What Is the Talent Lifecycle? The 5 Stages Explained
Human resources professionals have many important tasks in the office, but one of the most crucial is managing the organization’s talent lifecycle. It’s not just about attracting top talent but also retaining them. 47% of Gen-Z and 66% of Millennial workers have said they would leave a job if offered a better salary. This clearly illustrates that companies have to do what they can to support their employees through every step of the talent lifecycle to ensure a positive relationship that’s beneficial for both parties.
But how does the company do that? Here’s everything you need to know about the talent lifecycle and the strategies HR can employ to manage employees through every stage.
Contents
What is the talent lifecycle?
The stages of the talent lifecycle
1. Recruitment
2. Onboarding
3. Engagement
4. Learning and development
5. Offboarding and outreach
What is the talent lifecycle?
The term “talent lifecycle,” also referred to as “talent management lifecycle,” encompasses the entire process of recruiting and retaining the right individuals, nurturing their growth within the organization, and enabling them to reach their full potential. In simpler terms, it represents their journey throughout the company.
The talent lifecycle consists of various stages, ranging from candidate recruitment to employee professional development, all with the overarching objective of attracting and retaining exceptional employees and helping the organization reach its goals.
Human Resources (HR) plays a pivotal role in this process as they are responsible for facilitating the talent management lifecycle.
The stages of the talent lifecycle
1. Recruitment
Recruitment is the initial stage of the hiring process, encompassing various steps from attracting potential employees to securing the right candidate. Human Resources (HR) plays an important role in spreading awareness about company opportunities, using methods like direct recruitment, job board postings, website promotion, attendance at job fairs, and other effective strategies.
In addition to promoting openings, HR actively oversees the hiring process by reviewing applications, conducting screening interviews, facilitating connections between applicants and relevant personnel, and managing offer letters.
Establishing and maintaining a robust recruitment process is paramount for HR, as it directly affects the quality of talent entering the company. According to Harvard Business Review, a poor hiring process contributes to approximately 80% of employee turnover. Seeking anonymous feedback through surveys or soliciting applicants’ opinions on the hiring experience can offer valuable insights into organizational recruitment.
Key metrics to consider include job acceptance rate, time taken to fill positions, and the number of applicants.
HR tips
- Spread the word about your workplace success. People will want to work for an organization when the perks of working there are clearly illustrated.
- Keep open communication with all applicants during the hiring process. Maybe someone isn’t the right fit for the role they’re pursuing, but it doesn’t mean they won’t be an asset to the company one day. A negative interview experience with a lack of communication may put them off the organization for good.
2. Onboarding
Onboarding is the next stage in the talent lifecycle that follows the acceptance of an offer. It encompasses the entire onboarding process, providing new employees with essential information about their roles, team, and the company as a whole, while ensuring they become familiar with the workplace.
During the orientation process, HR takes charge of communicating key points. This includes providing contracts, details about pay and benefits, security badges and office maps, as well as facilitating connections with the IT department, meetings with managers, and more. HR also serves as a point of contact to address any queries that new employees may have and guide them in the right direction for assistance.
Research indicates that a positive onboarding experience is vital to employee satisfaction. In fact, new hires who rate their experience as “exceptional” are 2.3 times more likely to be content with their job.
To monitor the effectiveness of the orientation process, HR can request anonymous feedback from employees to gauge their perceptions. Additionally, tracking the post-orientation habits of workers, such as how many employees access specific benefits explained during orientation or how many reach out to seek further clarification on topics covered, can provide valuable insights.
HR tips
- Ensure there’s a formal onboarding process so that each employee is treated consistently and in a way up to the company’s standards.
- Get managers involved with the hiring process. Research from Gallup shows employees are 3.4 times more likely to be satisfied with onboarding when that happens.
- Keep important employee documents in a location that’s easy for workers to access when they need them, like an internal portal.
3. Engagement
Once an employee has settled in, make them feel like a valued member of the team. This can be achieved through several methods, including promoting a healthy company culture, recognizing employee contributions, and organizing team-building activities.
