Recent numbers revealed that the unemployment rate had fallen to a still worrying 8.1%, and in the three months to May there were 2.58 million unemployed people in the UK.
So with the recession-hit economy continuing to shrink and margins narrowing, it is more important than ever for companies to find and keep talented people to steer them through the hard times.
The situation has sparked a real struggle between businesses competing for the most skilled candidates. When the natural desire for workers is to sit tight and seek job security over mobility, the talent pool shrinks – and so the value of the best candidates has noticeably grown.
Now more than ever, HR directors and business leaders are challenged with both attracting and retaining skilled people, in the knowledge that they will need to inspire their top talent to stay on when unemployment falls and the recruitment market begins to move again.
If organisations are to flourish and grow under their current leadership, they must do so while paying close attention to those who have the potential to pick up the torch and carry on their success.
And that applies across the length and breadth of the business: from the very best employees already delivering, to those who are underperforming and whose contribution can be improved, and even to temporary staff whose skills are spotted and could be taken on permanently to strengthen the team. Building a workforce that evolves and expands could make the vital difference to winning a contract, completing a project or reaching a target.
For example, Elemense was called in to assist a large services company in the south-west, which wanted our help in fairly assessing the abilities of administrative workers to complete pay grading and skills banding.
We delivered an on-site management team to discover potential ability through tests of not just expertise but also personality and motivation. These gave essential information to inform an internal set of benchmarks and help identify future leaders.
Now all new temporary workers undergo the assessment during their first three months. This not only meets the initial aim of pay grading, but also gives crucial guidance for longer-term hiring decisions, determines potential high achievers and flags up training needs.
It is these kinds of future-proof services that are needed by our clients, because when gaps suddenly start appearing and the right people simply cannot be found, it is simply too late to tackle the problem.
A successful talent management strategy that pulls together all these demands must start with HR becoming the engine room – attracting, keeping and nurturing talent. An effective system will promote mobility, retain staff and cut training costs through efficient coordination across the company.
With HR securely placed as the central hub, individual line managers must fulfil their role of being the live connection to the workforce, always alert to identifying needs, and tuned in to behaviour, performance and morale issues.
By working together, these two elements of the business can achieve results in retaining and developing workers into a committed staff body wanting to experience repeated success.
But while that works very well in smaller companies, where changes are more easily spotted, there are major practical challenges to achieving this kind of system in larger firms, where it is impossible to achieve such an overview of everyone who works there.
Instead, an effective leadership development programme is needed so that the inevitable gaps that appear can be swiftly and efficiently filled by the right talent at the right time. Throughout the organisation, these people will have been supported in their professional growth, building their skills, experience and knowledge to step up and maintain the business's momentum.
Talent is at the very heart of a business – it needs care to sustain that vital beat.
Joanne Hinks is operations director at Elemense, a provider of recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) services
