Month: December 2022

Things can get messy when a position opens up within your company, and no one is there to fill it quickly. Building and maintaining a talent pool can help you find the right person for the job without spending too much time and money. Instead of starting from scratch each time a job becomes vacant, you’ll have a list of qualified candidates waiting in the wings. 

What is a Talent Pool?

A talent pool is a carefully managed database of people who possess the skills required to fill potential positions at a company. If you’re a hiring manager or recruiter, talent pools are essential to your recruiting strategy toolkit.

The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that each new hire costs around $4,700—sometimes much more. The hiring process can take weeks, especially for smaller businesses with fewer resources. If you don’t move fast enough on the candidates you love, other companies might hire them first. 

A talent pool helps minimize the costs and resources associated with looking for and hiring new talent. 

By taking the time to curate a talent pool, you’ll be able to enjoy a streamlined hiring process whenever a position becomes vacant. While company policy may require you to post every job opening publicly, you can focus your energy on scanning your talent pool for ideal candidates instead of wading through hundreds of applications. 

Of course, the candidates on your list have to want to be considered. That’s why a critical part of creating a talent pool is maintaining relationships with the people on your list. You’ll also need to make sure your talent pool is more than just a list of names. 

It should include contact information, qualifications, skills, and potential roles each person could fill. If it sounds exhausting to keep track of…

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Performance management is a term usually used to refer to the process of making sure that employees, activities, and/or outputs in an organization meet their goals. 

It involves things like evaluating employee performance and targets, as well as supporting employee growth and improving employee experience. Good performance management should focus on both company goals and employee satisfaction and should be managed in a positive way, rather than by overworking teams or setting unreasonable goals. 

When done right, performance management can improve productivity, create a strong culture of happiness and trust in a company, and help businesses understand where they need to improve if they want to meet their goals. 

Why is Performance Management Important? 

Good performance management enables employees to perform better because they are being supported, they have good training and instruction, and they are in an environment that encourages growth and new ideas. 

At the same time, it also makes it easier for a business as a whole to meet its goals. When employee performance is good and individual strengths are obvious, it’s easier for managers to put people into roles and teams where they can thrive, which leads to targets being met faster and better overall productivity. 

Without performance management, companies risk employee dissatisfaction, which in turn leads to losing employees, revenue, and profit. Without documented performance management, analyzing and growing from past mistakes is also difficult.  

Best Strategies for Performance Management 

There are a few tried and tested strategies for effective performance management that are helpful to both employees and management teams. Here are some of the top proven strategies for companies to help support employees and meet their goals: 

Holding Frequent Performance Meetings 

Having frequent meetings between managers and employees is important for setting and meeting goals, but also for catching any problems before they…

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Setting actionable professional development goals is invaluable for career progression. However, these goals impact many more areas of your professional life, including increasing productivity, clarifying your career path, improving job satisfaction, and becoming a better employee. Of course, the professional development goals you choose depend on your career aspirations.

You can identify reasonable individual goals by deciding where you want to be in five to ten years. Alternatively, you can use the results of your performance review to identify areas for improvement. Finally, ensure your goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This post covers examples of the most common professional development goals. 

1. Do Your Job Better 

Setting professional development goals can be intimidating, requiring both time and money. However, you don’t need to have your entire career path mapped to identify relevant goals. Instead, you can start where you are with what you have—that is, learn to do your current job better. 

Workplace skills, also known as employability skills, refer to the basic proficiency or know-how required to perform your daily tasks at the workplace. These skills are often transferable, meaning they are still valuable even when you leave for a different company or start your own business. 

Focusing on the skills related to your current job or position is essential. For example, learning a new language might help you communicate better with a particular client demographic. Similarly, improving your public speaking skill can help you make more impactful and exciting presentations. 

Don’t worry if you don’t know where to start. Your most recent job evaluation can help you identify specific areas to improve. Some valuable workplace skills worth improving include:

• Communication 
• Management 
• Problem-solving 
• Organization 
• Self-regulation 
• Time management 
• Teamwork

Developing your workplace skills offers some of the best returns on investment. For example, you’ll…

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