The Importance of Talent!

To remain competitive in the current business climate, you must attract, develop, nurture and inspire talented employees to ensure they remain within your company to meet current and future demands.

It is no longer enough to identify talent once they have been hired and worked for your company for a period of time.   

Identifying talent must begin with the detailed assessment of applicants during the selection and recruitment phase. It is at this time that desirable competencies and skills such as the ability to influence, divergent thinking, problem solving abilities and a strong motivation to learn and be successful will become apparent.

Talented individuals are driven. They want to achieve the best results in the most efficient way possible and often view challenges as opportunities to think more innovatively. Top performers are motivated by others like them, leading to stronger collaboration and higher-functioning teams. This fosters a bolder vision for your organisation and will impact the bottom line in a beneficial way.  Imaginative ideas which facilitate business growth and customer satisfaction will create enhanced productivity and profitability. This underscores the importance of attracting talent. If you can match such desirable qualities with the right position and align a team of like-minded thinkers, business outcomes will improve exponentially. 

First step! Discover what engages high performers so you can create an environment that is aligned to their needs and elicits their best qualities.

Research has found the factors which impact high performers the most are:

•             Employee autonomy
•             Risk Taking
•             Tolerance of mistakes
•             Open Communication
•             Good supervisory relationships
•             Education and training opportunities

Second step! Identify the organisational factors which influence an organisations ability to retain top performers. Research has highlighted that factors associated with retaining talent are:

•             A change driven organisation culture

•             High degree of organisational flexibility

•             Agile and innovative work culture

•             Strong leadership and vision

A final remark! It is possible to train an employee on any product or service. You cannot train someone to have integrity, resilience, self-confidence and work ethic!  So consider how you might assess the presence of such attributes reliably and objectively during the recruitment process. 

The two most favoured approaches are via interview or personality assessment, but with them emphasis on reliably and objectively, it may be more defensible to gather such data as strong hypotheses via a personality assessment and then validate these competencies via structured interviewdo yourself and your business a favour and start incorporating personality assessment into your recruitment strategy. The benefits of gaining talented employees will help your organisation stay aligned and to the organisations strategic mission!  

As in the organisation may well have decided what competence achieve success and set it apart from competitors, whilst the HR strategy might be to align a competency based HR approach with the corporate strategy.

Filling the Talent ‘gap’- Recruiting tips that matter in 2016

Can you guess what the recipients of Fortune’s ‘100 best companies to work for’ 2015 award reported as their single biggest focus for 2016?

Employee development - the ability to hire the right people for the job (think innovative thinkers with a tolerance to ambiguity) and to be able to work with their abilities, skills and talents to develop them into valuable, driven and productive employees.

In most companies today, where job responsibilities, KPIs and work priorities vary so frequently, the difficulty of recruiting and retaining staff is receiving increased recognition amid this shifting scene. Additionally, the needs of employees (especially Millennials) are changing, and employers must respond. It all adds up to a bigger, more complex role for a company’s human resources function than has ever been seen before.

Attributes such as innovative thinking and the ability to produce work that hits the mark, increasingly relies on collaboration and high level cognitive thinking. According to a 2015 World Economic Forum study, half of employers globally expect their business performance to suffer due to gaps in talent. 

The following tips when you are considering hiring individuals with the aim of ‘filling’ the talent gap should be kept in mind.

Soft skills are important.

Consider candidate’s soft skills like their interpersonal effectiveness, communication skills, thought processes and emotional intelligence. Remember if you hire them you will have to work with them!

Check social media profiles.

How that person behaves on social media is a good indication of what kind of person the individual is and how the candidate might fit into your company's culture.

Ask the right kinds of questions.

It’s important for you to get a feel of how the candidate responds to a variety of questions - do they blame someone else for leaving their past organisation or give short one-word responses throughout the interview? Their degree of professionalism when responding is a good indicator of how they will act in your workplace. 

Let candidates interview you, too.

Don't be the only one to ask questions. To help determine if your prospective candidate has the right personality for your particular job, it's important to help that person understand the company's work environment.

Don't judge a book by its cover. 

It's easy to write off candidates based on their appearance, but it's more important that you consider how well they can do the job and if they're a good fit in other ways. John Schwarz, CEO and founder of workforce analytics company Visier comments:
"I have had the experience of hiring kids from school who were disheveled, unpresentable [and] inarticulate, but who had a very strong visceral commitment to what they were doing and passion for what they wanted to be," Schwarz said.

Above all, take the time to really think about what kind of person would be a good match for your organisation. Consider their skills - both hard and soft, experience, online presence and their personality when making your decision. What value can they bring to you and your company in today’s competitive and innovative global market?