Over the past few months StepStone has been working with Bersin & Associates to develop a tool for organisations to benchmark their strategies against best practices in Talent Management.

That tool, www.talentstrategyassessment.com, makes a complex task, really simple.  I'd had a go at using the tool myself and found that, after responding to 19 straight-forward questions in less than 10 minutes, I got two things:

1. A scorecard comparing my strategy to others from Bersin's huge pool of research, with red, amber and green status indicators that alert me to the areas I need to work on
2. A detailed (29 page) analysis and commentary of my responses with suggestions for improving my talent management strategy.

The scorecard and report covers the core of talent management strategy development:

• Alignment with organisation - organisational objectives, ownership and measurement
• Workforce planning - workforce planning and identifying demand and supply of talent
• Sourcing & recruitment - internal mobility, external employer brand and best source of hire
• Performance management - goal alignment, deployment and line-manager accountability
• Succession management - talent profiling, gap analysis and planning
• Development - design and implementation of personal development plans
• Compensation - maintaining a high performing workforce and financial control
• Retention - career management and  personalising the employment experience

Personally what I really like about the tool is the scorecard.  Whilst the analysis is great and gives a depth of thoughtful insight into what a good Talent Management strategy should consider, the scorecard tells me where I am and provides the motivation for turning my reds into ambers and my ambers into greens.  Also having completed the assessment I now have a user account that I return to later, retake the assessment and compare my current and previous scorecard and report to gauge progress.

So, a quick and easy way for to assess the strength of your organisations Talent Management strategy, identify improvements, produce 2 documents to share with colleagues and, if you send the url with some of your key stakeholders, you will be able to get their perceptions of your organisations talent management strategy and see how they compare to yours.

I'd like to get an independent view of the tool so, when you've completed the questions, reviewed your scorecard and report, please tell me what you think of it.

Once again, you may click the following link to take the Talent Strategy Assessment.

Tags: assessment, benchmark, Bersin, compare, comparison, hcm, management, talent, talent assessment, TM strategy, www.talentstrategyassessment.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 5:04 pm and is filed under Community, Talent Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.