Agility of the HR will emerge as game-changer

Ankush Puri is the Business Head at Lee Hecht Harrison – India. The organization offers talent mobility solutions throughout the entire employee lifecycle – from on-boarding, through career and leadership development, engagement and retention to redeployment and transition. Puri’s 18-years of experience maps almost the entire HR spectrum from organization development to performance and talent management, change management and leadership consulting. At LHH, his responsibilities include business profitability through effective client consulting and associate management. Apart from this, he is also an OD Consultant involved in driving Leadership Development and Executive Coaching Assignments nationally.

Q: What are the talent development trends in India?

A: Talent Development in India is entering a new space. To a very large extent it gets defined by the following:

Talent Demand Supply equation: For e.g. the Trump effect will alter the demand supply equation for the IT industry and the focus of organizations will tilt from talent development to honing their talent acquisition practices or differences in terms of the competitiveness of a particular sector.  Thus, talent development in protected sectors will be driven by the policies rather than business needs as compared to mediocre growth sectors where it would be an active function but not as aggressive as high growth sectors.

Maturity and effectiveness of the education sector: A country like India still faces a huge gap in terms of the requisite skill level and industry readiness of Talent. A major chunk of learning is still left to ‘on the job’.

Employee age groups: Sunrise sectors that thrive on innovation, purpose, speed and disruption may prefer to employ a younger work group as compared to the mature and stable industrial sectors. This yet again defines how each sector looks at Talent Development as it is defined by the needs and preferences of their Target talent group.

While the above points necessitate the need for a differential treatment, there are some common threads that cut across these disparities like:

Subjectivity to scientific frameworks: Organizations are gradually moving towards scientific frameworks to breakdown job roles, identify and define desired behaviors and establish frameworks that help them structure a scientific approach to talent development.

Data Analytics:  Organizations in India are increasingly resorting to establish correlations between talent dimensions and work place behavior, thus leading to the emergence of a new sub-sector i.e. HR analytics.

Revisiting qualification: Indian organizations are slowly moving out of the trap of perceiving qualification to be a reflection of competencies. On the contrary, many organizations are seeking support and successfully creating their own filter mechanisms to define and identify talent based on competencies, rather than using qualifications as a predictor of behavior.

Challenging the stereotypes: India is waking up to challenge stereotypical definitions like age, gender, geography, functional experience, industry exposure to tap into a latent potential talent base within and outside the organization and thus grow their talent reservoir multiple times.

Enterprise: Organizations are willing to experiment and try out disruptive techniques and formats to develop talent, though the techniques may seem not even remotely connected to the job of the employees.  

Evolution of HR: Human Resource as a function is evolving into a game-changer function, overtaking the importance of finance in many sectors, as a function. The percolation and transference of HR into the business is something that is increasingly being practiced and recommended.

Mass customization: While development has emerged as a burning need and a compulsion to engage the workforce, the workforce is in a position to demand customization and contextualization, in the absence of which, they are quick to reject the organizations development initiatives and perceive a generalized approach as lackadaisical attitude of the organization, towards employees.

Q: On one hand, jobs are getting specialized and on other hand technology is proving to be a major competitor to human upskilling. What are the ways in which there can be a synthesis of both with regard to talent development?

A: This is a trend, here, to stay.

What might possibly change is the role of the human and the desired competencies. As these changes unfold, the organizations need to ensure that their human workforce is aligned and ready to adapt to the change in desired behaviors and build the necessary skills, in time.  

Q: How do you think technology is affecting talent development in India?

A: Technology has had some major repercussions on talent development practices in India. Right from the emergence of technology-based platforms and gadget based learnings that have relieved the managers from the shackles of distant geographies, time constraints, mismatch to learning styles to tools that accentuate speed and accuracy in helping Human Resource Managers gather, analyze and draw meaningful inferences about performance and potential of employees. 

To think of a Human Resource Manager trying to assess potential candidates for a job opportunity or planning successors or assessing leadership potential for a group of people across geographies, equipped only with pen and paper tools, trying to match their schedules, would have been a nightmare in yesteryears. My salute to our predecessors who managed these complexities!

Q: What are the challenges in talent development and how will HR as a function evolve to handle the challenges in this space?

A: The 3 critical elements with respect to talent that are Understanding Talent, Developing Talent and Deploying Talent, form the bedrock of an organization’s performance. While the solutions lie here, so do the challenges. As India becomes one of the few fast growing economies, the competitive scenario for organizations will change in India, the country will attract more organizations, more expats, the demographics of the work population will undergo changes, and it’s the agility of the HR to ensure uninterrupted talent flow, which will emerge as the game changer. This would mean accuracy and further detailing in defining talent, faster and accurate means of evaluating talent, innovative, customized methodology and content for developing talent and meaningful, engaging ways of deploying talent.