Successfully building an internal talent pipeline
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As businesses grow and change, new roles are created and existing roles often require new team members to fill them. To prepare for this, we encourage our clients to think about Talent Pipelines – and the processes and strategies they have in place to identify and prepare the people who can fill those roles.
However, where many companies are proficient at developing and managing an external talent pipeline – for example, by using their websites to capture and filter prospective hires to fill upcoming roles – we often find they overlook opportunities to build a highly effective internal talent pipeline alongside it.
Here are five ideas we’ve often put to good effect in our clients’ businesses which might help you create and cement a productive internal talent pipeline:
- How many positions will become available? If only 2 or 3 positions are likely to come up and benefit from the initiative, there’s usually little value in investing the time and resources into creating an official internal talent pipeline. Choose the right place for talent pipelines to be developed – where they’ll be effective and generate a worthwhile return on investment.
- Work with individual managers’ agendas. One of the key ways to ensure the success of your internal pipeline is to get managers from around the business onboard. Spend time finding out where they need a throughput of people ready to go into certain positions; whether they want to attract talent into their team from around the business; whether having pre-prepared candidates could help reduce the time needed to get new hires up to speed in their department; or even if they like the idea of acting as a nursery for talent across the business. Once you know what each manager sees as valuable, you can shape your process to achieve it and win their support.
- Listen to concerns managers have. It’s natural to have concerns about implementing an internal talent pipeline. Many managers will worry about their best team members being “stolen” by other teams, and whether participating will take a lot of unrewarded time and effort on their part. Especially at the outset, you need to be working to build your programme around their concerns, rather than just taking a cookie-cutter approach across each department. And you must convince them that they’ll get the appropriate time, support and resources to make it work.
- Make adoption easy. The reality is that if managers have to work things out for themselves, they’re less likely to go with it. So think through the process and your systems in advance. For example, how are you going to select people who progress into the talent stream? Will you do an online assessment or a formal assessment centre? If you have a clear process which is easy to implement, you’ll increase the chance of success.
- What’s in it for the people in the talent pipeline? While it’s crucial to get your managers onboard with the project, don’t forget the people who will make up the pipeline. Even with the support of your entire manager base your talent pipelines can fail if you don’t know what will happen to the people once you’ve identified them. We’ve seen countless situations where the focus has been on creating the pool and then suddenly facing a collection of motivated people with raised expectations demanding to know what will happen next… Will you set up training programs, give access to senior people in the business, provide learning sets or training? The key here is not to take it “one step at a time” but to have the end point worked out. This is often the first thing your candidates will ask, and you’ll significantly tarnish your credibility if you can’t answer, or you suggest something that it turns out you can’t deliver.
An internal talent pipeline can be a highly rewarding initiative but, as with any new project, the key is to start by lighting small fires based on key roles with specific managers. That way you significantly increase the likelihood of a successful roll-out while giving you a great opportunity to refine the project as you go before it becomes too unwieldy to change your goals, processes and strategies.