Effective Talent Management Strategy: Assess Needs

Crafting an Effective Talent
Management Strategy (Practice 2)
How to assess talent management needs and
aspirations to establish best practices to target.
Practice Guide

TALENT
MANAGEMENT
STRATEGY
OVERVIEW

What it is
As a company defines its business strategy, each
function must align its objectives and actions to
support its strategic goals. Talent management
strategy is a key process that the HR function follows
to accomplish this directive by identifying priorities
and setting up plans to advance talent management
practices. It is directly enabling corporate strategy. It is
a compass to decide how to design and prioritize
talent management and other HR programs, services,
and policies and guide how they should mature over
time.
This process follows a periodic cycle, typically
conducted on an annual basis, where the HR team
analyzes current and future business and organizational
needs, reviews its talent management programs and
practices to assess if they respond adequately to those
needs, and identifies adjustments.
These improvements may enhance the effectiveness
and efficiency of services provided in response to
regulatory, operational, technological, or employee
experience opportunity areas.
Talent management strategy is different from “Talent
Strategy”, which includes looking into business
requirements in terms of the capabilities required by
the organization, the ways to access them in the
market, and their development, maintenance, and
retention. It is also distinct from “HR Strategy”, which
focuses on defining how to organize and operate the
HR function, as well as determining what processes,
policies, and services will be part of it at any given
stage.
3

Why use it
Talent management strategy is useful for prioritizing
time and investment decisions on the most important
initiatives for the organization, not only the most
urgent. It is an overarching plan that encompasses all
talent management areas, helping align the HR agenda
with the business strategy.
It allows HR teams and key stakeholders across the
business to collaborate and agree on main objectives
and a roadmap of improvement initiatives.
The scope typically comprises programs supporting
the worker life cycle, which involves attracting,
accessing, engaging, managing, augmenting,
developing, and transitioning talent. Nevertheless, the
process creates the opportunity to holistically review
other areas driven by HR to evaluate and improve.
4

PRACTICE
GUIDE
L1
Progression
Assessing talent management
needs and aspirations to
establish best practices to target.

How it works
Implementing a new or improving an existing HR
program, which has been preselected as a prioritized
focus area, requires identifying or defining the right
types of practices that will help achieve the desired
outcomes for the program.
Wowledge packages the practices necessary to
implement new programs from scratch or advance
them from an existing stage across different levels of
sophistication, helping fast-track this process. This is
illustrated in the applicable practices for key HR
programs included in Wowledge’s catalog.
Alternatively, a systematic approach can be put in
place when other or highly customized practices need
to be considered as follows.
Review quantitative and qualitative
data inputs
Revisiting data from prior analysis of the business
strategy will be fundamental. This might include KPIs,
and organizational needs, with particular attention to
employee surveys and comments, feedback, and
anecdotal information from interactions with top
leadership, managers, and internal customers
throughout the year. This information aids in creating
a preliminary list of potential practices or improvement
initiatives per focus area. This list might contain a mix
of practices with some included in Wowledge’s
progressions and others newly identified through this
approach.
Research is necessary to complement the preliminary
list, ideally with recognized best practices to
implement the corresponding HR program. Research
methods include asking consultants or specialists,
reviewing expert articles or books, and exploring
credible online sources.
6

Fine-tuning a more robust and specific list of
improvement initiatives results from targeted
conversations with key company stakeholders.
The best way to obtain valuable and structured
feedback during these interactions is guiding the
conversation with standardized questions or a
questionnaire covering the following elements for
each targeted talent management program in scope:
a. Full description of the program and what the
expected outcome(s) are for the organization. This
serves to open the discussion to align understanding
and uncover if stakeholders have different
expectations that should be addressed.
b. Preliminary list of practices or improvement
initiatives to implement for the program. The intent
is asking probing questions to help validate or expand
the list, together with assessing which specific
initiatives might be the most relevant.
c. Questions to gather views on program
interdependencies or particular challenges with
respect to making the desired improvements. This
will help understand linkages among programs and
other key considerations.
d. Stakeholders who should be involved in the design
or implementation of each specific program or
initiative. Discussing potential participants helps
make sure the entire process will have the buy-in
from the key people in the organization and, in some
cases, identifies supporting resources.
This exercise yields both quantitative and qualitative
data to not only create a fuller list of improvement
initiatives but to also get a sense for which of those
practices might be the most relevant to set adequate
and achievable aspirations for the improvement cycle.
7

Define current state and desired
practices
Compiling a complete list of practices for each HR
program takes collaboration and diverse sources. As
such, each practice has different levels of complexity
to execute. In addition, some initiatives might already
be in place in part or would be set aside to consider at
a later stage.
It is best to organize and classify the practices into
levels of sophistication to make it easier to define
appropriate aspirations to start working towards and
track how the organization might be progressing
towards implementing more robust practices over
time.
An effective framework to use is classifying practices
into three levels of progression, the way Wowledge
structures its expert-developed practices, considering
the following criteria:
-Level 1 Practices: The core, or most fundamental
practices that are considered the building blocks.
These will be less complex and without significant
investments or skillsets to implement.
-Level 2 Practices: The advanced, or more mature
practices considered the next level of sophistication.
These might require using technologies and already
basic practices in place.
-Level 3 Practices: The emerging or leading practices
that might involve the latest HR thinking. These
highly sophisticated practices might require
leveraging more complex technologies, models, or
skillsets.
8

After classifying practices into their corresponding
levels, it will be relevant to identify if any are already in
place to some degree in the organization. At this stage,
the objective is to determine what practices to
consider targeting for the improvement cycle as an
aspiration.
The “Targeting Aspiring Practices Template” helps
organize practices and complete such assessment.
Typically, all HR functional leaders (e.g., recruitment,
learning and development, compensation, and HR
operations) take part in the process to assess the state
of each program and practices, define aspirations, and
identify gaps. Feedback from stakeholders and
employees also serves as a key input to the diagnostic
process.
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Since each organization has unique characteristics,
needs, and aspirations, Wowledge's practices are
developed utilizing an exclusive stage-based
approach – from Core to Advanced to Emerging
– that reflects distinct levels of sophistication to
meet our members where they are.
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