Talent management

Strategic management of talent yields real business benefits, but only if talent is correctly identified, performance effectively managed, and high achievers put on a path of opportunities that lead them to their full potential.

We work with high performing organizations to identify talent, determine competency-based development paths, develop talent retention strategies, and to evaluate individual requirements for the optimization of long-term performance capabilities.

Talent management is a soft and elusive dimension of management. The clearer an organization defines its strategy, and the specific contribution individual roles are expected to make within the strategy, the greater the ease and sustainability with which the organization can optimise the talent within it.

This is the complex mesh that we work with clients to navigate.

Our work in talent management focuses on the development of organizational competency architecture, from which we develop corporate, functional and role-specific competencies.  We structure each of these around knowledge, technical, and behavioural competencies, which provide objective basis for the identification, evaluation and development of talent.

From the emergent competency profiles at various levels, and in close consultation with the client, we develop recruitment, selection, development and performance management strategies as part of a comprehensive strategy aimed at meeting the organisation’s current and future performance requirements.

This approach enables our clients' HR functions to play the strategic role that the HR function is rightly supposed to play in progressive organisations.

An effective talent management strategy is a big business advantage.

Because the organisation’s knowledge, skill and experience requirements are carefully planned for, and specific ways of meeting them determined, sourcing for matching talent is that much easier.  Recruitment costs come down, as do interference costs and other losses emanating from reduced productivity over the period of recruitment and placement.

A well implemented talent management strategy will also afford you better utilization of your learning and development budget, since the learning and development path for specific people in specific roles within specific functions will have been planned in advanced and aligned to the organisation’s capacity and productivity requirements.

Various challenges around succession planning are also addressed, and organizational capacity development targeted at what really matters.

The value of performance management is also greatly enhanced within an effective talent management strategy. Performance management ceases to predominantly focus on discrimination of reward, and more importantly, becomes the means by which group and individual performance is aligned to organisational performance requirements.

This way, the people management function plays its righful role in the organisation.

We see, over the next ten years, considerable gains to be made from investment in advisory around strategy, finance and assurance, especially, through which our clients will be looking to optimize performance and to obtain the greatest return from increasingly scarce resources.

We also expect the changing character of organizations to continue presenting various challenges relating to the management of human resources, and in particular, with respect to management of staff performance and the optimization of latent employee capabilities.

Based on our analysis of corporate performance drivers within the regions we serve, our current five-year plan aims to achieve the following, among others:

• Enhance our regional advisory capabilities to more effectively respond to client requirements;
• Broaden our Success Model Suite (SMS) solutions to match our clients’ changing requirements;
• Increase investment in global business data sourcing in order to consolidate our global advisory capacity;
• Extend reach and accessibility of our advisory solutions beyond traditional channels;
• Leverage our investment in technology to achieve operational efficiency, minimise operational risk and to guarantee service quality.

Along with these, we hope to continue consolidating our advisory capacity through increased sharing and access to proprietary consulting methodologies, case references, and other resources in our knowledge bank.

To achieve this, we are looking to make significant investment in the technologies on which our practice is based, and in the people that our strategy’s success will depend on.