 78 percent of survey respondents say the collaboration between training and HR will be greater over the next two years. “Many people are realizing that there is a gap between learning and HR, that they either need to get together in the same organization or play nice together, make sure that each understands what each other’s goals and objectives are, and make sure that they are driving in the same direction,” Averbook said. “If you think about it, the core of talent management is generally made up of three things: build, buy or outsource. If the HR department is in buy mod e—meaning they are doing a lot of recruiting—and the learning department is in a build mode—meaning they are trying to develop people internally—that is a big conflict. And those organizations have to be synchronized, especially as the talent-management crisis becomes more and more apparent in the economy.”

Other noteworthy results included 88 percent reporting their organization is either somewhat or not successful at all at aligning business goals to measurable business results, and 72 percent of survey respondents have no analytic tools to measure the impact of HR on business results. Averbook said, “Many HR professionals are still tied up in the tactical side of things and don’t actually align themselves to the goals of the company. Therefore, because they don’t align themselves to the goals of the company, they have no way to look at the measurable business results. To me, this is just a huge sign and telling tale for HR departments that they need to get out from behind the walls of HR and get more attached to the line of business.”

This survey validates the fact that organizations worldwide are focusing more and applying more effort on talent-management initiatives today and will continue to do so during the next few years as external factors, such as the looming talent shortage and global expansion, become more and more prevalent.