How to Harness the Power of Technology for an Effective Talent Management Framework

HR managers like you know full well how important it is to keep your people happy in the company. Ensuring our workforce has an engaging, enriching and exciting experience is our main objective. When people feel their best, they tend to work better and go above and beyond in the work they do. Creating this 'aha' feeling is what talent management is all about.

Different people have radically different needs. But everyone wants efficiency, social connection at work, seamless communication, unhindered collaboration, unlimited growth, ease of work, flexibility, autonomy to an extent, and access to their information at the right time.

While most of these are subjective, there's one common thread connecting all these expectations from the workforce: they want everything to be integrated, seamless, and efficient, which is exactly what HR technology is capable of doing.

In this article, we'll go over how technology can significantly enhance the talent management framework of a company, right from sourcing to separation, and why you need a smart HR tech tool to ensure your workforce is highly engaged and ready to go full-on.

Where Does Talent Management Begin?

Talent management, on paper, begins when an employee joins you. However, in reality, it starts when as an outsider, they apply for the position you advertised/reached out about.

From the time they get in touch with you, how you treat them, respond to them, value, empathize, and respect them determines the kind of relationship you will have with them.

Talent management is an overarching term that includes all the steps, techniques, and processes you need to do, and have in place, to ensure your workforce productivity doesn't get stalled, they aspire to grow with you, are fulfilled with where they are, and the work they do.

What’s Critical About Talent Management?

Creating a robust talent management framework isn't an overnight thing. Tons of research has to go into understanding your employees, analyzing what's working with your competition and what's not, where's the industry moving, socio-economic changes, technology upgrades that happen frequently, and several other factors that collectively give you a picture of how you need to structure your entire employee lifecycle so that your employees are aligned, happy to be associated with you and deliver their best.

What's critical about talent management is that every step is interconnected with several others. For example, payroll is a simple, but integral cog in the talent management machine. If there's any irregularity, inefficiency, or issue with payroll, it could cause an avalanche of problems and commotion among the employees.

The same goes for other seemingly insignificant yet powerful processes and stages in the talent management framework.

If something goes wrong somewhere, it has the power to cause resentment among employees and spread a bad image of the company internally and externally. However, on the flip side, if you have a robust, agile, team and clearly defined, data-driven, AI-powered technology to keep talent management in check, you're sorted.

Why Do You Need Technology to Create Employee Experience?

Technology in talent management can do wonders. Its benefits are threefold, actually. Let's go over them one by one:

For the Business

The obvious benefit is having an engaged workforce, but what's more?

• 50% greater retention, so you can save on recruitment cost
• 17% increase in employee productivity
• Reports for decision-making, at the click of a button
• Rich analytics to forecast future requirements, based on current patterns
• Single source of truth for any employee insights
• Lesser escalations
• High ROI

For the Employees

As an employee, the seemingly important benefit is doing away with manually punching attendance and endlessly mailing HR for information. But there's more:

• Employees can have all their data at one place, which saves time and effort of coordinating, asking and waiting around for responses from support functions.
• Brings in responsibility and accountability, instead of having other support staff running around to get their information in check.
• Can determine if the company is actually interested and invested in tending to their needs.
• Lesser TAT to get their issues resolved.
• Significantly lesser red tapism, since everyone has access to their own data.

For You

As HR, and gatekeepers of talent in an organisation, bringing in technology to help you with talent management is one of the best things you can do for yourself and for your company.

• No more manual data refreshing
• You don't have to worry about file safety or data confidentiality, as you don't have to maintain data manually
• Eliminates mundane HR operational work
• Saves a lot of time spent in doing repetitive Transactional work.
• Increases time and emotional bandwidth to forge meaningful connections with employees.
• Allows for process improvement, increased efficiency and productivity
• Results in increased employee satisfaction and net promoter score.
• With rich data, and multiple checkpoints, it's easier to delegate, monitor and hold process owners responsible for their actions.

How Can You Integrate Cutting-Edge Technology in Talent Management?

Right from the first stage when you come in contact with a potential candidate, there are several avenues where you can harness the power of technology in your talent management framework. It's a one-time investment, but its rewards will keep on giving for a long time.

