Over the last several years, HR leaders have increasingly recognized that talent relationship management is essential. Many organizations retain a Chief Talent Officer to manage talent relationships within this shifting era of employment practices and to devise a talent management strategy that is both inward and outward facing.
Internally, they must identify high performing employees who can adapt to meet future challenges and roles. Externally, the CTO needs a strategy for an ongoing process to build a bench of talent.
The practice of maintaining relationships throughout a person’s career, even when he or she is not your employee, ensures that the best talent keeps you within reach when ready to make a change. The fluid and unpredictable nature of millennials’ career paths only underscores this value, with younger employees working for 15 or more companies during their careers, up from 5+ 15 years ago.
CTOs know that the best talent moves around in order to gain a competitive advantage in their careers. They are prepared for boomerang hires who leave, and return and benefit from the skills and experience they have gained elsewhere. And they recognize that an online presence is more important than ever in hiring and rehiring, and that social media is an outstanding tool for storytelling and showcasing employer brand.
As essential as it is, not all organizations have the resources for a dedicated and experienced executive running their talent function, as full-time resources can cost $130,000 – and more — annually. Yet they know that relying on generalists or less experienced staff may lead to inadequate solutions.
Talent management tends to be cyclical and is more efficiently approached as an on-demand function, responding to spikes in talent needs at specific points in time. The heavy lifting often happens at the front-end as strategy is developed and specific challenges like building a strong bench of future leaders is addressed. The work that follows throughout the year is a combination of execution and transactional tasks, meaning, for smaller organizations especially, the CTO may be working under capacity for at least some of the time.
Now, new service offerings are becoming available that put the required CTO strategic processes and systems implementation in motion on a short-term “near-sourced” basis.
For example, a CTO on-demand program was started last year by a New York City HR consultancy. The program promises to get you up and running without a long-term investment and believes that short-term CTO services fill a gap in the industry.
In an era of near-sourced talent and short-term employment, the opportunity may have arrived for organizations to take advantage of short-term, near-sourced leadership at the top of the talent hierarchy, as a way to optimize talent expenditures and a chance to implement appropriate talent management strategies for the first time.