Businesses may spawn from ideas, but talent is what makes them grow. As a result, effective talent management strategies are the cornerstone of the operations of several established organizations. Talent managers face numerous challenges when developing and implementing effective talent management strategies in the face of constantly evolving market conditions, expectations, and unpredicted events like the pandemic.
Is talent management an effective strategy? How do you recognize it or create one? In this episode 14 of the #HumansOfHiring series on Effective Talent Management Strategies, Ranjan Phadke, Vice President and Global HR Head at Healthcare – EXL, explores the subject in detail.
What Is an Effective Talent Management Strategy?
The webinar opens with the speaker’s views on the Talent Management Strategy. Speaking in detail, Ranjan Phadke goes on to explain that talent management strategy is a vast subject. He opines that a change has occurred since the pandemic, as the workforce is now evenly distributed, and talent management strategies are now based on catchment areas of hiring.
“You would simply design them according to where your office is. If you are based out of Bangalore, you would have an office and a recruitment centre in Bangalore. You would pull in people that larger organizations always tried to pull in from across the country”, he added.
He adds that Medium and Small organizations always preferred to be centred in such locations. Whether a person is from there or not, they would shift if required. Even if you hire from elsewhere, the person would be based where your office is. Your recruitment strategy would be around where you are. You would also try to set up offices where you feel a larger catchment area or a larger pool of talent.
However, all of that has changed significantly in the past few years. An effective talent strategy would incorporate all the elements from how we hire people to how we retain individuals, how we help them grow in an organization, how we make them successful and how they help the organization succeed; Ranjan thus concludes his answer to what is a talent management strategy.
Extensive Organization Strategy
Our Speaker, Ranjan Phadke, then talks about the multiple elements that go through designing a talent strategy. He talks about how extensive an organization’s strategy should be and what it should ideally cover. A company’s strategy should focus on attracting talent, retaining them, and ensuring their success. To achieve organizational goals, it is necessary to ensure employee skill development and align their aspirations with the organization.
“Large organizations need comprehensive strategies where certain aspects are standard while some are dynamic. Post-pandemic, organizations are much better equipped to hire. There are very few organizations that hire in person. What used to be in-person interviews are now executed digitally and virtually. The whole recruitment engine is the strategy that organizations are defining and refining”, he said.
He then asserts that the answer to the question “Where do you hire from?” has also changed. Today, we can hire from anywhere, and people can work from anywhere. Organizations can now acquire talent through this aspect of strategy as well, increasing their pool of potential candidates. Due to this, individuals have more choices.
Speaker’s Take on Upskilling Programs
With the pandemic, the entire industry has shifted its work philosophy. Traditionally, IT professionals were reluctant to work outside the office for two major reasons: compliance and data security. Over the last two to three years, almost everyone has worked from home while ensuring that data security and compliance requirements are met.
“We now trust our people a lot more to do the right thing. The trust between the organization and the relationship between managers and their teams has increased. We not only trust them to do the right thing, but we also trust them to deliver from wherever they are, and they don’t need constant monitoring. One portion of the manager role, in-person supervision, has vanished because we would now expect everyone to judge their time and effort, what they need to deliver, and what people are delivering”, he adds.
Going to the main question about if it is difficult or easy to execute upskilling programs, he concludes that earlier, the mode was always in-person classroom training. Still, they realize now with the shift that the adoption of digital and online training is far more and far better than before. And the tools or platforms they have now are also evolving as the quality of courses and materials available for online learning is also improving rapidly. It’s much more intuitive, relevant, and self-learning in its mode. So, all of this is responsible for making learning easier. As for employees, it all comes down to trust. Upskilling is not just for the organization but also an individual’s growth. And for them to do it, the organization should provide them with the right resources and tools; the rest is up to them.
