The Top 5 Ways To Optimize The Talent Pipeline In Your Organization

You are responsible for growing the talent pool in your organization or department. All is well until 1–2 key departures leave you scrambling to find qualified people within your organization for key positions. You decide to broaden your search to the outside…but it takes forever…where is all the talent when you need it?

When it comes to nurturing talent within your organization, the key is to focus on your processes as much as your outcomes.

You can’t only focus on having talent when you need it, you need to be preparing your talent pool at all times. Here are the top 5 ways to do that:

1) Hire Well, and Fire Quickly

Easier said than done. But worth calling out, nevertheless.

Your hiring process sets the foundation for your talent level— if you don’t hire well, you fight an uphill battle from the start.

One great tip for hiring— set expectations well. If incoming employees think they will be doing one set of tasks, and then, once they start, they are asked to do another set which is vastly different, they may be disappointed and leave. Take the time to access career aspirations, personality fit, skills match, etc. while vetting potential employees to identify any obvious mismatches.

Barring serious offenses, employees usually deserve a chance to prove themselves after mistakes or poor performance. This is doubly true for top performers who may be going through a rough patch and just need support to push through it. Once you have exhausted all support options though, and things still aren’t working out, don’t be afraid to let go of bad employees.

Negativity, in particular, can be detrimental to work culture. It is contagious, so do yourself a favor, and, if you can’t fix the negativity quickly, let go of the person who is causing it.

2) Create a Culture of Growth and Learning

It is critical to invest in your employees.

The fear is that you spend significant money training your employees and then they leave…but let me ask you this:

What if you don’t train your employees and then they stay?

There are secondary benefits to investing in your employees. For one, it attracts individuals to your organization who value continual learning and career growth. You help out your recruiters by attracting the right people to join your organization. Being known as an organization that invests in your employees is great for your brand.

Encourage employees to explore creative side projects for the organization. Employees tend to work harder on things they are passionate about, so if they can add value in activities beyond their normal job duties, allow them.

Tolerate mistakes from employees. Mistakes are part of learning from experience. Encourage employees not to repeat the same mistakes though.

Creating the right culture takes time, but the payoff is worth it.

3) Reward with Autonomy and Appreciation

You see that a talented employee is unhappy…should you give the employee more money? Will that big raise or bonus actually help morale?

If you haven’t already, read my post on how to motivate — you may be missing the most important thing to know about motivation.

A good salary, relative to the market, is an important way that employees use to gauge how much you care about them and value their services. So take care of your employees. However, and with that said, unless an employee has explicitly expressed that money is the issue causing his/her unhappiness, you should not just throw money at employees when they are unhappy and expect to solve the problem.

That method may work in the short-term, but the resulting happiness boost is only temporary. In fact, for talented performers with options, they may accept your raise AND THEN LEAVE. As sad as that scenario is, it’s actually better than the alternative — an unhappy person stays within your organization after the temporary happiness boost wears off. And remember, unhappiness and negativity can spread within an organization, so unhappiness is not something you want to leave unaddressed.

Autonomy — a self governing state.

A much more effective strategy to improve employee morale is to reward your employees with autonomy and recognition/appreciation when they perform well. These rewards cost the organization less financially and are more motivating than money.

According to studies, autonomy is linked with increased employee happiness. If you are going to micromanage, do it for new employees, and then slowly reward them with autonomy.

By giving autonomy, you allow employees the power to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences (good or bad). You give them responsibility and accountability. Obviously, employees should not be given full autonomy in the beginning. But as they earn your trust with good performance, reward them accordingly. Another strong component of autonomy is feeling like ideas can be shared and heard, even if they are not implemented within the organization. Make people feel included and value their contributions.

Employees will light up with confidence when they can demonstrate they have positively contributed to the organization and mission. No career feeling is better than when an employee can say “I helped out my organization. My decisions and actions made a difference to others.” People love pointing to numbers of how many people they’ve impacted or how much money they’ve saved or earned for the company.

4) Have Achievement Measures and Milestones

It is important to help your employees set SMART goals for each performance period. Stay ambitious. Use metrics to measure progress.

This is ultimately where your talent gets evaluated. The outcomes.

Analyze your employee data. In the age of big data, you should be analyzing both individual employee data and group data to look for trends. Identify best practices and share them within your organization.

Each level of your organization should be defined by specific behaviors, experiences, responsibilities, performance levels, and/or actions that employees need to master before advancing to the next level.

Have a promotion queue, and let employees know where they stand — employees value transparency. The two statuses at every level should be 1) not ready to be promoted and 2) ready to be promoted.

If employees are not ready for promotion, they should know exactly what they need to do to get ready. If they are ready for promotion, let them know when the next one could be.

Sometimes circumstances dictate that there are no openings. If the next possible promotion date is too far away, and an employee decides to leave because of it, wish them well. Remember it is better to see qualified people leave than to see unqualified people stay. Having too much talent in your organization is a good problem.

5) Build in Redundancy, But Not At The Expense of Autonomy And Accountability

Build in overlap with job functions and skillsets so you are prepared if a few key employees leave abruptly.

Overlap both knowledge and role responsibilities, where possible. Give rewards for knowledge and experience sharing, even if the rewards are just autonomy or appreciation.

No one wants to feel replaceable, that’s just human nature. The truth is, on an individual level, no one actually is — we are all snowflakes, unique individuals. But from a job role perspective, and in a business context, everyone is replaceable. Most employees are unlikely to provide cover for themselves, by default, and especially while they are still working in a role. Your processes must incorporate some form of knowledge and experience sharing among employees, or at least strongly incentivize it.

Sometimes you have “super-employees” that cannot be replaced easily. One solution to alleviate stress when these employees leave is to distribute their job duties across multiple employees. But, honestly, if you really have someone that you can’t replace easily, even after extensive knowledge sharing, try extra hard to keep that individual. They must bring something special to your organization — they are a rare talent.

Another pro tip — don’t always force employees into specified job roles. For example, let’s say for the past 10 years, you’ve had job role 1 with tasks A, B, and C, and job role 2 with tasks D, E, F. And you find yourself in a situation with two unique employees — one excels at tasks A, B, and F, and the other is exceptional at tasks C and E. Where possible, shift duties around to let employees do what they are good at. Find someone else to pick up task D, and adjust all pay accordingly.

The key to successful implementation of redundancy is balancing it with autonomy and accountability. What you don’t want is for two employees to have the exact same job role and responsibilities, and then watch accountability slip through the cracks when neither has ownership or authority to make a firm decision without conflicting with or having to overrule the other. That is inefficient. A better approach is to have individuals sit in on certain meetings as backup, own specific subsections of a larger project, or perform parallel roles that are similar to, but not exactly the same as, the role in question.

That’s it for now! Now go improve your talent pool!

Thanks for reading :P