When devising a strategy on how to retain employees, one of the first considerations is top talent management. A recent survey by Manpower’s Right Management group found that more than 50 percent of U.S. employers are already having a tough time filling mission critical positions. That’s an increase of 14 percent from 2010. This underscores why it’s more important than ever to retain the key performers you already have in place – you may have difficulty replacing them!
Defining Top Talent
While employee turnover is costly no matter the level in the organization, it can be argued that the expense is multiplied for individuals or roles deemed to be critical to the organization. Key employees cost much more to replace because they are more difficult to find and often require special reward packages and development efforts. This is why you should focus a lot of effort into retaining your top talent.
The first step is to develop clarity around what defines “top talent” and around the definition of “high potential” for various functions. This lets you focus on the right individuals.
Organizations also typically don’t define which jobs are considered to be critical within the organization. While it can be tempting to say that every job is critical – otherwise the role wouldn’t exist – you need to be able to focus your recruiting and retaining efforts by differentiating between critical and non-critical roles. This is another key activity to recruiting or retaining key talent; by identifying which jobs are the most important and treating them accordingly when recruiting for these roles, you will know how to focus recruiting efforts.
“Having clarity around the purpose, application, and process of a critical job is important. If you don’t have very clear understanding of the purpose of the job, that will come out in the interview.” Brandon Cherry explained during a recent CER webinar. To put these ideas together, you need to align top talent management with the management of critical job posts and clarify the eligibility requirements for critical jobs.
By taking these simple steps you can move your organization into a position where you can not only understand the top talent and most critical positions in the organization, but you can also recruit and retain for these roles more successfully.
This information is excerpted from the CER webinar “Win the Talent Scarcity Fight: How to Recruit and Retain for Hard-to-Fill Positions.” with expert Brandon Cherry. To register for a future webinar, visit CER webinars.
Brandon Cherry is a Principal with Hay Group, where he assists clients with the design and implementation of cash incentives, equity-based incentives, group incentives and executive pay strategies.