Research demonstrates the importance of maintaining enthusiastic and engaged employees for the success of a company. According to a survey from the University of Oxford, happy workers are 12% more productive than unhappy ones. It’s logical that employees who lack interest in their work or the company are less likely to exert maximum effort into their projects.
In this stage of the talent management lifecycle, HR can support employees in various ways. By organizing happy hours, sports leagues, office parties, team lunches, seminars, and other bonding activities, employees can enjoy their time in the office and build relationships with one another.
Reward programs should be implemented to recognize employees’ contributions and inspire them to consistently perform their best. Encouraging support, respect, inclusivity, compassion, and other qualities that contribute to a great workplace environment is also essential.
HR tips
- Make sure to listen to employee feedback. Is there a specific form of recognition people particularly like? What made a team outing so special?
- Set aside regular time for employee recognition each quarter.
- Encourage managers to communicate with their employees to promote a feedback culture.
4. Learning and development
It’s essential for companies to prioritize learning and development for their employees. Not only does this increase the likelihood of employees staying with the company and open up promotion opportunities (in fact, they’re 41% more likely to stay at companies that hire from within, according to LinkedIn), but it also ensures that companies have highly skilled and knowledgeable individuals in each role, maximizing output.
Learning and development is a systematic process aimed at enhancing an employee’s skills, knowledge, and competency, leading to improved work performance. The learning aspect entails acquiring knowledge, skills, and attitudes, while development involves expanding and deepening knowledge aligned with one’s development goals.
The overarching objective of learning and development is to effectively modify the behavior of individuals or groups, equipping them with valuable knowledge and insights to enhance their work performance or foster attitudes that contribute to better outcomes (Lievens, 2011).
HR tips
- Make learning and development structured around a need, not just for the sake of promoting learning. Conduct a training needs analysis to understand what skills are needed relevant to their function.
- Ensure that training goals are highly specific and measurable.
- Develop the training program in collaboration with an external trainer or training provider, and the trainee.
5. Offboarding and outreach
The offboarding stage helps the organization understand the employee experience and identify areas of improvement. This stage also serves as a way to professionally close the chapter on an employee’s employment and leave the final impression of the company. How you manage offboarding will result in either a good or bad impression. And impressions matter, specifically when you want to build a good employer branding that will attract top candidates to your organization.
Give your offboarding process some careful thought and planning. Consider how you can make the employee still feel valued and supported by the company during this transition period. Also, identify what needs to be done during this process, such as the smooth handover of work and equipment. It’s also a great opportunity to ask for employee feedback by conducting an exit interview.
Additionally, offboarding provides an opportunity to continue to build a network of alumni and tap into their network to find your next great hire.
HR tips
- Make sure to keep clear lines of communication open during the offboarding process. There’s a lot to be done when an employee vacants a position, and it makes it all the easier when people can easily ask questions and get answers.
- Create a formal succession plan so HR can jump right into filling a role the moment a person hands in their notice, without letting anything important fall through the cracks.
- Incorporate exit interviews into the offboarding process, so employees can provide valuable feedback about the company and the way it’s run.
- Just like a school engages its alumni, so should a company. A former worker can spread word about the workplace and recommend great new employees. Consider a company newsletter, or engaging in other forms of alumni outreach.
Key takeaways
HR is involved with the talent lifecycle right from the beginning — recruiting an employee — to when they are finally offboarded. When done properly, HR’s monitoring of the talent lifecycle ensures a company brings in top talent and sends them out with more skills and knowledge as well as a sense of satisfaction with the organization.
By effectively overseeing the talent lifecycle, HR leads to happier employees, happier employers, and a more successful company.
FAQs
The talent lifecycle is the process of managing the talent involved in a company right from the beginning. It’s a way of visualizing an employee’s journey so HR can implement the necessary strategies that lead to happier, more fulfilled workers.
The talent management model includes recruitment, orientation, engagement, learning and development, and finally offboarding.
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