The Talent Management Framework to Transform Your Business

The reality of today’s workforce is simply different. Companies are dealing with a talent shortage, bigger expectations from customers, steeper competition, not to mention a shift to hybrid work models and workforce structure changing. But here’s the thing, the payoff of a successful company is also higher. Companies can evolve quicker, technology helps automate processes and drive success. The key factor in many companies’ success is the talent behind that success. A talent management strategy will ultimately be part of your solution to drive your company forward and help it thrive in today’s business environment.

Learn more about creating a talent management framework to do just that.

What is Talent Management Frameworks?

Talent management frameworks are how your company decides to plan, structure, and develop a process for talent management, including; how to identify and recruit talent, how to evaluate performance, how to establish a positive work culture, and how to create strategic plans for the future of your company. As you can imagine this ends up covering so many aspects of your company, and the larger framework the company works within.

Why you need a Talent Management Framework

Setting up a talent management framework helps your organization determine its goals and business needs, plan to accomplish those goals, and measure how you are doing. A strong talent management strategy gives your company the ability to reiterate and grow.

In fact, research has shown that companies that continue to commit to talent management have seen their talent and pipeline of leaders have an impact on the overall business. Talent management had been a foundation for these organizations' overall management process, finding innovative ideas, and helping their company as they face challenges.

Recruit the Best Talent

A key part of assessing your framework is figuring out your talent needs. This means taking a look at your current recruitment process and what gaps you need to fill.

Before you consider your overall recruiting process, you will want to consider your company and employee brand. In order to attract the right people, you’ll have to have a brand that speaks to those people. This could be everything from the tone of voice of your emails or initial outreach, the presentation of your website, or your recruiting culture.

There will also be a balance on how you want to find or attract candidates. Think about what sourcing tools will be necessary to connect with candidates, and how you will build a pipeline. Some of the top avenues of sourcing include,

• Referrals
• LinkedIn
• Events
• Recruiting boards
• Previous applicants

Aside from considering the different types of applicants, recruiting metrics can help you indicate the most successful recruiting source. In fact, recruiting metrics can help you with multiple aspects of recruitment development. They can show you how well you attract talent, the type of talent you attract, your interview to hire ratio, and your total cost of hire.

Engage and Motivate Employees

Most businesses recognize the impact an engaged and motivated workforce can have. Yet still, according to a Gallup poll, only 33 percent of American workers are engaged in their jobs- many of which identity as being “actively disengaged” or “just showing up”. To help determine engaged and disengaged employees, SHRM put together a list of engaged and disengaged behavior.

Engaged behavior

• Optimistic
• Team-oriented
• Goes above and beyond
• Solution-oriented
• Selfless
• Shows a passion for learning

Disengaged behavior

• Pessimistic
• Self-centered
• High absenteeism
• Negative attitude
• Egocentric
• Focuses on monetary worth

As you determine your talent management framework, consider how you would bucket your employees and your top talent in these behaviors. If you haven’t already, is there a way to track certain behaviors or larger attitudes? According to SHRM, there are two major factors that drive employee engagement- including organizational drivers and management drivers.

Organizational drivers are things about your organization as a whole that help recruit and maintain top talent. This could be things like seeing themselves at the company, and growing there, or general belief of the company’s success and impact.

Management drivers include factors of the employee's general management and the overall human capital management at the company. Management on a whole can be a large driver for both engagement and motivation. Although other factors such as pay or benefits can be a part of motivation, it’s been shown that having a positive relationship with the manager impacts overall motivation. Some management tips that should be built into your overall framework is

Appreciation: Managers should be sure to give recognition when recognition is due as even small feedback can help motivate employees

Autonomy: One of the surest ways for someone to be unmotivated is to be micro-managed and feel watched by their manager. When able to, try and give employees autonomy

Progression: Create learning and development programs and have managers encourage these programs

Motivation & Engagement in Hybrid work models

Specifically now, when remote work and hybrid work models remain popular, and businesses are still responding to the pandemic, motivation and engagement are key for employees. You want to consider how you can report employees as they shift back into going into the office, or remain remote.

Build a culture of transparency

Employees want to know what’s going on within the business. If it’s completely unclear what company objectives are, or what is coming in the future, employees may become disengaged or frustrated. Decide how you can support a culture of transparency.

