3 Talent Management Consulting Tips to Keep Top Talent Performing

Winning Talent Management Strategies
Talent management consulting experts know that winning talent management strategies are about more than just recruiting the top talent you need to compete and thrive.

What to Do After the Candidate Accepts Your offer
While it is critical (and not easy) to attract and hire winning talent that fits with your unique culture, talent management consulting experiences tell us that the next steps of onboarding and assimilating new hires so new employees get involved quickly, feel productive, and have a voice in planning their future with the company is even more important.

Unfortunately, too many organizations focus so much of their energy on competing for talent that they neglect to develop that hard to find talent once those new employees have been hired. What these companies don’t realize is that they have hired “A” players but are giving them only “D” level attention.

What Top Talent Craves
We know from assessing organizational culture that top talent craves meaningful work, a healthy and high performance culture, and a path upward that aligns with the overall company direction. If your talent feels unappreciated or under-valued, they will look elsewhere; you can ill afford to lose employees that matter.

The current estimate on the cost for replacing an employee is approximately 1.3 times their salary. Are you ready to risk losing your top talent?

Three High Performance Talent Management Tips
Instead, here are three talent management consulting tips to keep top talent aboard and performing at their best:

1. Be Strategic In The Way You Utilize Talent
   Based on your clear strategy for the business, both short- and long-term, place your talent where it will have the greatest positive impact. Match each high potential employee’s background, skills, and inner-personal qualities with the specific job and performance environment you have determined is essential to company success.

   Share with them your rationale for the assignment and encourage their help in planning how they can best contribute.

2. Provide Targeted Development Opportunities
   High potentials love to learn and grow. But irrelevant training is a waste of their time and your money. Be selective about the learning and development opportunities you offer. Each should have specific business objectives, learning objectives and immediate relevance to the job.

   Then hold high performing employees accountable with performance metrics that are clear, accurate, fair, meaningful, aligned, timely, and achievable with the right amount of effort.

3. Stay Connected
   Maintain regular communication with these critical employees. Of course, you want a high level of engagement throughout the company, but it is most important that you retain these top performers.  Check in on a regular basis to assess their level of engagement and commitment to the company.

   Make sure you recognize and reward contributions.  Show that you are ready to invest in their development by providing constructive feedback and targeted learning plans tied to their career development aspirations.  Foster open and honest communication to learn what they care about personally.

   The degree to which your organization can align its values with your employee’s personal values increases their engagement in the company’s mission.

The Bottom Line
It is not enough to attract and hire the right employees if you want to outperform your peers through people. Success depends upon how well you engage and retain your top talent. Don’t stop trying to win them over once they accept your offer. Follow through on keeping your top talent engaged and committed to the organization.

If you want to learn more about how to onboard top talent, download 7 New Employee Orientation and Onboarding Best Practices for Speed to Productivity