How a Strategic Talent Advisor Helps Your Company Grow and Flourish.
It’s not recruiting. It’s cultivation.
You’ve heard the refrain, “Just get some bodies in here.” Managers can be so desperate for help they’ll hire, well, literally anyone with a pulse. But then productivity plummets anyway, frustration spreads, and HR is left with a mountain of work trying to mitigate the damage. But while this approach is obviously short-sighted, it’s just the tip of the iceberg of what’s wrong with talent acquisition. In fact, the whole approach to talent acquisition is so broken that it needs a complete reframing.
A good strategic talent advisor thinks of your organization as an orchard, and your talent like the trees in this orchard — living beings that require nurturing to bear fruit. Here’s a new way to think about how you acquire and develop your talent.
Talent Acquisition Is the Seed of Your Company’s Success
To flesh out this orchard analogy, think of your company as a large field. You don’t want to just plant any old seeds in this field — you need good seeds that will bear the kind of fruit you want. They don’t all have to grow into the same kind of tree, but they do have to be able to grow in harmony. If you want an apple orchard, you shouldn’t plant olive tree seeds. The talent you acquire, like these seeds, should have a DNA profile that fits your company’s.
Think of Your Company’s Culture as Your Orchard’s Soil
Your trees will grow in soil that provides them with all the nutrients they need. This soil is your company’s culture, which feeds your talent and encourages its growth. Just as withered trees may be a sign of bad soil, if your talent is leaving or disengaged, you may have a problem with your culture.
Create a Talent Development Program to Keep Your Trees Growing Strong
Some trees may require more supervision while growing than others, just as certain individuals might benefit from more hands-on management and mentorship than their colleagues. This is where talent development comes in. Your talent development program should serve the same purpose as the poles that keep young trees from growing crooked but should be flexible enough to allow for different management styles.
Who’s Doing the Planting and Tending in Your Orchard?
This all sounds like a Herculean task, doesn’t it? If you’re an HR professional, having to handle talent acquisition and development along with all your other duties can be daunting. So it’s understandable for a company to lean on the services of a recruiter to at least handle the acquisition part of this process.
To continue with our orchard analogy, though, a recruiter is the equivalent of the customer service person at Home Depot who sells you a packet of seeds, or maybe a sapling. You’ve acquired your talent, but you simply may not have the bandwidth to give it the care it needs.
If you’re looking to create an orchard that produces the best fruit, you’re going to turn to a specialist, someone who knows how to keep trunks and branches growing straight and tall, can help prune or redirect branches that may be headed in the wrong direction, and knows how all the trees should be growing together.
This is the role a strategic talent advisor plays in your organization: an arborist, but for talent. A strategic talent advisor will help you get the right talent seeds and plant them in the right spot, and make sure your culture is providing a healthy, nourishing foundation. They ensure your talent grows and thrives, and provide explanations and solutions when your talent doesn’t.
The Result: Great Fruit
When you tend your orchard properly, your talent trees will bear the best fruit. This fruit comes from happy, thriving employees: creative ideas, executed beautifully.
V/G is a strategic talent search & development consultancy partnering with the world’s most renowned technology companies to help them find, retain and cultivate top talent in tech.
