Readying your
Talent Practices
for a Digital World

SNAPSHOTS 2024

Our Annual Publication

What does it mean to Go Digital with your Talent Practices?

In recent years, organizations have been increasingly pushing for broader digital transformation of HR processes. They are also taking a fresh approach to talent management & development. However, our conversations with HR leaders reveal multiple challenges in this journey.

From our interactions with leaders in companies that are successfully going digital with these practices, we have identified four common themes. Snapshots 2024 dives deeper to better understand these themes and capture key learnings & best practices.

Interestingly, these themes suggest that going digital successfully may have more to do with the mindset & ways of working, than with the maturing of existing HR/procurement processes or IT capabilities.

01

Data-driven Decision Making

02

The Agility Imperative

03

Designing for Scale

04

Focusing on Future Readiness

We learned from our experiences with clients, and have brought them directly to you through contributions from HR leaders in this Snapshots edition. Explore the valuable insights derived from practical experiences.

Bimal Rath

Cofounder & MD, Think Talent Services

Industry Contributors

Ajnav Deka

Head - COE (Talent,
Performance & DEI)

TATA Power

Ayaskant Sarangi

Chief Human
Resource Officer

Mphasis

Geetanjali Wheeler

Director - Talent Management & Development

Sun Life Global Solutions - India

Ranjaboti Som

General Manager - Talent Development & OD

Schneider Electric

Sarika Pradhan

Vice President -
APAC HR Head

CGI

Shivin Tikoo

Head of
Human Resources

Mahindra First Choice Wheels

Syed Azfar Hussain

Senior Vice President - HR

Bajaj Finserv

Trupti Nayak

SVP & Head -
OD, Employee Engagement
& People Analytics

HDFC Bank

Vinod Krishnan

Senior General Manager -
Learning Leadership
Culture & CoE, HR

Aurobindo Pharma

Vivek Jain

Sr. Executive Vice President & Head HR - RA, CIIB, PB & ARC

Kotak Mahindra Bank

Yojana Gawade

People & Organization
(HR) Director

Mars Pet Nutrition India

Theme 01

Data-driven Decision Making

In our conversations with HR teams across industries, making talent processes more data-driven comes across as a key priority. With a plethora of platforms, tools and now AI algorithms available to support key talent decisions, making processes data- driven has probably never been easier. Despite this, we see HR teams working on such initiatives struggling to get them off the ground.

Resistance from People managers who see this process as taking away their “autonomy” is often a key issue. HR capability around designing decision metrics & statistical analysis and navigating issues around InfoSec & privacy also emerge as key bottlenecks. Effectively leveraging digital will require HR professionals to develop new skills and develop a more comprehensive stakeholder engagement process.

Top 3 takeaways for Leaders

Coverage: Entire Talent Lifecycle

Organizations are striving to improve the quality, credibility, and efficiency of talent decisions across the entire talent lifecycle by making them more data driven.

Required: A Change Management Approach

Success requires viewing such initiatives from a change management perspective and creating comprehensive stakeholder engagement plans to align and train key stakeholders.

Focus on New HR Capabilities

Improving the data orientation of processes requires HR teams to develop analytical & process design abilities, along with awareness of Infosec issues.

Are your Capability Building
initiatives focusing on the right things?

Traditionally, focus areas & the design of talent interventions are based on the “perceived” learning needs of the cohort & typically rely on comments & inputs from key stakeholders. Taking a data-driven approach to identifying learning needs can potentially point to a different set of focus areas or skills that may emerge as collective development needs of the cohort.

In this blog, we summarize key findings from the analysis of competency profiles of 2000+ high-potential managers generated through Development Centres. The analysis indicates that supporting ‘self’ & teams through change, fostering an innovation orientation & improving conflict management may be more critical learning needs for high-potential cohorts than the traditional focus areas of people management & collaboration.

HR’s primary role is to help managers view data as a complement to their decision-making, rather than a competition to their experience or gut feeling, thereby, embracing transparency amid the changing environmental needs.

Vivek Jain

Sr. Executive Vice President & Head HR – RA, CIIB, PB & ARC

Kotak Mahindra Bank

A data-driven Framework to evaluate Effectiveness of your Promotion process

Data allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of our talent practices more comprehensively. Here is a framework of metrics being used by leading organizations to evaluate effectiveness of the promotion process:

Click on the tabs to open & read.

Experience

Issue Rate – Percentage of Participants who faced Issues during the Process
Participant Experience Score – No. of Immediate Positive Feedback received from Participants
Line Manager Feedback Score – No. of Managers/Leaders included in the Content Review Process

Efficacy

Failure ratio – No. of participants rejected after Promotion Centre / Total no. of participants after Promotion Centre
Type I Error % – No. of promoted participants who received Low Performance Rating after 6 months / Total no. of promoted participants
Turn-around-Time (TAT) – Time required from nomination to final decision

Engagement & Inclusion

Coverage Ratio – No. of People covered in Promotion Centre / No. of People having Basic Eligibility for the Role
Fairness Perception Score – Percentage of Participants who rated in Engagement Survey “Promotion processes are fair & objective in my organization”?

