Q.3 Define talent planning. What are objectives and steps of Talent Planning?

Answer. Definition of talent planning

Organisations are finding it difficult to get, expand, and maintain skilled employees
because of increasing need for talent, aging labour force, and various globalisation
challenges. In this situation, talent planning1 plays a very important role. It helps us
to add real-time, enterprise-wide clarity to examine the workforce and then place
talent where the impact is more visible and effective.
Target planning helps an organisation to predict its upcoming workforce demand and
then estimate the numbers, nature, and sources of potential employees.
The effective talent planning includes:
Understanding the requirements of the organisation.
Knowing the right people whom we are looking for.
Ensuring that the right person is doing the right activity
Objectives of talent planning
The main purpose of talent planning is to establish defined competencies and sets
criteria to measure its talent & skills. Other objectives include attracting and
recognising key people, providing the resourceful employees as per the requirement
and developing of best practices in recruiting and resourcing.
It is evident by recent investigations that worlds top class organisations adopt longterm strategic talent planning to capitalise on their recruitment and retention
approaches.
The major objectives of strategic talent planning include:

determining workforce gaps in order to meet business requirements.

recognising successful performers.
identifying new and emerging job roles.
planning alternative workforce tactics.
creating procedures for knowledge transfer.
developing faster career paths for very high potentials
creating capacity to implement strategies.
knowing the needs of the organisation.
accomplishing organisation excellence.
developing keepers, super-keepers, and solid citizens.
distributing training and development resources.
optimising investment in employees.
ensuring leadership.

Steps of talent planning

The five key steps in strategic talent planning2 include:

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Planning workforce
Imaging and branding.
Sourcing methods.
Screening and assessing candidates.
Marketing and communicating.

Q.4 What is meant by talent acquisition? Explain some of the talent acquisition
strategies.
Answer. Talent acquisition

Talent acquisition is an individual process that comprise of all the sub

processes involved in recognizing attracting and finally employing
highly talented and skilled people who are more production for the
company. When used in the context of the recruiting and hr profession
talent acquisition usually refers to the talent acquisition department or
team within the company.
Talent acquisition strategies
Given below are some of the requirements for staffing, recruiting, talent management
and as human resources professionals:

To identify and set success indicators for high quality performers: There
is a necessity for establishing success indicators for each position recruited
along with high quality performers themselves. For example, number of sales
a performer has made in a month, number of reports written resulting in
consulting tasks, amount of income a performers group has produced, and so
on. There are no many standards to go by, but still it is evident about who the
major contributor in an organization is and what is the job of the organization
and the higher authorities of that organization and here, job of the HR
professional is to measure those contributions.
Work with managers to develop high performers profiles in each group:
The commonalities and the things recognized during the screening process
are identified which predict success. For example, competencies, activities
those high performers do, working techniques or processes. There are many
organizations that assist in determining crucial success factors and also help
in developing tests to discover them in candidates.
Identify potential high performers and their working strategy: This step
helps to aim at advertising towards high performers and make a decision on

Q.5

the events that are worth attending and help to get the kind of people that an
organization is looking for. This step requires attention on competitive
intelligence(CI). Competitive intelligence is a process of identifying, collecting,
evaluating, and distributing intelligence about the products, competitors,
customers, and other features of the environment. This is required to help
executives and managers in strategic decision making for an organization. CI
is very familiar in most of the organizations; and hence, many companies use
CI professionals to search for information about production competency and
equipment installation. The same approach is applicable to recruiting. The
details about the location of good and talented people are collected from
competitors, sellers, and suppliers. Employee referral program can be used
for the same purpose.
Gather and capture important information about candidates: The
information gathered is precious and it must be shared with other recruiters by
storing it in some database. The place where such kind of information is
stored is referred to as Blog. A Blog is a personal online magazine or a journal
that is often updated and planned for public use. Blog helps both internal and
external community of recruiters to exchange information gathered. When
blogs are properly used then lots of working hours and bunches of money is
saved.
Identify the significance of developing people: The recruiting function has
to be more like a talent agency which has not happened in the past. Talent
agencies help in identifying talent and also developing it for planned
purposes.