Talent Management 20.07.

2020

The Future of Talent Management

Future of Talent Management

Talent Management (TM) so far: (McDonnell et al., 2017)

- Ever since "war for talent" has begun TM it has become very popular (past two
decades)
- A lot of publications with numbers rising still today
- Has become and will become even more strategically important due to:
- aging workforce, falling birth rates
- internationalisation, global communication and mobility
- digitalization and Work 4.0

Impediments to further progress: (McDonnell et al., 2017)

Regarding methodologies and research:
- too little empirical work and evidence
- often unclear definition, insufficient theories, and not distinctive enough from
HR in general
- actual "talents" are often not involved in the research or asked for their opinion,
too much focus on (HR-) managers
Regarding practical implementation:
- adaptation in big organizations, but not yet in the public sector
- wrong or insufficient performance indicators (e.g., stock market performance)
- need to establish (short- and long-term) contributions of Talent Management
practices to encourage further investments and developments

Too much focus on individual talents? (McDonnell et al., 2017)

- Polarisation between talents and non-talents
- Questionable fairness, equity, and justice
- Neglecting complexity and interactions in team performance

Big Data
Coping with the complexity: (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2017)
- Big Data as a chance and tool to measure more innovative and reliable performance
indicators
- Using large amounts of external (recruiting: social media, Linkedin) or company-
internal (performance indicators, work hours, 360 ° feedback) data to gain further
insight

How is it possible to work with Big Data in TM? (Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2016)
- Technological advances in three key areas have made it possible
Data scraping:
- Gathering data from websites, smartphones, and computer networks
- Translating it into behavioral insights
Data storage:

Anne-Sophie Forche, Dominic Norcross, Paula Rivera

Talent Management 20.07.2020

- Development of storage devices due to large amounts of useful data e.g., iCloud,
Dropbox

Data analytics:
- Allows to rapidly transform purely qualitative information into quantitative data
- Allows the data to submitted to a variety of new analytic techniques

New opportunities to identify talent signals

(Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2016; Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2017)
- The possibility to evaluate massive data sets has enabled innovations on talent
identification
- These new ventures are mainly based on four methodologies
Digital interviewing and voice profiling:
- Allows employers to storage and watch the recordings at their convenience
- Possibility to compare candidate’s speech pattern to a desirable model
Social media analytics & web scraping:
- Data from social media as the digital equivalent of identity claims
- Prediction of psychometric tests scores using “likes” as data input
Big data and workplace analytics:
- Today organizational performance data is vast and fine-grained
- It could predict team effectiveness and identify central nodes in the network
Gamification:
- Similarities between playing online role-playing games and situations in the
workplace e.g., cooperation, leadership, decision making
- It may improve person-job fit

Cautions regarding these new innovations

(Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2016; Chamorro-Premuzic et al., 2017)
- They have not yet demonstrated validity comparable to traditional methods
- The cost of building new tools may be prohibitive
- New tools are extremely likely to identify an individual's ethnicity, gender, or sexual
orientation as well as talent signals
- Privacy and anonymity concerns: Three issues must be resolved: Data ownership and
sharing, data privacy and access, and the ethical use of data

Why HR is set to fail the big data challenge (Angrave et al., 2016)

- central arguments:
- lack of understanding of analytics thinking by the HR profession
- HR analytics industry provides often too genereic tools, which don’t create real
specific value
- Grim outlook → Analytics may:
- embed mainly financial and engineering perspectives, while overgoing HR
perspectives, reducing strategic influence of HR
- damage quality of working life and employee well-being, without delivering
sustainable competitive advantage

→ What needs to happen:

Anne-Sophie Forche, Dominic Norcross, Paula Rivera

Talent Management 20.07.2020

- More academic analytics expertise and know-how within organisations and HR analytics
needed
- Accepting big data as more than a “nice to have”, adapt big data solutions to answer the
right (company or industry specific) questions

Which other trends do exist?

Development of new core competencies (Whysall, Owtram & Brittain, 2019)

- (still) Ongoing displacement of human labor through technology (-> costs, efficiency) -> no
longer those with the highest technical expertise are the most successful in engineering /
get promoted

Diversification (Crowley-Henry & Ariss, 2018)

- Organizations become more international -> skilled migrants in key-positions are a
strategic advantage (e.g., through cross-cultural adaptability, flexibility, etc.)

Other groups that may be underrecognized, e.g., women and non-binary persons, persons with
unusual educational careers, persons with disabilities or neurodivergent and especially in
Germany: people from the eastern-German state

Employee-led change - The arrival of a new generation (Nolan, 2015)

- While millenials and their characteristics are already established at the job market, future
generations will come and have their own characteristics -> effective talent management
needs to be aware of that to stay attractive for young talents

Transforming Talent Management actively? (Claus, 2019)

1. Design thinking
Method, that tries to apply methods of design on HR problems
-> wants to improve employees experience of HR
- Three key principles: Empathize (understanding workforce and their problems), Envision
(creating options and turn these options into solutions) and Experiment (test these
possible solutions)
- Tools including: experience mapping, touchpoint simplification, rapid prototyping

2. Behavioral economics
Combination of Economics and Psychology
Human behavior bounded by three traits: bounded rationality, willpower, and self-interest:
possible implication:
- Awareness about roots of judgment
- Nudging
- Leveraging intrinsic motivation

3. Agile management
Departure from traditional waterfall project management
flexible and interactive method in self-organized teams

Anne-Sophie Forche, Dominic Norcross, Paula Rivera