Dive Brief:

• Aligning talent with business objectives can substantially increase performance, retention and company competitiveness, according to The Predictive Index's State of Talent Optimization Report. The study of 600 executives, including 200 CEOs, found that the alignment between talent and performance yields a 90% "strategic success rate" for businesses.
• However, the index showed that while most organizations have a business strategy, only 36% of the respondents had a talent strategy, and only 12% aligned it with their business strategy. In other words, having no talent strategy "is the norm," even though talent is both a huge company expense and a valuable asset. Respondents attributed 64% of their costs to labor, while attributing 72% of their organization's value to employees.
• Despite the importance of talent to the organization, execs said less than half of hires last year were good hires. On top of that, only 22% of companies surveyed said they know what's driving employees to disengage from work.

Dive Insight:

One of the biggest struggles for employers may be ensuring their talent practices live up to employee expectations. For example, employees in a McKinsey & Company survey said that CEOs and managers are why talent strategies do not succeed. While managers in the U.K.-based poll said they adopted most, if not all, of the practices in a list of 21 good talent management approaches, nonmanager respondents said that managers had trouble carrying out talent practices — or were the reason the new practices didn't work. For talent management to succeed, leadership needs to be onboard, or else attempts to change how things are done could make turnover worse.

Strong leadership is especially important, as a more proactive rather than reactive approach is trending for talent acquisition in 2020, experts previously told HR Dive. "It's going to change the way HR business partners approach … workforce planning," Michael Stephan, Deloitte's US human capital leader, said. "Not just how many heads you need, but 'where is the best place to access this particular talent?'"

With talent sourcing remaining a large source of anxiety, some experts believe the solution lies in knowing when to buy talent and when to develop it. When recruiters come up short, developing a workforce through training and upskilling may be a necessary dual-track solution. Leah Belsky, Coursera's chief enterprise officer, made the case for building a workforce in a previous email to HR Dive. "Facing a skills shortage afflicting most industries, businesses are doubling down on training their own talent in critical skills instead of hiring from a sparse talent pool," Belsky said. She added that building a culture with clear development and learning opportunities can raise employee satisfaction and retention.