How To Make Your Talent Management More Agile

Making your talent management strategy more agile gives you the upper hand when it comes to finding and luring candidates with the strongest skillset. But what is agile, and how can your company adopt its principles?

In short, an agile talent management strategy means being as flexible as possible and getting away from the one-size-fits-all model. The approach requires changing strategies throughout the year to make sure you're always meeting the needs of the current talent pool and the individual candidates who are applying for the role.

This can be tied into wider trends, such as employment rates or the economic climate, or something as simple as workload or what your competitors are doing.

But how can you adopt these principles to improve your recruitment outlook? Here are some of the key strategies that help make talent management a more agile process:

Have at least three strategies

Your business should have at least three strategies for recruitment:

• One for periods where you are looking to grow rapidly and need to hire a large number of staff
• Another for when you aren't looking for any new employees
• And one more for when you are somewhere in between

This helps you quickly adapt to any changes whether they are from your company, your competitors or the wider business landscape.

Encourage communication

Having a quick and easy way for people across departments to communicate makes it much easier to facilitate agility throughout the company. This can be everything from projections to examples of best practice.

Calculate predictions

Forecasts for the best and worst-case scenarios make it much simpler to estimate what strategy you will need to implement in the coming quarter. It's easier to quickly change tack if you have the confidence that comes from having a back-up plan.

Remove any unnecessary processes

The best but probably most complicated way of making any internal process more agile is to get rid of any that aren't necessary. This may be a matter of reducing the amount of people who need to approve a new hire or organizing one meeting instead of sending multiple emails.

Have thresholds

Creating thresholds for when to recruit makes it easier for people to make decisions. It's good to have one benchmark for when you may turn to a freelancer or consultant for a job, and another for when it's going to be most productive to recruit and hire a full-time employee.