Talent management has to fit with the organizational culture.

What does your organization pay attention to?

There are explicit and tacit signs of this.

The explicit signs might be the organizational values displayed in your premises, set out in employee literature and referred to in your performance management systems. The implicit signs could be how people are recognized and rewarded (which may or may not fit with what is written in the employee handbook!)

Organizational culture is ‘the way things are done around here’ – and in the most successful organizations there is an alignment between what is said and done.

Action speaks louder than words, so regardless of what is written in the company newsletter or the employee handbook, people know that what they see happening is what counts. Each organization needs to construct its own definition of talent and design the processes to develop and manage it as needs and priorities change.

Some organizations adopt a ‘whole workforce’ approach to talent management, while others develop a more exclusive focus defining talent according to need.

Regardless of which approach organizations adopt, fairness and consistency must be applied in all talent management processes. Diversity considerations must also be built-into talent management processes to ensure that you are able to draw from the widest pools of talent possible.

Transparency is important to manage expectations, involve and inform people in the talent management system. This also influences the extent to which information about talented people is shared across the organization, although it is inevitably more popular with those who are part of the talent pool than those who are not.

The hardest - and the most critical stage. Get this right and you have a new asset for your organization; get it wrong and you have a liability. How well does your organization identify what job you want to be done and what skills and attributes someone needs to possess to be successful in that job? What tools and techniques can and do you use to assess the candidates? The statistics demonstrate that interviews alone are a poor predictor of potential. In a recent survey, 28% of employer respondents confessed they had gone to interviews unprepared. This is a shocking statistic when recruitment is not only costly but also getting that decision wrong can have severe consequences for the team and the business.