Talent Management Trends

Talent management technology enables human resource departments to drive performance and meet the needs of business. Talent management is a strategic approach to recruiting and retaining the best talent and, though frequently existing in immature forms, is appearing in more and more organizations.

However, Aberdeen’s 2011 HR Executive Agenda report revealed that 39 percent of organizations lack any talent management strategy at all. More optimistically, the report also revealed that more than 80 percent of best-in-class organizations have aligned their talent management initiatives with the organizational business strategy.

Talent acquisition is the talent management area experiencing the greatest change and the top pressures facing acquisition specialists were found to be growing competition for the same talent (51 percent), skill shortage (49 percent), and strains in reaching business goals (49 percent). Many organizations are relying upon technology to respond to these pressures. About 80 percent of polled organizations stated that they either currently use or plan to use technology to meet organizational recruitment needs.

One of the primary drives for the change in the process of talent acquisition and the higher demand for acquisition technology is the current condition of the labor market leaving organizations no choice but to devise creative approaches to talent. One example of this change in focus is job boards, which were once the primary recruitment tool in the “post and pray” acquisition method. Today, employee referral programs and career sites have overtaken job boards as talent sources. This shift is largely due to a change in how talent acquisition success is measured. Aberdeen’s 2011 Talent Acquisition Lifecycle report revealed that the top metric for measuring recruitment results is the quality of the hire; a shift from the previous goals of cost-effectiveness and simply finding warm bodies to fill positions.