Is the way we structure jobs, think about careers, and manage the relationship between talent and employers stuck in the past? Professor Nick Kemsley, director of the Centre for HR Development at Henley Business School, examines the talent lifecycle and looks at how talent management strategies need to adapt to career consumerism.
For the workforce of yesteryear, perceptions of the word “career” were often synonymous with working your way up the ranks of a single organisation, often in the same domain, and building a long career through to retirement.
Sometimes this took an individual to the higher echelons, but often employees found their groove at a level and continued to enjoy the career that their organisation was good enough to provide them with. A deliberate exaggeration perhaps, but there was a strongly employer-centric, perhaps even parent-child feel to careers, summed up by the phrase, “Your career is the time you spend working with us”.
The past three years have spelt out in huge letters that organisations do not think about talent the way that talent thinks about organisations”
Fast-forward to today and the reality has moved on enormously, at least in the minds of the talent we seek. As of February 2022, 40% of working adults in the UK had worked part of their week at home. In 2023 this figure may well have risen.
Those with high-currency skills know what they have and aren’t afraid to use it. Careers for this talent are most likely to involve periods at a significant number of organisations, or even several shifts in career direction. Many have a plan, an understanding of personal brand equity and a mindset of employers as suppliers of various pieces of the jigsaw.
Talent is often leaving an organisation, not because the marriage has failed, but simply because they see that it is time to move on. They have become out-and-out consumers – career consumers – and it’s been on the rise for years.
There has been enormous discussion about the challenges for employers of hybrid working, but we are not seeing the wood for the trees. The sudden and enforced step-change in work flexibility finally broke the dam and career consumerism has been set free.
Yet our prevailing view of talent and careers has not really evolved. Most talent management approaches still have at their heart the model that your career is the time you spend working with us. The past three years have spelt out in huge letters that organisations do not think about talent the way that talent thinks about organisations. Our talent management strategies have failed to change with the expectations of workers.
Career consumerism
Performance management and dealing with ‘career consumers’
The way we structure jobs, think about careers and the time that talent and employers spend together is stuck in the past – and will be increasingly unable to cater for this new era of career consumerism. Some big things need to change.
So how do we start to think like the talent we need? The truth is that organisations are often just a stop on the way in an individual’s career journey.
We need to stop thinking of this as a failure of talent management or even a negative attribute in the individual and begin to view the employment of individuals as an exchange of mutual value.
This give-and-get attitude – as long as it delivers for both parties – would lead to a partnership of employment. So how would we structure career dialogue, role design, employment terms and development differently if we were thinking (as talent may well be thinking) beyond the boundaries of our organisation?
Your competitor for talent is not always the enemy
In 2007, a recruiter from Google sent a job opening at the company to an engineer at Apple. When Steve Jobs heard about this, he emailed the CEO to put a stop to Google recruiting from Apple.
This attitude persists; the competitor for talent is often perceived as the enemy. But they are a competitor for talent for a reason – because talent sees them (as it sees you) as being of value to their career in some way. This has two big questions attached to it.
Firstly, do you know what that “jigsaw piece” is for the talent you need and do you market yourselves in that way? Secondly, when it comes to talent, what if we thought of other companies as our development partners?
We may find ourselves in a situation where we find it difficult to provide the diversity of experience or breadth of knowledge that we would like our talent to have, leading to poor decisions being made in an attempt to retain employees.
Changing responsibilities or assignments – although often successful – can go badly wrong when used as a last resort to retain an individual. The same is true for pay. Increasing pay simply to retain one individual often leads to bigger problems down the line. Sometimes talent, and in fact often it is the best talent, just can’t be retained.
So, what if career dialogue was open and honest in this respect? What if leaving was even part of the plan? What if that plan potentially involved an individual coming back into a more senior role in the future, equipped with learning that you would find hard to deliver? Feels scary, doesn’t it?
Yet some organisations already think of leavers as potential returners and ensure that they have ways of keeping in touch with their alumni – for example, Microsoft’s Road to Rehire project. This still stops short of being a deliberate strategy but at some point, we have to recognise where we should choose to continue to battle the system and where there is more to gain by being smarter about how we conspire with it.
Grow your own as part of a joined-up talent strategy
I’m not suggesting that all of your talent will move on quickly, or that we should resign ourselves to failure to retain. There are many ways in which you can improve talent retention. In many organisations, the “centre of gravity” for developing talent tends to coincide with the mid-career stage.
Employers’ approaches for early-career and late-career talent are somewhat less strategic, with dislocations where career stages meet. Early talent often focuses on future leaders whereas for late-career talent the conversation is often more around the challenge than the opportunity. Talent scarcity and retention issues, combined with manager preferences often being for plug ‘n’ play external recruitment solutions to minimise risk, serve to accentuate the issue
More in-depth
In-depth: Are UK pay increases too large or too small?
In reality, a big chunk of the answer to sustainable talent sourcing lies in the exact opposite – developing strategies which combine the power of different career stages within an overarching talent strategy.
Developing early talent to meet future demand for scarce and much-needed mid-career skills allows organisations a more plentiful and affordable route into critical talent segments. Yet “growing your own” as part of a more holistic and strategic solution for scarce specialist skills is often overlooked by early-talent functions.
As a result, there is sometimes a disconnect between early career development outcomes and mid-career demand which just serves to cement the dependency on external recruitment in an ever-tougher market – a vicious circle.
Such strategies often fall victim to managers’ fears that waiting for skills to be developed takes too long and has too high a risk compared to simply “buying talent in”.
There are two obvious flaws to this thinking. The first is that it assumes more experienced talent is both available, affordable and pre-disposed to work for you; which is often not the case.
The second is that this gap between the demand for skills and the development of them in-house only happens once. Yes, it might take two to three years, but in the meantime, you won’t be any worse off than you are now and, in the future, you will have a lower reliance on the external market.
The enormous potential of late-career talent
Late-career talent is often a forgotten population when it holds enormous potential, but we need a shift in mindset. We tend to think about the high cost of wages, or that late-career talent could act as a blocker for the internal mobility of others. We may even try to encourage employees out of our organisation through enhanced retirement deals. Yet when that talent leaves, irreplaceable knowledge and experience goes too.
What if leaving was part of the plan? What if that plan potentially involved an individual coming back into a more senior role in future, equipped with learning that you would find hard to deliver?”
This again shows a lack of integrated talent strategy thinking. Instead, we should consider how this knowledge could be recycled and transferred to the wider organisation. What about mentoring? What about temporary roles on specific initiatives which also free up internal mobility?
Last month’s publication from the Office for National Statistics found that a quarter of workers over 50 were working part-time, with older workers valuing flexibility. Some organisations are waking up to this. Recent research at Henley Business School found that the vast majority of those taking advantage of apprenticeships were focusing on re-skilling.
Having a consumer-centric and cohesive strategy to improve both supply and the retention of the skills we need seems an essential response to increasing competition for skills in the external market and decreasing loyalty internally. None of this can happen without getting our act together on strategic workforce planning, the approach to which itself needs reinvention.
Ultimately, we need to decide whether we want to stick or twist. Talent management strategies need to be reformed around a more modern set of assumptions, but are we bold enough to shift our mindsets and take the leap?
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