RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Talent succession meets the world

Talent succession (the identification, qualification and mapping of high performers / potential into future role / capability requirements) has long been the domain of talent management experts who scurry through the internal population to pick out the golden jewels. However, this role is changing…

In an earlier post I talked about the growing trend for talent succession strategies not only to identify ‘top talent’ within the organisation but also talent on the outside. This post explores in a little more detail the drivers of this change and the challenges it brings.

Why external talent?

Why the need to consider an external talent succession strategy? Firstly, the pace of change in organisations continues to accelerate. Value migration between business models is faster than ever before with firms continually having to renew their source of profit and the subsequent competencies required to deliver. Secondly, employee length of tenure continues to decline. No longer do graduates join an organisation with the expectation of being groomed for a board appointment in decades to come.

So external as well as internal succession management is integral to ensuring organisations have the ability to not only ‘build’ talent internally, but also to acquire it quickly; particularly in rapidly evolving markets where business critical capabilities continually change.

The challenge of external talent pipelining

This approach does however pose a number of challenges for the talent manager. A typical set of questions may include:

- How do I benchmark external talent against my current workforce?
- How do I engage candidates for an opportunity that may not exist until a point in the future, or possibly never at all?
- How do I ensure I’m pipelining talent whose capability will still be relevant in the future?
- How do I effectively enhance my employment brand by engaging candidates without wasting their time?

Your views

So, tell us about your experiences? How has internal and external talent succession worked for you? What have been your challenges?

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