Dear Human Resources

Our regular columnist, Aidan Stoate, CEO New Zealand at Inspire Group, shares his heartfelt insights into leading people.

Good talent management: find great people, grow them, keep them. Repeat.

This may sound like a simple recipe, but it’s one made with ingredients that can be expensive, hard to source, and rarely available in conventional supermarkets.

Traditionally, and despite the challenges of establishing and maintaining an effective talent pipeline amidst constantly changing economic, political, operational and technological conditions, HR teams have done an excellent job with this tricky process. Where inadequacies have existed, most HR and executive leaders have been proactive in refining and optimising their talent strategies to maximise their organisation’s ability to identify, build and retain great people.

But in 2024, it has never been more challenging to do so. Why?

One answer may come in the form of the rapidly evolving workforce landscape. The professional emergence of Gen-Z as a proportion of the workforce is set to surpass the Baby Boomer generation for the first time this year, according to a Glassdoor forecast cited in a recent LinkedIn article.

Traditional means of hiring, developing and retaining staff are therefore being radically challenged in the context of rapidly changing professional expectations and values. The talent pipeline recipe may not have changed, but the cooking apparatus almost certainly has.

What employees expect now (and in some cases demand) from their employers heavily contrasts with the entrenched organisational policies, procedures and routines that were once so effective for talent management in previous eras.

Outside of the new generational impact, the tastes of older and more established employees are also changing. The erosion of traditional career paradigms is evident as more tenured employees seek lateral rather than horizontal moves, regular career breaks, cross-industry experiences, flexible working hours (and locations) or contingency work opportunities. Highly structured and linear talent management programmes can no longer adequately serve these communities and their needs.

Workplaces that are agile and adaptive hold a critical advantage in the battle for today’s talent in this respect, because they can shift their outdated models to more modern, fit-for-purpose initiatives with relative ease and efficiency. Those who invest in the development of future-fit leaders to navigate these changing demographics and trends are also more likely to succeed.

But where to even start? It can feel like a monumental task just to design small changes to a talent management strategy in the face of so much transformation. This is where, dear HR, you can undertake the role of executive chef by introducing some experimental flair to an established recipe.

What is the safest risk you could take, or the smallest sprinkling of flavour you could add to improving your talent management, having first asked your customers what their dietary requirements are?

As we know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so test your new creation with a small sample audience to establish if the change might work for others as part of a bigger menu. And be prepared to break a few eggs on the way; it’s all part of the process.

Bon appetit!

Aidan Stoate is the New Zealand CEO of Inspire Group, an award-winning learning design consultancy that delivers worldclass solutions to organisations globally. Aidan has a passion for helping organisations improve their culture and performance through innovative learning and development interventions. As an ICF-accredited organisational coach, Aidan provides subject-matter expertise for the design and delivery of leadership programmes, while leading the Inspire Group New Zealand business across all projects and disciplines. Having led organisations and teams in the United Kingdom, South-East Asia, North America and Australasia, Aidan brings a nuanced perspective while promoting inclusive, engaging and contextualised solutions that drive genuine behaviour change and strategic benefits.