Smart leaders understand that strategic hiring and the deployment of top talent are vital to managing risk, successful business outcomes, and future-proofing your business. In a competitive business market, it is the strength of your people which determines the rise and fall of your company.

Therefore, it is vital for leaders of today to consider talent management as a core business practice that is fully integrated and aligned with other vital business strategies and processes.

In a nutshell, talent management is the science of using strategic human resource planning to improve business value and reach goals. It is best understood as a shift in thinking around the hiring, training, and retention of employees.

Despite the importance of this business strategy, talent management solutions are an ongoing challenge for executives in many modern organisations.

Traditional talent management systems typically consist of out-dated processes such as ranking employees against each other and the delivery of annual reviews. These tend to be resource intensive and emphasise employee evaluation over development.

Now it’s time for organisations to move away from this top-down annual performance process and instead pilot more continuous, developmental and empowering performance management and feedback processes. Only then can a business align its employees with its culture and business goals.

Moreover, as the disparity between highly-skilled individuals and others grows, attracting top talent will only get more difficult.

The ability to attract talent is one of the biggest differentiating factors in business. We are seeing a growing need for digital talent analytics tools and strategies to facilitate organisations in figuring out who would best fit a job role, how to find these people, and also how to keep talent.

SilkRoad is reinventing HR technologies by offering businesses a solution that goes beyond traditional talent management to full talent activation.

As your business grows and develops, so should your talent. From sourcing and hiring, to onboarding, training and appraisals & development, this solution engages and activates talent across the entire employee journey.

 Create a branded, personalised experience that candidates cannot resist

In a highly competitive job market, it is crucial for businesses to start engaging with candidates from the get-go. With SilkRoad Recruiting, your business can create a branded career portal customised with videos, blogs, and testimonials.

Video job descriptions: Engage potential hires with video job descriptions which explain what skills and qualities are needed to excel in the position and the workplace culture.

A mobile experience: With a global smartphone penetration of 55 percent, businesses who want to attract and engage talent must make the recruitment process mobile. SilkRoad’s solution allows your business to engage the workforce by making it easy for them to apply and making it simple to both post and approve job requisitions.

Hire the best talent at a lower cost: SilkRoad’s free job posting network enables you to expand your candidate pool, sharing job openings across popular social media outlets and automatically linking to thousands of posting sites at no cost.

Fully engage new hires from the moment they sign the contract

Talent activation begins with onboarding. Engaging new hires early and ensuring readiness from day one is a crucial driver of a candidate’s success. With SilkRoad Onboarding, businesses can deliver a strategic and engaging new hire experience through a configurable portal that connects new hires with your brand, culture, and values, at every stage.

Good onboarding has been proven to drive favourable business results such as improved customer service, productivity growth, competitive agility, and profitability.

With customisable workflows delivered automatically, new hire and manager surveys to continuously improve the experience, the delivery of personalised learning and more, you can be sure to keep your talent connected to your business goals.

Create a culture of communication

Employee engagement is key to retaining talent. Businesses must focus on building connections with employees and creating an open and honest culture where communication is encouraged.

SilkRoad’s Performance Management solution goes beyond traditional systems to unlock your employees’ talent through regular check-ins, goals and reviews.

Provide your employees with regular feedback aligned with clear expectations, and easily schedule check-in meetings to discuss such goals, expectations and performance.

Employees can view their progress in real-time, having clear visibility of their current performance and business objectives.

Employees are demanding more professional feedback than previous generations. One survey found that baby-boomers prefer less frequent feedback while millennials prefer more.

Constructive, timely feedback is a key ingredient in improving everyone’s performance. With SilkRoad’s solution, employees are empowered to give, receive and request feedback from their peers – all of which is integrated into the review process.

Managers are also given access to a powerful dashboard and analysis functions which can serve to inform decisions regarding work direction and business objectives.

Deliver a personalised talent-activating learning journey to individual employees

Employee training is a crucial driver of business growth. Yet for many companies, the delivery of training very often fizzles out soon after the onboarding process.

Yet, strategic learning and development should be an on-going process for each employee during their journey.

Such benefits of a long-term learning management program include the advancement of employee skills, keeping up with industry changes, staying ahead of competitors, identifying weaknesses and skills gaps, an increased job satisfaction, and attracting new talent.

With SilkRoad’s Employee Learning Portal, each employee is provided with a personalised one-stop location to develop new skills, enrol on courses, view learning plans, and connect with peers.

With mobile-friendly content, learning is made immediately accessible to employees from wherever or whenever they wish to partake.

Managers are also given complete visibility to track the progress of employee learning through reports and analytics. Here, you can measure how learning impacts engagement and talent activation as well as the overall compliance picture of your organization.

In the race to win and keep the best talent, businesses can no longer rely on old and out-dated systems for talent management. It’s time to go beyond simple HR automation to full talent activation. Get started with this ultimate guide to onboarding new staff, from SilkRoad.