New HR: Understanding HR's customers – Employees (part 2)

Future and past employees… this is how I finished my last blog post about employees as customers and this is how I want to start part 2.
So far HR has only (and if at all) been taking care of current employees (except some pension payments to retirees). And with this task, HR was fully booked. And back when Ulrich has designed his model this was sufficient. But the Talent landscape has changed.
Today, Talent has a different view on work and career than just a few years back. Career is no longer defined as “within a company” or even “moving up the ladder”. Career means many different things to today’s employees. Talent moves in and out of companies how they feel – and they can do that as they turned out to be a scarce resource.
Companies and HR departments that I have seen are not prepared for that. As soon as an employee leaves the company, it is off the radar. This is a luxury no longer acceptable. NEW HR has to have an internal and external Talent map and succession planning.
Some companies already today have something like an external Talent pool. This is absolutely fantastic and necessary, but often this Talent pool is not properly structured or managed. What is necessary is an integrated view on Talent – as well as management of Talent. The Talent function should have a clear understanding of the Talent within the company as well as externally – may it be Talent, which was approached for an open position or has applied for a job – but likewise Talent that has decided to leave the company.
Employees leaving a company do no longer do this for good. They just do that to follow a different career path at this point in time, because they feel a need to do something different. And guess what? – through doing this, they normally become even more valuable because they acquire new skills.
In today’s world, once this Talent is out of the company door it is lost. This is unacceptable tomorrow! A Talent function should keep in contact with this Talent, follow his/ her career moves and make sure that he/ she knows that the company is still interested and is supporting this out of company experience. – and at some point this should lead to Talent returning to fill open positions – best through integrating this Talent into the Talent pipeline.
Of course, this is nothing easy to do and requires a big change of focus and definition of Talent. But this will be more and more important, the more Talent becomes scarce. Individual Managers are already doing this and keep an eye on good Talent that leaves their company. – this is a fantastic first step, but needs to be more structured and scalable.
Today’s HR department structures are more often than not, not ready for this. NEW HR is stepping into this with a specific Talent set-up. But before going into this topic, let’s finish the assessment of HR’s customers in the next post with the final customer of HR: unions/ works council.
Until then all the best.