Perspectives On Conceptual Triangle: Talent Management, Sustainability, Organizational Catalytic Abilities

Surya Darpita, Regional Head Talent Acquisition Asia Pacific, Consumer Goods Industry, SC Johnson

Since the phrase “war for talent” was coined by McKinsey, the term “talent management (TM)” has received a remarkable degree of practitioner and academic interest. Since the environment for most organizations today is global, complex, dynamic, highly competitive and extremely volatile, organizations both locally and globally recognize that they have a critical responsibility to recruit, develop, deploy, manage and retain their most valuable asset—talent. This cruciality of the Talent Management were then linked back with the pandemic era, as post pandemic those volatility and dynamics are just gone up to a very broad spectrum. Three factors that are most impacted are listed below with the organization being the catalyst of the two.

Talent Management – Rethink and Integrate Marketing Strategy

We used to tag external talent as “candidate” which terminology-wise is valid. However, the magnitude of external factors influencing business are getting greater that HR and Business Leaders needs widen their horizon to scout and manage talent even when they aren’t their direct employees. Talent and Business Customers now are separated to a very thin border. When business direction are influenced by the external factors, they need to also consider where the customer’s behaviours has shifted to, and what the talents are demanding from a broader perspective. Thus the scope of organizations talent management strategy needs to also factored in external talent sentiments. Organizations need to re-think their employer branding strategy, and start treating external talents as their organization’s customers, and thus segmented them to have more targeted pipeline.

"Future organizations needs to be more agile, by being a catalyst of Talent Management (internally or externally) and Broader spectrum of Sustainability, to win the war of talent and overcome internal retention issues" 

Sustainability – Talent Strategical Perspective

Most CEOs explicitly pointed out that talent management was too important to be left to the Human Resources (HR) alone, therefore CEO share 20% – 50% of their time on talent issues. Talents, internally or externally, has much more awareness on the sustainability thanks to pandemic. The way writer’s view sustainability, is not only environmentally, but also gears more towards the talent needs – professionally, and personally. Talents are now more attracted to join company that proven to share back to community and think about our blue planet, give them a well-rounded of compensation and benefits, and give them opportunity to have healthy mental and well-being including the piece of job security. We’ve seen lots of great campaign from industry leaders that putting together all these factors and has proven their stronger footprints in attracting talents. Many other organizations taking another strategy and look deeper into their organization, and has more robust talent rotation that enable more generalists instead of specialist, resulting the organization to be more agile and adaptive. Surely the e nvironmental sustainability is also very important, and organization needs to take the momentum to share to the talent market how they are doing in terms of this space. Hot topic has been hovering around plastic usage and waste, which globally, it was reported only 9% plastic recycled, and global plastic recycling rates is only less than 20%. This could be a deal breaker for external talents to come into your organization if they have visibility of any efforts you are doing that shared their values and thus they want to play role in it.

Organization as catalyst Talent Management and Sustainability

Organization needs to works like a catalyst, that will speed up the process of their talent management systems to support a very fast changing and uncertain environments. It means that the HR and Business Leaders need to work harmoniously to rethink on their business strategy, and to re-align the targeted outcome with their talent needs after assessing their internal talents availability. A report mentioned, the higher a position’s profile, the more resources the hiring process for that role requires—all for an unknown result. Will your new hire work out? It might seem like a game of chance at times. In fact, one 2018 survey suggests that a surprising 30% of new hires will ultimately leave that position within three months of their first day on the job – thus internal movement if possible are game changer and cost saving at least on the long run. Organization also need to have structured model how are they looking to play part to give more value to their products, by joining any global movement for a better world. Talents are more motivated to see that they’re organization are sharing their values by proactively putting efforts for a better world, and talent attraction will just come naturally once they’re doing their job and advocating their movements to influence other organization and be industry leader.

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