Talent Management and Succession Planning

Talent Management is the ongoing, systemised process of identifying, developing and retaining the organisation’s high potential individuals. The intent is to create a talent pipeline in order to replace future leadership and other key positions. This process will be guided through the competencies, business performance and the strategic direction of the organisation.

Succession planning is the leading edge of talent management and it is focused on specific key positions and identifying certain high potential individual (successors) to fill the positions as they become vacant.

Talent management is not about filling vacancies, but about creating competitive potential for tomorrow in order to maintain an organisation’s competitiveness in the marketplace and increase shareholder value.

The key components of these programmes are:

• Determine what factors are critical for success in your organisation, including creating a competency model
• Have a process to identify those employees who possess those skills or can be coached and trained to attain those skills
• Spend the necessary time and resources to prepare them for future roles
• Consistently make talent management an absolute priority through starting at the top, and include development of direct reports in bonus schemes and manager performance appraisals

Talent management and succession planning have been shown to greatly increase retention which leads to the following benefits to an organisation:

• Lower recruitment costs, which is a substantial cost when factoring in signing bonuses, search costs, efficiency lost as new hire learns the role and the organisation
• Retains tacit knowledge within the organisation; the knowledge that adds tremendous value but can only be developed over years of continuous experience
• Allows a company to proactively react to a sudden vacancy in a critical position. Any time that a key position, such as at the top of an organisation, is vacant it will result in lost revenue, and this becomes more acute the longer the post is vacant