Fiscal Year 2015 — The Year of Opportunity for Talent Management?

The new federal fiscal year is upon us and with it comes new opportunity and a chance for fresh beginnings. In reality, astute leaders are always looking and planning ahead, so just because the turning of a calendar page indicates a new year, it doesn’t mean new thinking and foresight waits for that day. You’ve been thinking about budgets, head counts and workforce planning throughout the year.

Still, it’s as good a time as any to take stock of where your agency’s talent management capabilities are and where they’re headed.

Improving Federal Talent Management – Can You Move Beyond Survival?

Survival mode — it’s easy to get caught up in it. It’s often true in the case of talent management, including the always-challenging sourcing, recruitment, onboarding, retention and performance management pillars. In this era of sequestration, limited resources and overworked staff, it’s certainly easy to not rock the boat – it’s all we can do sometimes to just get by. Sure, it would seem that in fantasy land we can toss our outdated and legacy systems aside, pave the way for revamping our systems and do the dirty work necessary to implement a modern talent management system. But then reality typically hits us in the face as we have seemingly more than we can handle to just keep things working.

Just survive.

The good news? “Fantasy land” is not only more real than you think, it’s more attainable than you may realize.

You Can Get There From Here

The most modern talent acquisition, performance management and all-encompassing talent management systems available today don’t require a complete destruction and reconstruction of your existing workflow processes. Indeed, they allow you to keep the processes that work for you, while enhancing them through automation, analytics improved usability and access. At the same time, unnecessary processes, resource-intensive checks and balances and manual and unsophisticated communication procedures can be eliminated, not only improving how HR works for an agency,  but at the same time helping individual HR staff, hiring managers and employees.

As we enter this new fiscal year, it’s a good time to take stock.

Can You Answer Basic Questions?

For example, can you answer these questions about your talent acquisition operations?

• Are you attracting quality talent and the talent you need?
• Are you losing quality candidates?
• Do hiring managers depend too much on HR for administrative support?
• Do you have effective onboarding processes?
• Do you lack a unified view of your people data to drive decision making?
• Can you leverage performance information as part of your recruitment process?
• Do you have data to help you hire better performers and reduce hiring poor performers?
• Do you have a unified consistent user interface across all parts of your recruiting system?
• Do you have real-time access to organizational data that can help you make better hiring decisions?
• Is your recruiting tied to your performance data?

You can go through all aspects of your talent management systems and ask questions such as these to try to determine a baseline for how you are stacking up.

Moving Forward Is Attainable – Without Magic

The truth is that while questions such as these might have been difficult if not impossible to answer several years ago, when your systems might have been deployed, they can be answered today. Today’s best modern talent management systems bring organizational people data to the forefront and allow agencies to answer these questions and more.

Because these systems are typically cloud-based and provided as a service, implementation is typically much easier than the outdated legacy systems that are prevalent in many agencies. You don’t need to blow up internal processes and departments to make quantum leaps forward for your talent management.

Is 2015 The Year of Change for Your Agency’s Talent Management?

The world keeps changing, and federal talent management has been changing along with it. What may have been true 5 or 10 years ago is very likely not true today. The landscape has changed.

It’s a great time to assess your system’s capabilities to ensure they are helping you answer the questions that need answering and providing the insight for decision making you deserve.

Take stock.

And happy new year.