Friday, May 17, 2013

Talent Trumps Job Security

Despite the fact that for most Indian employees’ job security has emerged as the number one priority this year, ‘Talent’ is still reigning. Finding by Mercer Consultants show that talent is still not easy to retain.


Employees are less happy with their jobs and the task to retain key performers is tougher than before", research by consulting firm Mercer confirms.

In other words, a valuable talent still does not need to worry about job security. They are secure in themselves, in their competencies.

At Microsoft, the talent strategy is built around two key stakeholders — high potentials (4% of the employees) and key talent (another 16% of employees).

In fact it is the companies that are insecure about their talent and are doing their best to retain them.

Recent business reports show that opportunity for new mothers to secure performance ratings during their six months' maternity leave (Citi India), grooming high potentials by having different benches — the emerging leader bench, leader bench, senior leader bench and executive leader bench (Microsoft India), succession planning, leadership development programmes from institutes like Michigan University and Harvard Business School and six-year long resource intensive "Emerging Leaders Program" for young talent (Mahindra & Mahindra), fostering a culture of idea-preneurship that enables employees to generate creative insights (HCL Technologies) are some of the strategies being put-in-place by companies to engage and retain talent.

A Talent was secure, is secure and will always be secure. Talent trumps Job Security.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I totally agree with this article. The main reason as to why Indians put job security as their number one priority is that they do not believe in their own competencies. No organization would ever want to let go of good talent (regardless of the economic situation) so why should they why worry about job security in the first place? Also the research says that employees are less satisfied and it is tough to retain key performers. This could be eliminated by assigning people to those jobs of their expertise rather than other jobs, that way the satisfaction would be high leading to high productivity. So it is necessary to spread the message to Indians to develop their competencies rather than worry about job security. And as you’ve rightly said talent will always triumph job security.