Dr Lien's Talent Management Conundrum

I attended an interesting lecture last night at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. Their Associate Professor in Human Resources Management, Dr Lien Els, gave a great presentation debating what is 'talent', and how do you harness it.

One of her great points I thought was that you should not plan to keep talent. You can't keep or restrain talent. Talent moves on or leaves. You should plan how you intend to retain talent as long as possible and that all comes down to what you'll let them do whilst they're with your firm. To retain talent, she argued, the role should be wide open and not a tightly defined job description. Talent needs to feel as though they are constantly growing, or at least have the room to grow into at all times.

Another good observation in my opinion was that most HR professionals tend to think of talent management primarily as sourcing/recruitment, and as a result of that, it is easy to neglect the talent that may already exist within an organisation.

All quite heady stuff. If you want to know more about their research events then see the following link: http://www.uowdubai.ac.ae/research/

Job site Search Engines
Essential for those looking to quickly find jobseekers via the Net. However I have a small gripe this week with a couple of job sites who have overlooked the basic model of a search engine. You have to be able to find something using it!

Sounds simple, and it is for the majority. However a client asked us to integrate our recruiting technology this week to a new South African job site which has lots of IT jobs on it and is popular. Now if you visit the site and search 'all' vacancies, which I would think 2 out of 5 visitors would do when they reach the homepage, the search doesn't work. At best it retrieves a dozen jobs; when there are actually hundreds posted.

This isn't the only site who has not yet made a brilliant job of making job searching easy. I don't know whether in this case the site have put a restriction on the site because their servers can't handle retrieving hundreds of records at a time, but either way I think job sites should be audited by an independent body to make sure that employer advertising bucks are being spent in places that will actually yield candidates for them.