MARKETING

When The Only Way Is Up



When The Only Way Is Up

Introduction

The human resource department in any organization plays a pivotal role in building world class organizations (Sartain, 2008). Human resource has a key role in supporting and nurturing the career of employees of a company. The role of human resource is not limited to that of a power breaker or a policy maker. Instead, the role of human resource is to provide strategic support in terms of developing talent at work. The function of human resource is to look beyond the policy manuals and build convincing managers. The importance of this role increases multi-fold during an economic downturn for organizations to effectively manage talented and high potential staff.

Misunderstandings in the need of talent management during economic downturn

Most human resource professionals and consultancies misunderstand their role with respect to development of talent during economic turmoil. They think that, with training and skill development, human resource can develop the talent in the organization and set them to achieve absolutely anything (Coffman, 2005). This is untrue. Most human resource professionals and consultancies think of training when it comes to talent development at work during economic downturn. They focus on providing guidelines and highlighting any issues that may be avoided in the future. It is true that people should be aware of their weaknesses, when you coerce people too much to cover up their weaknesses you make them a master of their weakness. Instead, the role of human resource in an organization during economic downturn should be to focus on strengths only. Organizational success depends on the strength of its people and their ability to leverage their collective strengths for management effectiveness and personal development (Clifton, 2007). By emphasizing on negativity, the human resource becomes a destroyer of talent rather than performing its actual role of a developer of talent.

Talent development for competitive advantage

The company that has the best talent pool will never fail. It can get hit on its bottom line once in a while, but with its human resource amply performing its role in developing talent at work during the bad times, the company will be back on its feet in appropriate time. For human resource to play its role in talent development at work, they should first understand the importance of talent management. Talent development should be of foremost importance for the vulnerable organization. Through impressive talent development, an organization can make its talent its core competence. Any organization whose core competence is its talent, it is very difficult for its rivals to match the organization's core competence. Caring for the employee is essential even after the employee has left; unfortunately, very few companies realize this.

For a company, that has a high employee turnover sends a negative message to the market. This is true for both employees and employers. Companies that face recruitment difficulties do so because of their own mistakes. Human resource plays a crucial role for any company that wishes to grow or come ...