1. Talent Sourcing

Being a crucial HR function, your recruitment team needs an advanced AI-powered all-in-one recruitment tool that can connect you to global talent with its wide connections and network. You need an application that can run cold and warm outreach campaigns, access a rich candidate pool of active, passive and past candidates, connect you to multifarious job boards and help you in your inclusive, global hiring.

An high tech, easy to use, expert backed tool like HireQuotient has an intelligent mix of unique features that can create a talent network, reach out to millions of candidates and post your job openings in 100+ job boards instantly, thus cutting your operational tasks in half.

2. Screening

To hire the best talent to take up important functions in your business, you need a fool-proof mechanism to assess and verify their credibility.

But that's not the only thing you need. A smart screening tool, that can automatically read the thousands of applications you get, consolidate them and store them in one unified database, fetch vital and relevant information from each application and show you exactly what you need, and also goes the extra mile to verify credentials and highlight the best of best for you, is exactly what you need in this fast paced, competitive industry.

You cannot afford to have a candidate who's primarily a misfit further into the screening process. You need laser sharp screening technique, that can do a high level thorough screening and give you the cream layer for further assessments.

HireQuotient is capable of doing all this and more, and that's why we're a preferred recruitment tool for start-ups and large corporations alike.

By using Hire Quotient, you not only save time, you save manual verification and sorting efforts for your recruitment team, which can otherwise be spent creating exemplary candidate experiences.

3. Pre-Employment Assessments

Now that we have arrived at the cream layer of candidates, you can proceed to further technical and personality assessments for assessing domain specific knowledge, skills and overall personality.

Instead of having all filtered candidates to interviews, you need to have one or two screening levels, so you can save billable hours and efforts of the entire hiring team.

A domain specific assessment, paired with a job simulation exercise is perfect to determine if the candidate actually knows about their job and domain like they claim to know. Since these assessments have questions or challenges that require the candidates to deploy the competencies they'll actually use on the job, the results speak for themselves.

But, these tests need to be administered right, proctored online, questions or challenges customised to suit the level of the candidates and results to be customised for the hiring team to make a decision.

That's why you need a tool like HireQuotient that has an ocean of skills you can choose from, customise questions to suit the grade, designation and competency level expected in the candidates and administered online, to cover global talent.

The tool's flexibility and agility is exactly what you need, to ensure time, cost savings and 100% efficiency in assessments, with ZERO bias or compromise on quality of hire.

By investing in tech driven pre-employment assessments, you show candidates that you value your time, their time and efforts, and are focused on quality. Level specific, precise assessments also say that you are serious about hiring the best and encourage the candidates to give their best, while projecting you as a sophisticated, authentic brand.

4. Seamless Onboarding

After successful pre-employment assessments and personal interviews with the most suitable candidates, you have arrived at the 'chosen one'.

Now, it's time to onboard them. The candidate is new to your organisation and needs complete handholding to acclimatise and get the grip of people, process and work at your company.

However, they also shouldn't be overwhelmed with new applications, lots of new information even before joining. Finding a middle ground is wise.

The candidate is already familiar with the tool you've been using for candidate engagement and overall recruitment operations. So, it makes sense to have an onboarding module that's similar to that of your recruitment tool.

Planning the onboarding day's agenda, point of contact for the candidate's different touchpoints, training calendar furnished with complete information, contact details of important stakeholders etc can be fed into the system and mailed to the new joiner before the joining date, which is sure to reduce any stresses, doubts or concerns the candidate might have on the first day.

It also gives a great onboarding experience, as it shows the new joiner you actually care about them.

Automating all these operational tasks like sending welcome email to the candidate, personalising it based on the job role they're chosen for, automatically sending reminders or tasks to concerned stakeholders to dispatch welcome kit, laptop, etc ensures these hygiene tasks are carried out on-time, if any pendencies arise, you're able to single out the cause, alert the staller and invigorate the process to reach completion.

Having a seamless Onboarding experience where the candidate gets all vital information, resources and contacts to start with speaks a lot about you and the importance your company gives to its people.

5. Learning & Development

What keeps an organisation going, and in good shape is its people's ability and willingness to grow with the organisation by learning, upskilling, learning and unlearning.

