Organizations nowadays are becoming employee centric. Employees are asked to or assigned projects that pertain to their skills and abilities and what they are best at. To put it other words, jobs are designed around people now and not vice versa.
They is an ever increasing emphasis on developing training and development strategies in organizations. When such a strategy is developed and put in place, it is then called a talent marketplace. The purpose is to align people skills and extensive knowledge with the task at hand.
American Express and IBM are two very good examples of organizations that implement a talent marketplace strategy. The most productive employees are allowed to choose projects and assignments that are most suitable to their area of expertise.
Not many companies like the ones above mentioned are able to harness people skills in an effective way. Organizations in the name of talent management pay far more attention to searching for and recruiting people from outside. Little emphasis is laid on locating talent within. Even the work experience for such people is not enriching that helps them to feed and develop their expertise. This is in fact how most organization loose talent to rival organizations.
In the current business scenario it’s your intangible assets like people skills, people perceptions or reputation and relationships that count more than your tangible assets like the plant the machinery. More than anything else talent mobilization helps you unleash the power of people you have onboard. Providing them more opportunities to grow themselves and find work and skills that help them realize their potential counts far more than simply engaging them in repetitive jobs.
Talent deployment is another factor that needs to be taken care of well. Organizations have to be flexible in talent deployment across the length and breadth of their structure. Value creating initiatives need to be developed on a war footing in any organization if it wants to survive in the long run and therefore the need to developing talent.
In talent marketplace it is the internal talent mobilization that is the keyword. By mobilizing talent internally, organizations are offering freedom to their managers to use talent from across the length and breadth of organization for success. This also acts to increase the ownership of employees towards their work and get work done more effectively.
Hindrances to Talent Marketplace: Typically most organizations are structured such that managers find it difficult to locate a single individual from among a company’s talented workers for a single job.
The reason – companies are not prepared or flexible enough to accommodate anything that is new and seeks time. Again most of the companies spend lots of resources improving the quality of line staff. They are better off spending resources developing people for moving up the line management ladder. Formal job-rotation and career development policies are given precedence and the same organization gets stuck when a situation demands a cross job rotation.
The ‘push resources’ strategy of the conventional models may not survive long enough considering the inefficiencies involved. ‘Pull talent and knowledge’ on the other hand is gaining more weight in an era where uncertainty in business looms large.
