Keeping talent in circulation

Businesses are beginning to wake up to the need to have a strategy for managing talent:

Competent businesses are adept at hiring and firing workers. Great businesses however are skilled at developing and deploying talent in ways that continuously grow their experience, stretch their abilities and enable their achievements. Creating work environments that promote people agility across jobs and organizational boundaries is the next imperative for companies seeking competitive advantage through their talent.

It is surprising how few companies develop and move their talent around the organization. They know how to recruit stars, fire failures and replace leavers – but few seem to know how to provide one of the most important factors in retaining talent – opportunities to achieve, move and grow – within the company. Ever hire a star only to see them leave in frustration 9-18 months later because they felt stuck? Or experience shock when an outstanding performer leaves your company after 5 years because they were ‘too valuable’ in their current job to be allowed to move to a different position or department? So instead, they moved to a different company.

There are many organizational and cultural reasons why companies constrain talent. Performance obsessed managers are often reluctant to give up the people resources they feel are needed to achieve ever more challengingly goals and performance objectives. This short sighted behavior is reinforced by management and incentive systems that reward business results but not development of people.

We're glad to see this realization taking hold. Corporations have a tendency to view their employees as the sum total of the skill set for which they were hired. But human beings have a surprising range of talents, and the current notion of "career" actually embodies what would have once been considered several different careers. Consultants and free agents are particularly inclined to seek out development and change. By its nature, the consulting profession has its own built-in mechanisms that enable people to move into new settings, migrate into new roles, and try out new skills.

From the New Equities perspective, working with a community of consultants and placing them on projects, it's just as important to know where people want to go as it is to know where they've been. Companies who think in these terms are already ahead of the game. Consider the example of Cisco, presented later in the same article:

Companies like Cisco that compete in dynamic industries, where technologies, products and markets are in a continuous state of change must learn how to develop and redeploy their talent in an agile manner. The company recast its Pathfinder software application originally developed to support external recruiting and used it to create an internal job matching system. Pathfinder’s corresponding online database, I-Profiler, allows employees to voluntarily enter their resumes for consideration. The profiles capture employees’ work and educational experience, skills, and technical qualifications and detail their career aspirations for development discussions with their managers. Line managers have access to each of their employees’ profiles to assess existing skills on their teams.

Cisco is looking first to its own internal workforce, encouraging people to self-profile so they have a ready-made talent pool. Their process captures not just past experience but also the employee's career path, encouraging discussions with managers. Ultimately, as new opportunities surface, Cisco will be in a position to make the best use of the talent it has in-house.

New Equities is taking virtually the identical approach in building our own community of IT consultants. Our aim is to proactively network with consultants and profile them well ahead of any specific project requirements. Having a complete professional profile means understanding not just work history but career aspirations, not just skill sets but future potential, not just references but connections. Each person who becomes a member of our community brings new knowledge and new connections that can benefit the community as a whole.  The New Equities network comes into play in uncovering new opportunities, finding the right people, and keeping talented people working.