Jim Holincheck

I had a chance to go see a presentation by Rio Tinto, a global mining company, today on their efforts at Talent Management.  There were a few extremely important points made in the presentation:

• Understand the business need — In Rio Tinto’s case, the business imperative for talent management was a talent shortage for critical talent (e.g., mining engineers) to support growth
• Focus on defining the process first, then look at the technology — Rio Tinto did a really good job defining talent management processes that work for them.  They have implemented integrated technology (SAP) for some of the processes, but have not implemented automation for all (though they will continue to automate more over the next couple of years).  Rio Tinto is a good customer for other customers to speak with about SAP’s talent management capabilities, especially e-recruitment.
• Analysis is where the value is — It is one thing to define a good process.  That is good.  It is also good to automate that process.  That is even better.  However, the best case is when you can use that data to make better decisions about talent.  One example that Rio Tinto gave was that by having a more comprehensive view of talent (and access to that data), they were able to understand their bench strength and redeploy people as needed.  In addition, when they had gaps that they could not fill internally, they had data about sourcing that allowed them to more quickly respond to new needs.

Are you doing all three in your talent management initiatives?

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Category: Human Capital Management SAP Talent Management Application Suites     Tags: HCM, SAP, talentmanagement

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