Senior leaders receive the largest piece of the talent budget pie, and having a better understanding of what your good people look like will help attract the right recruits. These were some of the themes discussed as Saville Consulting welcomed 100 delegates to Stamford Bridge, home of Chelsea FC for its third year of Talent Development Days.
Talent practitioners from Barclays, British Airways, KPMG, Tesco, GlaxoSmithKline and many more companies listened as Saville Consulting CEO Gabby Parry introduced the brand’s vision - to transform assessment on a global scale.
Interactive voting instantly captured the thoughts of the room on some key talent topics:
- More than half of the delegates identified 2-10% of their employee population as their high potentials
- Senior leaders receive the greatest share of the talent budget
- Delegates believe that better competency profiling and assessment of a candidate’s fit with the company culture would have the most impact on improving their hires
Delegates then broke off for interactive roundtable discussions in either the Recruitment or Development Zone.
Delegates in the Recruitment Zone focussed on best practice use of assessments to engage, select and screen candidates while the Development Zone delegates were looking at how to identify and develop potential, and how to successfully manage and improve performance.
Lively discussion prompted by interactive games, case studies and workshop exercises raised numerous points including:
- In order to get the right people in, look at what is working for you already. What is it about your organisation that current employees like? Make the most of this and make sure potential candidates are aware.
- Ensure that all communication with candidates reflects what life is really like at your company. Is it a more relaxed environment or corporate atmosphere? You want all correspondence, process and assessments to echo this.
- Capability of line managers and the quality of line manager discussions with their reports continue to be the biggest barrier to improving performance and maximising an individual’s potential.
- Increasingly, delegates are tearing up the annual appraisal in favour of more regular performance reviews which are seen as highly effective at developing potential.
- Delegates spoke of the 70:20:10 model as a good framework to approach the development of employees. 70% of development time spent on the job training with rotations and stretch assignments, 20% spent on informal development activities such as peer and action learning groups and the remaining 10% in formalised training programmes.
- ‘Reflective practice’ was an interesting developmental approach used by many public sector delegates. They highlighted the benefits of post project/assignment reflection as individuals and teams on how it went, what the key learning points for the individual and team were, how it could be improved in future and development required to cope better next time.