Provide employees with the proper technology

Be sure to provide employees with the technology they need so they can be successful. Hybrid models may require more investment upfront with technology that can support your operations but will help empower your employees to be successful. On the other hand, if employees don’t have the correct tools and technology, their motivation can be impacted.

Centralize communications

Minimizing frustrations with communications can be one way to keep all your employees engaged. Streamlining your communications, creating communication plans, and considering how employees communicate all can help centralize.

Encourage team bonding from home

When your employees feel connected to their teammates and the organization, they can feel more motivated and overall engaged. So instead of a typical team bonding in the office, be sure to plan ways that your employees can connect together from home.

Recognize employee work

Lastly, given the advice above, be sure that your recognition isn’t skewed for in-office employees, or works for remote work. Giving recognition and appreciation is key to continued motivation for employees.

Boost Employee Performance

A major part of your overall success in talent management will be how employees perform and the paths you create to drive success. To boost your employee performance find a way to measure, give feedback, create development tracks, and manage leaders.

Performance management will vary given your business, your human capital, your goals, and your human resources capabilities. For example, a company with hundreds of employees and a large human resources department’s performance management will look different than a smaller company with a niche market and roles.

Regardless, creating performance metrics for each role can help create a baseline. Many companies take the performance metric along with a manager review to get an overall performance score. Using software to track and give structure to your performance management can also help.

Aside from simply evaluating performance, ultimately you will want to improve performance. To improve performance feedback will be key. Feedback should be double-sided-- both giving feedback to employees on how they can improve and getting feedback from employees on how they think your company can improve. This way your employees are getting consistent feedback on the different ways they can grow and improve, and you are getting feedback on things that might enable your employees to succeed.

To develop talent to be top talent, learning and development tracks will be key. These tracks may be a part of your overall talent framework and HR framework already, but if they are not consider how you can add L&D to your team regardless of the size. This could be as small as a learning stipend, or as large as a complex L&D program and outside support. Giving employees the opportunity to grow and learn will pay off by feeding itself back into your organization.

Lastly, decide how your leaders and even yourself can develop and improve performance. Management and leadership training and tools can help take your leadership to a next level and have a trickle-down effect on your organization.

Retain Talented Employees

A work institute report in 2018, found that 1 out of 4 employees would leave their company for another company and nearly one-third of that turnover was attributed to unsupportive management and a lack of development opportunities. And this is even before the pandemic and doesn’t speak the highest turnover in industries like Tech (one of the fastest-growing sectors as well). Retaining top talent can be what sets your organization apart.

To retain top talent consider:

Employee feedback

Your employees need a voice in the process if they are going to stay. Providing avenues to give feedback and getting consistent feedback from employees all can show you what’s working and what’s not working.

Emphasize learning

As you can see above, learning can help with motivation and engagement-- which ultimately helps with retention as well. Emphasize a learning culture to

Evolve your talent management

Retention tactics that worked 5 years might not work right now. Continuing to measure and evolve your talent management can help you address the current workforce and retain the current workforce.

Here's a Talent Management Framework That will Transform Your Business

CAVU’s Talent Management solution combines software and concierge services, so your human resources team and organization can create a talent management framework that drives success today and in the future.

With our talent management software, you have access to applicant tracking software for talent strategy. We then help your team with collecting employee onboarding information and managing to onboard and give you tools for performance management when it’s time. Not to mention that our team helps with tax credits so you don’t miss out on employee tax credits. Our talent management framework can help set you up for success and give you the tools to transform your talent management.

Let’s envision for a moment the “star team’s” talent management framework with the tools and thought structure above.

1. Evaluate Talent Acquisition Strategies

2. Employee Onboarding

3. Performance management

4. Consistent feedback- both ways!

5. Establish learning & development programs

6. Evolve talent management

As you can see a strong talent management framework is the backbone for how you will ultimately run your talent management and touches each part of the employee experience. Being thoughtful on each part of the experience, and having tools to help you evaluate each part, is so important for the ultimate success of your program. So whether you have never built a framework before, or you are just hoping to evolve your framework, know the effort and planning you do know will help support you and your employees (and future employees) today and in the future!