Post-Recession Challenges of Talent Management

[Gireesh Kumar Sharma]

Recovering Economies

After a year or so the news on recession is taking a U-turn (not a V-turn though). Officially, analysts are reporting that recession is over, including Google CEO. While it will take some time for recession to pave the way for prosperity and growth for business in general, the prosperity is already on its way to certain economies such as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

HR's Role in Post Recession EraHR May be Caught Off Guard

Although this is good news for business operations, including marketing and sales, it poses new challenges for human capital. Businesses would no longer run on the old rules, but new out-of-the-box solutions, more comprehensive efforts, innovative thinking, and new skills and competencies would be required to grow and prosper. Needless to say, the demand for both the quantity and the quality of talented employees will grow worldwide. Companies that have fired employees in the past are already feeling the pinch, as they do not have enough bandwidth to execute.
Bloggers like Jon Ingham, who champion the cause of Human Capital Management, are being invited to speak on performance management. The need for performance management is pressing.

Talent Scenario During Recession

The law of demand and supply mercilessly applies to human resources, also. During the economic downturn, companies were able to downsize by getting rid of redundant work force and dead wood. They also restructured the employee compensation (mostly by decreasing) to stave off financial losses. Only those employees were retained who proved their worth. The employees had to accept all kinds of compensation-related compromises while maintaining the same or even higher level of efficiency and productivity. They could thus survive the financial tsunami.

These survivors got the opportunity to handle a variety of tasks that further sharpened their skills and made them multi-skilled. Thus, overall quality of talent has increased. At the same time, those who were out of job lost this opportunity to hone their skills in a new challenging environment. Adding to our woes, slashing of training and development budgets has led to a depletion of the number of skilled employees within the companies.

And a Difficult Road Ahead

Such steps from companies have created an altogether tricky scenario: The quality of talent within the companies has increased (raising the bar of the talent), while the quality of skills available in job market has dwindled. Now, recruiters can hire the required quality talent not from outside but from inside their competitors’ workplace.

Read the rest of this blog at Talent Junction.