Revamped Promotion Process at a Pharma Company

A leading Pharma company redesigned the process for internal promotion from individual contributors to managerial roles. All employees nominated for promotion now must clear a structured assessment center, followed by a final interview, to be finally cleared for promotion.

Enhanced Talent Review with 360° Feedback at a Conglomerate

The annual talent review & development planning process at a leading Conglomerate has been redesigned. All employees in managerial roles now go through a 360° feedback survey prior to the conversation with their managers, with the 360 data being a key input into the development planning conversation.

Vinod Krishnan

Senior General Manager – Learning Leadership Culture & CoE, HR

Aurobindo Pharma

Promotion decisions used to rely on leadership nominations and performance, lacking a reliable measure of potential. The risk of promoting individuals beyond their competence level was a constant worry.

HR issues often are dealt with from a behavioral lens or a behavioral angle. But, when you start expressing things in terms of tangible numbers, then business stakeholders are able to grasp & appreciate the value of effective talent processes.

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01 Data-driven
Decision Making

02 The Agility
Imperative

03 Designing
for Scale

04 Focusing on
Future Readiness

Theme 02

The Agility Imperative

Reacting rapidly to changes is an essential requirement for businesses to succeed in the VUCA world. Business stakeholders increasingly expect HR teams to make processes more agile and shorten TATs on key deliverables, especially recruitment. HR teams successfully delivering on this agility imperative are running well-designed pilots, shortening process cycles, and leveraging predictive analytics to proactively anticipate and manage issues.

Digital platforms, being on-demand and easily deployable, can greatly enable agility. However, HR teams often come across as being too focused on avoiding mistakes and getting things right the first time. This can become a barrier to agility.

Top 3 takeaways for Leaders

Digital does not ensure Agility

Agility is essential for HR teams to be effective in a digital world. Digital platforms enable but do not by themselves automatically ensure agility.

Fostering an Agile Mindset

Achieving agility requires a mindset change: giving up a perfectionist mindset and embracing a beta culture.

Leaders as Champions

Agility also requires leaders to champion new ideas, sponsor and support changes and be more tolerant of failures or things not working as per expectations.

Employees are actually ready for the disruption & they are waiting for you to have the right talent process designed which fits both theirs & the organization’s agile goals. Business leaders can promote an agile culture by openly celebrating experiments & recognizing that it’s okay to fail. This cultural aspect doesn’t require a dashboard; it seamlessly integrates into our narratives of successes & experiments.

Yojana Gawade

People & Organization (HR) Director

Mars Pet Nutrition India

Piloting your way to Program Success

Pilot your way to program success with tips on setting clear objectives with measurable outcomes, targeted participant selection, continuous feedback for real-time adjustments, and building champions who advocate for the program’s value.

Gone are the days of managers nominating employees for learning programs. Now, if my team wants to learn, they go the self-service route on YouTube or Google, bypassing traditional processes. As my learners become more agile, the question arises: How can I support their newfound agility & align their goals with our organizational goals?

Ranjaboti Som

General Manager – Talent Development & OD

Schneider Electric

Program cycles are getting shorter for Learning Programs

Cohort sizes are on the rise as clients aim to democratize learning journeys and make them available to more employees.

Clients expect significantly shorter turnaround time for RFPs and RFQs.

Looking to use standardized, existing or build on top of it, rather than creating custom content from scratch.

Diagnosis increasingly focuses on contextualization of communication and identifying possibilities for on-the-job implementation.

Taking a virtual or hybrid approach depending on context and cohort size.

Multiple methodologies and running simultaneous cohorts ensures inclusion and a wider reach.

We have considered 30+ programs across 20 companies over 7 years.
Data is focused only on learning journeys and not on other engagements.
This does not include assessments or standalone training sessions.

Hybrid working is redefining the modern workplace, and similarly, hybrid learning gives us a chance to reimagine the learning experience. The way forward is to determine how all these multiple learning formats or modalities — synchronous vs. asynchronous, virtual vs. physical — can be used to create a more impactful learning experience for the employees.

Geetanjali Wheeler

Director – Talent Management & Development

Sun Life Global Solutions – India

Supporting Agility from Within

The Strategic Imperative of Investing on an Internal Talent Base

It is a very difficult task to create a strong base with a focus on primarily acquiring talent from the outside all the time. The costs, including hidden & opportunity costs, point clearly to investing in internal talent being preferable to hiring all the time, except maybe in very specialized areas. To bring increased certainty in talent availability & link to expected performance, investments in internal talent may yield better results.

Often, we create policies & practices but do not understand the capabilities of the (tech) platform. Often, both are done in isolation. So, (when designing programs & policies) one not only needs to keep the user in mind, which is the design thinking, but also needs to understand the platform capabilities because unless both meet, you cannot get a seamless integrated experience.

Shivin Tikoo

Head of Human Resources

Mahindra First Choice Wheels

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