Managing Values in the Talent Lifecycle

In examining the value of company as the backbone of all enterprise areas, I am going to focus on how values influence your talent lifecycle management.

First of all, we have to determine some Talent Management Areas, to make it easier to understand, here are the 5 steps in the talent management: Attracting, Recruiting, Onboarding, Developing Loyalty, and Upcycling. Let’s have a look at each of them to enlighten the impact of value in each stage of the talent management lifecycle:

ATTRACTING

This step is very tricky, because, when we’re speaking about attracting great candidates to your business, we have to be very precise about what we mean. Generating a lot of applicants is usually not the issue. The point is to generate very targeted and talented applicants with deeply embedded motivations in regards of your company values. Another issue is to be found in how to generate expressed values of the company that are anything but an advertising plan. 2.0 Companies have to face with a leaky tissue layer, we just can’t think like we use to, in terms of inside and outside the company (I had a discussion with a private school in which students planned to make a “Titanic Theme Party,” and where nearly nobody wondered about what message could be understood/misunderstood by reading the ensuing facebook statuses, and tweets and so on outside the school in terms of e-reputation … But party must go on, No ?)

RECRUITING

The way you manage your recruiting is an accurate good reflection of your company values for a candidate. The way you contact a candidate, the number of steps and meetings the candidate has to pass through before hiring, the ability of speaking with people doing the same expertise as he is expected to do, the way you negotiate the new contract, the way you will ask one to sign his contract (there is more than one way to make a job offer: whether you have to print a paper, firm it, scan it and mail it, or having an appointment with the company’s boss for an eye to eye meeting). Another point is how do you manage the time between signing the contract and the 1st day in … All these steps are saying a lot of things about your company’s values to your future employee, because he lives through it. The hiring process is not only wonderful words merged together to be the advertising-value-package-of-the-company, but a real experience and the more distortions between the promise and the reality of the experience, the less engagement you will earn … And all the effort done in the ATTRACTING step could be annihilated.

ONBOARDING

It’s affiliating time, you have to transmit your company culture to a new buddy! The more your employees behavior will align to the values of your employer-branding-communication, the more engagement you will earn. By contrast if there is a perception distortion between the candidate experience and the newbie employee experience in terms of felt values, you will have pretty much no chance to further engage these people.

DEVELOPPING LOYALTY

I’m upset by the term of retaining!!! (but perhaps it’s that the french word “retenir” means keeping with you someone who wants to escape). Loyalty is the point we have to face with. Someone who want to exit very often has good reason to do so and you as a manager have to help him in this endeavor. Retaining means stopping someone from doing something he or she want to do; and if you do that you kill motivation and engagement. The persistence of values in your company can help you to develop people loyalty, in our crazy faster and faster society, values are escaping families, politics , and so on, it could be great (even more for younger employees – millennials) to have this system of values as a permanent reference to anchor the people.

UPCYCLING

First of all, I have titled this step upcycling and not exit for two main reasons: upcycling is a design concept I love: you take some wastes (plastic bottles for exemple) to build something with a very higher value (some polar coats for exemple). And often in talking about HR we are denying the facts: yes, we are producing human wastes when we retain people too long in our companies without any opportunity to grow up, and No it’s not a waste to invest time into an employees’ exit, allowing him or her to keep on growing. Another point, is that when you think upcycling you must have “eco-systematic” (from ecosystem, which goes beyond your current employees) thoughts, and so you have to measure the way your employees exit the company; this is a good indicator of your company values. I go a little bit further: the way you imagine your employees should exit your company is structuring all you talent management policy. Thinking of an employee leaving as exiting – and not upcycling – can traduce all your system of values. I mean if upcycling is the end it is also the goal of talent management; for how to grow my company value in my ecosytem is the very point. What’s the goal of talent management, more often we hear about retaining people, with social networks we can think different: what about if the goal were to make your former employees member of your loyal employee alumni or to imagine that some of them could keep on growing their skills in another company and return to yours the day opportunity strikes (ala Steve Jobs back to Apple). By giving yourself that upcycling aim, you will be obligated to improve the consistency of your value system with regards to your managerial practices within your entire ecosystem.

After some 10 years working in Information Technology, Vincent Rostaing Owner of LE CAIRN 4 IT, believes that Valor is in Human Capital. Vincent Rostaing works to improve talent lifecycle management in new technologies firms. Photo Credit ToolStop on Flickr.