Talent Management and retention

ITU Regional Human Capacity Development Forum for Asia Pacific
Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei Darussalam
14-16 December 2009

Session 1: High level Panel on Human Capacity Development Challenges: A Strategic Perspective

Thusanai Piarabutr, SEVP, TOT

Key theme 1 Talent Management and retention

Innovation is happening much faster fueling the demand for talent Management. Under these circumstances, it has become much more important for employers to think about talent management rather than human resources management. Talent retention and human capital management are moving up their ranks to be strategic partners rather than administrators.

1. How do we manage all this?
2. How to stop talent from moving out?

1. How do we manage all this?

We have no doubt about why we need talent. Because any company that has very good players will have more opportunities to win the competition. In addition, we are now living in a period of time that characterized by Speed, innovation, short cycle time, quality, and customer satisfaction. This is highlighting the importance of intangible assets, such as brand recognition, knowledge, innovation, as well as talent.

A successful company, they seek the talent at the day one. But before the company recruits talent, the company should identify what competencies that the firm is looking at. Suppose that, your firm doesn’t start seeking talent at day one, ask ourselves that how we identify talent. This is a critical step. Most firms run talent management program and fail. There are many reasons why that the talent management is failure. The major reason is how to identify the right people. They fail because they use the result of individual performance as one criteria to identify talent as a result the firm get the wrong person because manager don’t have emotional fortitude to give honest feedback.

Even you identify right people; your firm may have weak HR system such compensation and talent development program. In many cases, talent program create a bad climate to the workplace.

Before run the Talent program, your firm should have strong HR architecture. I recommend running talent by recruiting and developing, if your firm is still in the process of developing effective HR architecture.

To recruit talent, you have to use HR assessment tool such as personality test, skill test, interview and long discussion with the applicants.


2. How to stop talent from moving out.


To stop them moving out, the HR architecture should be well developed. The HR architecture includes three major components. First, HR function such as competencies, Second, HR system such as compensation and alignment, and third the employee behavior require for implement strategy.



3. To be a partner, HR managers must understand the firm’ strategy; that is, its plan for developing and sustaining an advantage in the marketplace.

The evolutions of HR as strategic asset are as follows.

The personnel perspective: The firm hires and pays people but doesn’t focus on hiring the very best or developing exceptional employees.

The compensation perspective: The firm uses bonus, incentive pay to reward high and low performers. But it doesn’t fully exploit the benefits of HR as strategic asset.

The alignment perspective: Senior managers see employees as strategic asset, but they don’t invest in overhauling HR’s capabilities. Therefore, the HR system can’t leverage management’s perspective.

The high-performance perspective: HR and other executives view HR as a system embedded within a large system of the firm’s implementation. The firm manages and measures the relationship between these two systems and firm performance.


To design a measurement system that HR is impact on business performance, HR must focus on how HR can play a central role in implementing the firm’s strategy. With a properly developed strategic HR architecture, managers throughout the firm can understand exactly how people can create value and how to measure their value-creation process.

Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, Dave Ulrich, The HR Scorecard: Linking people strategy, and performance, Harvard Business School Press, 2001