Integrating that talent is a critical success factor for both the new employee and the business. How often is the process ignored in small businesses or over-simplified in larger organisations through a speedy and superficial orientation or on-boarding process?
All that can happen is that new people are simply left to fend for themselves, adjusting to their new role and environment more or less on their own. This will inevitably adversely affect both productivity and motivation. Think about it – what will it do to their perception of your company. and what might their response be? The bottom line is that ultimately your best talent will leave. Never forget that they always have options! People all need to feel valued, important, and respected. They won’t if they don’t feel that they’ve been given a good opportunity to integrate into their new organisation.
Developing high-potential talent
Your aim as a team leader is to recruit talent with high potential. You are looking for people with a good fit in terms of qualifications, experience and attitude. People with high talent potential are not short of opportunities – you need to position yourself as well as you can to win the “race”. To people with some experience in seeking new jobs, the way that they are integrated, both into the role and into the company, has the potential to be a significant competitive advantage for you.
For this reason, it makes sense to look at the whole process of Talent Integration as a progression from simple on-boarding.
Talent integration is the way that we blend new hires into the organisation… but it also covers the integration of newly promoted team leaders and managers into their new roles.
Talent Integration vs. simple on-boarding
At a basic level, on-boarding helps new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviours to become effective members of your team. Common methods include formal meetings, lectures, videos, print materials, or computer-based orientations to introduce newcomers to their new jobs in their new organisation. The reality is, though that this often becomes a rather mechanistic checklist type exercise, lacking suitable attention to individual, group, and social integration with a view to maximising the new employee’s effectiveness and motivation.
In essence, the aim of talent integration is in reducing the time for those in new roles becoming productive contributors. The desired outcome is for them to be quickly embedded into the organisation as a result of forming good relationships, receiving the necessary support, and building loyalty to their new team. The result is improved employee retention as well as being a selling point for attracting new talent.
Relationships – the basis for engagement
For anyone who is joining a new team of people, one of the biggest challenges is in understanding the behavioural culture at both a team and individual level. A mature team has evolved over time to understand each other (in most cases!) and to accommodate differences in behavioural preferences and priorities. For the new starter, gaining insight into this can be a massive help in their effective integration – short cutting a large part of the learning curve about what makes their new colleagues tick.
Talent Integration Basics
Effective talent integration embraces the following elements:
- A basic introduction to the new organisation (often covered in the traditional on-boarding process).
- A more formal, individual, developmentally focused integration plan covering the first 3-6 months, which includes:
– A focused discussion with their new manager in the early days to agree clear expectations for job performance, targets and results, relational expectations and how best to work together.
– Helping the new employee to recognise the organisational culture and “how we do things here” through a mentor within the organisation (probably not their line manager).
– For new managers, providing a coach to support their integration into the new role, especially if they will need to take on new skills.
– Planned and regular feedback meetings (at least monthly) where the focus is successes, challenges, their ideas for improvements, and their support needs. These are two way discussions, not diatribes from the boss!
9 Steps in planning for success
As the recruiter, you will want to give any hiring action the best chance of being successful, by doing the following:
- Have a clear view of what the job role requires and what actually needs doing.
- Gain clarity and agreement on the necessary skills, behaviours and attitudes for success.
- Understand any future role adaptation that may happen.
- Underpin your recruitment interview with behaviourally based questions probing experience, history, changes made, and successes.
- Use behaviour and culture focused questions to help determine their values and motivators – see how they fit with your organisation.
- Give the candidate a scenario-based problem and see how they would respond to it.
- Explain your talent integration process; share the experiences of others who have appreciated its value. Show how it drives success in hiringand keepinghigh potential talent.
- Use a behaviour based personality test to get a better understanding of the behavioural preferences of the candidate – and contrast them to the role requirements.
- Use this insight to support coaching the new employee to promote a faster and more effective integration.
If you don’t already have a talent integration process, maybe now is the time to consider implementing one. Hiring is an expensive game – improving the chances of success is a must to improve your bottom line and to attract and retain top talent.
DISC UK can help you with your recruitment and talent management processes – using Everything DiSC® behavioural products, you can improve communication throughout your organisation – building better relationships, delivering moire effective performance, better motivation… and improved bottom line results.
