TALENT
Attract and develop tomorrow's top performers
As the gig economy continues to replace traditional careers, and a new generation with different expectations comes to the fore, finding, grooming, and retaining talent is harder than ever. At the same time, agile enterprises need to attract and hire top candidates who are also team players and will add to the culture.
Learning & growth mindset
Enhanced productivity
Engagement & retention
CULTIVATING TALENT WITH AGILITY
Organizations, small and large, have always strived to recruit and retain the best talent. In recent years, the complexity of organizational needs, diversity of available skills, and sheer scale created by growing economies has given birth to more rigorous methods of study—and the field of agile talent management.
Agile enterprises recognize that top talent is their lifeblood. Their leaders focus on attracting, selecting, developing, and retaining the best people. Talent management becomes pervasive, impacting the business and operating model. Culture is actively managed, and important decisions made by the organization consider impact on talent.
The best organizations are able to recruit and develop team members who are intrinsically passionate about the vision and purpose. These team members take full ownership for delivering value, and collaborate with each other to create a strong feeling of community within the organization. Top talent leaves an indelible mark on culture, allowing these organizations to sustain high performance year in and year out.
Enterprise Agility requires not just the best talent, but a growth mindset, entrepreneurial drive, and a high level of trust. Leaders can recruit team members who reflect these characteristics, but they also have a responsibility to catalyze their talent by acting as visionaries, architects, coaches, and enablers.
HOW WE HELP
Low unemployment, increasing demand, and heated competition for top resources have created a talent shortage. We collaborate closely with business and HR leaders to advise on attraction, and help generate deep, talent-rich applicant pools.
Developing deep talent pools ensures that an organization is selecting from the best available candidates. The next step is to follow a selection process that ensures that only the best candidates for an agile enterprise are chosen.
The disruptive impacts of technology and automation have made life more challenging and complex for today’s employees. For many, a flexible mindset, continuous learning, and planning for multiple careers in a lifetime are all now necessities.
Approach talent attraction holistically
Low unemployment, increasing demand, and heated competition for top resources have created a talent shortage. Uploading a generic posting on a job board and expecting a superstar candidate to walk-in is no longer a reliable strategy.
Differentiating your organization with an employee value proposition is a great start to the attraction effort. A value proposition establishes an organization as a real player in the job market. Even on its own, the proposition can generate considerable goodwill, which is further amplified by word-of-mouth.
However, having a compelling value proposition is not sufficient for an organization wishing to attract varied skill sets, a diverse workforce, and a combination of junior and senior talent. Leaders must also actively encourage word-of-mouth, build a social media presence, reach out to target schools and programs, network at relevant events and forums, develop thought leadership, and personally contact potential candidates.
Before wading into the job market, leaders need a clear understanding of the type of candidate they are looking for—someone with the right skills, who will also add to the culture and generate new value. A candidate persona keeps leaders and team members aligned on the type of candidate that can fill the need. It also provides clues on how to craft a job posting that will attract the ideal candidate.
Attraction is a team activity. Most, if not all, areas of the organization can play a constructive role to bring the best talent into the pipeline. Leaders and team members should be encouraged to play an active role in the outreach, through networking, referrals, or testimonials. Attraction is also a year-round effort. Because the recruitment process can be long, and some offers will be declined, it’s a losing strategy to wait until the position opens to initiate the effort.
Finally, with the advent of a number of online attraction tools, previously arduous efforts—replicating the right branding materials for various channels, posting on a large enough number of job boards, measuring the success of attraction campaigns—can be partially automated. As a result, leaders can now focus on positioning, on-the-ground networking, and continuously improving the attraction effort.
We collaborate closely with business and HR leaders to advise on attraction, and help generate deep, talent-rich applicant pools.
Select candidates that enhance collaboration and culture
Developing deep talent pools ensures that an organization is selecting from the best available candidates. The next step is to follow a selection process that ensures that only the best candidates for an agile enterprise are chosen.
There are several unique considerations when choosing candidates for agile:
- Leaders must shift from hiring for functional talent and specific hard skills to hiring T-shaped talent—people who are quick learners and have the soft skills to collaborate.
- Those involved in the selection process should be able to identify candidates who can thrive in an agile workplace. These are good team players who are able to adapt to changing circumstances, and who have certain personality traits like humility, agreeableness, comfort with uncertainty, and openness to new ideas.
- Recruiting for diversity is essential, as is cultivating an inclusive environment. When a diversity of perspectives is represented and differences are welcome, teams out-innovate and provide greater value to a wider customer base.
- The selection process should involve those with whom the candidate will work upon joining. This gives both parties the chance to build personal connections and relationships along the way, and ensures there is a good fit.
Talent should be selected carefully, since bad hiring decisions can be costly and can take considerable time and effort to unwind.
The selection process effectively begins at the point when a resume or a candidacy is first received. Clear filtering guidelines allow only the candidates with high potential to proceed to the interview stage.
The interview rounds consist of behavioral, analytical, and skill-specific questions, as well as short case studies. Depending on the needs of the organization and the job, a more involved half- or full-day panel case study may be recommended. Clear evaluation criteria are used to compare and objectively contrast candidates across a number of mindsets, behaviors, and skills. The final interview round involves a fit interview with the relevant leader or senior team members.
The multiple rounds of the selection process not only allow the organization to assess the candidate, but also help desirable candidates to understand the environment that they will be stepping into.
A well-executed selection process ensures that there is organizational and cultural fit, and that offers are only made to the top candidates. Throughout the selection process, candidates are left with a positive impression of the recruiting organization and a high motivation to join. Those who are selected tend to enter with enthusiasm and accurate expectations.
We draw on our considerable experience in designing and customizing best practice selection approaches to enable agile enterprises to hire the best talent. We also help you adopt tools that make it easier to develop application forms, track applicants, conduct grading and evaluation, schedule interviews, communicate with candidates, and analyze the applicant pipeline.
Empower employees to take charge of development
The disruptive impacts of technology and automation have made life more challenging and complex for today’s employees. For many, a flexible mindset, continuous learning, and planning for multiple careers in a lifetime are all now necessities.
Meanwhile, traditional approaches to performance development fall woefully short when it comes to enabling agility. Performance development remains siloed, top-down, and focused on hard skills, and tends to reward individual as opposed to team performance.
Few people are happy with the way their organization handles performance development:
- 95% of managers are dissatisfied
- 58% of HR executives consider reviews to be ineffective
- 74% of millennials feel “in the dark” about how they’re performing at work
Enterprise Agility requires a paradigm shift in performance development. This means putting employees in charge of their own growth, focusing on shorter time frames with quicker feedback, providing bite-sized development opportunities, and separating reward from development conversations.
In an agile environment, the responsibility for development falls on the individual, who is encouraged to actively and regularly seek feedback and opportunities to grow. The individual is supported by a community of practice. The leader of the community of practice completes performance reviews for all of its members, based on feedback from multiple sources: other members of the community, the individual’s scrum master, and members of the individual’s agile team. In this way, both mindsets and job skills are assessed, teaming behaviors are encouraged, and any biases in the leader’s evaluations are minimized.
Instead of annual reviews focused on past performance, communities of practice conduct reviews frequently and foster a culture of continuous improvement, both for teams and individuals. The practice leader also works with the individual to create personalized development paths that are congruent with team and organizational objectives. Agile mindsets, collaboration, and team performance are rewarded.
Drawing lessons from agile delivery, we enable leaders to revitalize performance development, empower employees, and firmly embed a growth mindset in their organization.