Create talent pool for your business ☝️

What is a talent pool?

Talent pool is database of people who could effectively replace any of your current employees should they decide to move on. It is also handy when the organization is expanding and needs to hire talent for multiple positions. It reduces cost and time to hire and ensures your business's productivity is not affected by resource and skill shortages.

Internal talent pool is identified through individual manager evaluations, professional visibility, and assessment techniques. An organization could have multiple talent pools for different sections of its workforce. This allows them to react with greater flexibility.

Internal talent pool versus external recruitment

When you’re considering a candidate who’s been working for your company for a number of years, you’ll already have the insights you need from their coworkers and manager to know if they’re a good culture fit.

Best situations to hire internally:

• A small budget to hire, onboard, and train new talent.

• A position that requires significant company knowledge.

• You have high potentials eager and ready to take the next step.

• The skills needed are already available within your talent pool.

• When you’re in a time crunch to fill an important position.

New hires bring a fresh perspective to your business. When a change in direction is needed or the established way of doing things isn’t consistent with what the company needs anymore, bringing in new talent can help you shift both direction and mindset.

Finally, when your organization is on a growth trajectory and looking to expand, hiring externally is important for growing the business. Also, each time you hire internally you’ll have another vacancy to fill.

Best situations for external recruitment:

• When you need to grow the business.

• To bring in fresh, new perspectives and improve diversity.

• When a change in direction or mentality is needed.

• To acquire new skills and expertise within your organization.

How to create internal talent pool?

Creating a talent pool takes planning. Here are four steps to developing it:

1. Review the organization’s strategies.
   The goal here is to identify the competencies needed to make your business’s strategies happen. In the future, the strategies will change, but the competencies may remain the same.

2. Assess the company's current talent to identify any skills gaps.
   Organizations can accomplish this step using a variety of techniques, including performance reviews, assessments, multi-rater feedback, and interviews. A combination of techniques could prove to be exceptionally valuable. The key consideration is consistency.

3. Create modules or groups of activities that will help employees learn the skills they need.
   A combination of internal and external training and project-based learning may be useful. Effective activities include:

   1. Management coaching. Managers are positioned to deliver open, honest feedback that can help employees change behaviors and improve performance.

   2. Co-worker feedback. Peer-to-peer interaction is how most employees spend their time. Training employees to deliver timely, specific feedback can make an impact.

   3. Mentoring. Organizations can encourage mentoring relationships to cover topics that don't necessarily warrant a training program—like customer support and negotiation skills.

4. Monitor progress and make regular adjustments.
   The organization should conduct regular talent assessments and observe market conditions. Both internal and external factors can prompt a change in talent development strategy.

Create your talent pool with QVALON

Neatly following the above processes on a consistent basis is a challenge for any organization. Even more so for retail businesses as their workforce is distributed in many offices in different locations. The logistics of training, reporting, monitoring, and analysis in a retail business can cause the following issues,

• Favoritism of some employees (who have better relationships with their seniors)

• Loss of true talent if deserved candidates are constantly overlooked.

• Incorrect data collection due to human errors and influence.

• Irregular data collection that does not reflect the latest reports.

• Delays in information flow leading to slow decisions.

QVALON helps your business overcome such issues. QVALON can be used by all employees, across all departments and its features adapt to their designation and job responsibilities. Since your entire workforce is using QVALON, data sharing is quick and consistent. Data integrity is assured by relevant checks and controls.

Some of QVALON’s features and how they help develop internal talent pool:

• Inspection and audits –
  Measure an employee’s compliance and adherence to work processes. Observations made over a period of time help define performance and efficiency.

• Surveys and polls –
  Collect employees’ feedback regarding their job role, company’s policies, work environment, etc. These help gauge workforce’s loyalty and motivation.

• End-user feedbacks processing –
  Your end customer’s opinion towards your business can help verify trends suggested by other data sources. For example: If a retail store team scores high on motivation but has poor customer reviews, then it can suggest an unofficial understanding among the employees to provide false answers.

• Task management and collaboration –
  Tasks can be designated to personnel as per their work role, along with frequency and deadlines. Its completion reports and other data take shape as it moves between different departments and coworkers. For example, retail salespersons have to undertake monthly safety and hygiene training. The manager has to score them on their knowledge and skill.

• Analytics –
  Studying data over a time period concludes results. Numbers remain unbiased from opinions and intentions, so you are more capable to make correct decisions.

You can also compare employees or stores with each other across a region, division, or the entire network. With QVALON, your human resource department can select candidates for the talent pool more objectively.

The benefits of QVALON are not limited to creating an internal pool. Connect with us and we’ll help you understand the advantages your business is set to gain, with QVALON.