If you ask me for the guidelines for talent management, my response would be the following:

• Developing employees.
• Redeploying employees.
• Retaining the best talent.

Yes, the prime focus of talent management is enabling and developing people, since the quality of an organization is determined by the people it employs and has onboard. After hiring and deploying we may say that retaining and nurturing talent is quintessential.

Talent management also known as human capital management is evolving as a discipline that encompasses process right from hiring people to retaining and developing the same. So it includes recruitment, selection, learning, training and development, competency management, succession planning etc. These are all critical processes that enable an organization to compete and stand out in the market place when managed well!

Talent management is now looked upon as a critical HR activity; the discipline is evolving every day. Let’s analyze some trends in the same.

• Talent War: Finding and retaining the best talent is the most difficult aspect of HR management. HR survey consultancies are one in their view that organizations globally are facing a dearth of talented employees and it’s often more difficult to retain them. Further research has also shown that there is clear link between talent issues and overall productivity.

• Technology and Talent Management: Technology is increasingly getting introduced into people development. Online employee portals have become common place in organizations to offer easy access to employees to various benefits and schemes. In addition employees can also manage their careers through these portals and it also helps organizations understand their employees better.

• Promoting Talent Internally: An individual is hired, when there is a fit between his abilities or skills and the requirements of the organization. The next step is enabling learning and development of the same so that he/she stays with the organization. This is employee retention. An enabled or empowered means an empowered organization.

  It is also of interest to organizations to know their skills inventories and then develop the right individual for succession planning internally.

• Population Worries Globally: World populations are either young or aging. For example, stats have it that by 2050 60% of Europe’s working population will be over 60! On the other hand a country like India can boast of a young population in the coming and present times. Population demographics are thus a disturbing factor for people managers. Still more researches have predicted that demographic changes in United States will lead to shortage of 10 million workers in the near future!

• Talent Management to rescue HR: HR has been compelled to focus on qualitative aspects equally and even more than quantitative aspects like the head count etc. Through talent management more effort is now being laid on designing and maintaining employee scorecards and employee surveys for ensuring that talent is nurtured and grown perpetually.

• Increase in Employer of Choice Initiatives: An organization’s perceived value as an employer as helps improve its brand value in the eyes of its consumer. Most importantly it helps it attract the right talent.