The future of talent management 

February 2022: Mostafa Sayyadi summarises six of the best practices of talent management in the post-pandemic crisis 

_{In the post-pandemic crisis, talent management is something to which leaders must pay a great deal of attention. A mistake in this area may be vital to organisations and leaders must choose their practices wisely. Image: Harishmarnad/123rf}

Prioritise candidate experience
Knowledge is a collection of meaningful experiences. The key takeaway for leaders is that prioritising candidate experience can enable organisations to solve problems and create value through improved performance. It is the point that will narrow the gaps of success and failure, leading to more successful decision-making in a post-pandemic world.   
   
Tailor the talent acquisition strategy to business goals
Leaders must determine their business goals for the next three years and develop a talent acquisition strategy that focuses on planning the work and supporting newly hired employees technically so that they can achieve the business’s goals. A talent acquisition strategy helps companies to achieve their business goals that reflect excellence and higher-order effectiveness. This is where leaders can attempt to achieve business goals, stemming from a talent acquisition strategy across pivotal areas of the organisation.

Educate the hiring manager
Hiring managers can become familiar with employee recruitment practices through education. Education is more active, broad, flexible, experimental, synthetic and strategic when compared with training. This is because education is a process that leads to acquiring new insights and knowledge and potentially to correcting sub-optimal or ineffective actions and behaviours that cause companies to spiral out of control.

Enhance training efficiency
Leaders must provide work-related training programmes for newly hired employees when beginning onboarding and they must be aware of their training efficiency programmes. Training courses are an effective way to share knowledge. Most importantly, it is the application of knowledge aimed at providing better decision-making and work-related practices and creating new knowledge through innovation. Knowledge has to be measured in some way; many trainers talk about the return-on-investment of training, which is hard to measure. Training satisfaction measurement by participants and their desire to apply it to the workplace is an excellent barometer of learning new skills or building upon old ones. The key point in the training is the knowledge use coupled with testing and re-testing to ensure that the knowledge is actually helping the organization to grow professionally for employees and profitably for all stakeholders in the post-pandemic crisis.  

No strict job descriptions
When newly hired employees come onboard, they are given job descriptions. So, how can leaders write job descriptions that are not strict? The answer to this question lies in the leader’s motivation of employees to approach organisational problems in a more novel way. In doing this, leaders can inspire employees to rethink problems and challenge their current personal attitudes and values. Leaders can transform organisations by attempting to change the basic values, beliefs and attitudes of employees so that they are willing to perform beyond their previous or original level specified by the organisation in their job description. 

Be more flexible
Flexibility in the workplace may enable leaders to improve departmental and managerial interactions and to develop relationships among managers, business units and departments. Through flexibility in the workplace, leaders can also shift the power of decision-making to the lower levels and inspire newly hired employees to create new ideas and then implement them, which can, in turn, propel interdepartmental communications and improve knowledge exchange.