But, when it comes to active learning, most adults take the backseat. We have an innate resistance to learn after a certain age unless we're motivated either internally or externally.

Using technology in your learning and development function can actually give your employees the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation they need.

Firstly, a tech L&D tool takes a skill inventory of your organisation, determines skill levels of employees, compares with the actual competency level required for the role and ascertains the type of training needed. It also allows for collaboration in the tool, where their reporting manager, you, and other stakeholders can collaborate and decide on which training and mode the employee should take up.

The tool can also help you publish or notify several candidates at once, monitor progress, announce important milestones, allow for integration with the common employee communication channel where their learning efforts are appreciated, with or without rewards.

With a tech tool like this, employee learning can be made more fun, autonomous and effective.

6. Rewards & Recognition

When performance is tracked on a tool and linked to the rewards and recognition tool, you can easily track who has met expectations, who has gone and beyond to deserve rewards from the company.

An automated tool will help you sort these employees rank wise, grade wise, enable common employee voting if applicable and get you rich insights.

If the reward is monetary, it can easily be linked to your payroll and calculation transferred to it, so you can ensure the rewards get credited along with the next payroll cycle.

This cyclical, automated process will instil confidence in employees that their efforts will bear fruit for sure.

7. Internal Communication

We're all social beings. No one wants to work in silos. It's best to connect all your employees on a tech communication channel, so that you can make special announcements, instructions, share updates, work anniversary and wishes for employees special occasions, special mentions etc.

When you have an official internal communication and engagement tool, your employees don't have to search for important contacts, get introduced to cross functional teams and develop healthy working relationships.

8. Hybrid Interactions

Since we're all split into two kinds: those working from home and those working from office, you need a tool that seamlessly integrates attendance, meetings, work contribution, etc of both kinds of employees, so that no one feels left out or unheard or unimportant.

9. Performance Management

As an organisation managing numerous employees, you need an agile performance management tool, that can facilitate multi rater, 360 feedback for each employee from all crucial stakeholders.

This holistic performance and potential evaluation tool needs to consider current job performance metrics, competency levels and determine if the employee has met targets and expectations well.

If the candidate is consistently meeting or exceeding expectations, the tool can compare their combination of competencies with those required for the next role in their function and determine if they can be promoted.

Having a future oriented, collaborative performance management tool can save you the trouble of carrying out manual operations and coordination.

If you hardcode rating and increment metrics into the PMS system, it can instantly generate who gets what % of increment etc, thus saving you hours and hours of manual work, leaves no room for bias and takes data straight to approval then to payroll.

This system enhances employee trust, enables timely performance review and proper consequence management.

10. Attendance Management

With your workforce working hybrid or entirely remote, you need an agile attendance Management system that caters to all shifts, all modes of working, incorporates leave policies for all leave calendars in your company and gives you a consolidated report for you to approve and give a go-ahead for payroll.

11. Seamless Query Handling

Whenever employees have any queries, their natural instinct is to either go to their manager or HR.

When you're the only one being approached for all tasks your workload and pressure mounts. The only way out is to properly delegate tasks to the stakeholders concerned.

Bringing an automated tool that enables employees to raise a ticket with the concerned department, view status, communicate and follow-up directly, you save a lot of time coordinating between people.

12. Exit Management

Exit is often an overlooked activity for the HR. There's a lot of work involved, plenty of coordination to be done and several layers of approval to be sought.

By bringing in an automated tool, you not only eliminate any errors, you bring in process efficiency.

You can set a step by step workflow for exit which can help the employee and their manager in understanding where and how information flows. By bringing all stakeholders concerned, connecting them wherever their inputs or approval is required, you bring in accountability, clarity, enhance operational excellence and ensure a smooth hassle-free exit experience for your employee, which will definitely increase your credibility as a thoughtful, caring employer.

Conclusion

Now that you know how you can bring in technology to improve your talent management framework, what are you waiting for?

Start now by automating the most important function of recruitment with a high-end, easy to use end-to-end recruitment and candidate engagement tool like HireQuotient to get you the best talent for your brand and get a positive headstart to your talent management framework.