The war for talent is over – talent won

Talent Management 2.0: organic, mathetic, wonderful.

These days, one ought to be a talent. Once declared as such, there‘s only one way: up – straight up the career ladder. At least one can have this impression when attending career fairs, speaking to recruiters or browsing the web for job opportunities. „Talent“ seems to be the new „sexy“. The next fancy term to characterise the so highly desired skilled employees needed to fuel the knowledge-economy. Even though no one can really tell what characterises extraordinary talent – one thing is for certain: everybody wants to be one and every employer wants to have them.

More than ten years have passed since the first companies developed, set up and armed themselves with so-called talent management programs in order to win the „war for talent“. Well over a decade since a handful of McKinsey consultants created this term, related to the expected shortage of the highly skilled and gifted in the 21st century, one can observe a wild jostle taking place on the battlefield of the war for talent. Companies advertise their graduate programs with all kinds of wild measures and conjure a corporate culture of harmony and mutual respect on their corporate websites and PR events in order to lure young applicants with corporate learning programs and career prospects. All the more so, reality often hits hard after joining one of these companies...

Advertised as „individual development program with continuous feedback and coaching“ most talent management programs are nothing but standardised, boring, linear and interchangeable. In most cases, their sole purpose is to produce line managers best prepared to take over their bosses‘ job when it eventually becomes vacant. Only very rarely, their purpose is to develop an individual employee and his or her diverse set of talent. „Talent management“ can rather be understood as a label for a form of institutionalised „staffing circus“ – its purpose is to successfully complete the yearly parcours of staff appraisal, performance review, potential assessment, talent talk, peer reviews, etc.

This form of „industrial“ talent management, where junior leadership talent drops off the assembly line after years of training can be classified as „talent management 1.0“. Its key features are: linearity, standardization and predictability. However, no matter how good an organisation is at running their „talent factory“, the war for talent won‘t be won with talent management 1.0. In fact, the war for talent is already over – talent won. That is, bargaining power has already shifted from employers to the highly skilled and talented and will continue to do so. Few organisations will be able to ask job candidates to please assimilate smoothly into the organisation, don‘t cause to much trouble, follow linear career paths and don‘t think too much out of the box. In order to really appeal to Gen Y and Gen Z talent, industrial talent management has to become organic talent management, cultivating an open learning environment and preparing the ground for talent to develop to its fullest potential.

To implement „talent management 2.0“, a shift of paradigm in the talent mindset has to take place. Talent management 2.0“ has to support the unfolding of employees‘ individual talent. Successful talent management 2.0 is deeply routed in an organisations identity and strategy, spreads through the entire organisation and aims at improving its ability to learn and achieve like a true learning organisation. Talent management 2.0 embraces diversity of talent input and prepares the ground for diverse talent to transform into diverse competencies. This concept is contrary to the assembly line model of talent management 1.0 where every candidate gets taught more or less the same in corporate development programmes and diversity of talent is essentially ignored.

Some of the key factors for successful talent management include value management and openness of organisational culture, challenging and meaningful assignments and responsibilities for day one, inter-generational leadership and the integration of top talent in diverse teams. But most importantly, the core criteria for the development of talent should not be a company‘s current need for people and competencies in a certain area but its future needs. After all, the focus of talent management is a companies future workforce. While a company can put all its effort into finding and developing suitable candidates to fill todays pivotal positions, there is no guarantee these will be the same roles crucial for success in the future. Most likely, they are not. As a consequence organisations need to develop more towards broad individual competencies of talent and less towards particular jobs. As a consequence, talent management becomes part of a firms strategy and should be led from the head of an organisation itself.

Talent management 2.0 means overcoming old mental models and embracing new concepts of learning in organisations. Individual learning, learning in teams and learning as organisation itself. If born out of an organisations identify and core values and executed strategically, talent management 2.0 can become an energy source for any organisation: nurturing a workforce full of diverse competencies and helping to maintain a firms competitive advantage.