Improving your internal talent pipeline is a type of succession planning necessary for any organization to stay on top of hiring. This is especially true in fields where workers are both highly educated, technically skilled, and hard to find. You have high performers in your company.
Here’s how to keep them, grow their careers, and improve your time to hire.
What is an Internal Talent Pipeline?
An internal talent pipeline is a ready-made pool of high-performing employees. These are the top producers in your organization. They have a lot of job expertise for their particular role but also a lot of company knowledge that they use to mentor new employees. Your focus should be on nurturing the growth of these individuals to use them to fill new internal positions higher up the ladder in the organization, because you don’t want to lose these bright, hardworking employees. So, your goal should be to promote them, increase their salaries, and give them new challenges to help keep them feeling fulfilled—and their skills within your organizations.
The internal pipeline is a constant process, a conversation, and a regular part of goal setting. In the same way that you should be building an external pipeline of new candidates with your recruiting teams, your management teams should also focus each month on employee retention, promotion, training, and advancement.
How Can I Build an Internal Talent Pipeline?
Start by identifying your top performers. Who are the employees that consistently go above and beyond? Which workers lead teams or mentor other employees? Make a list of the employees that consistently receive high scores on their annual evaluations.
Next, sit down with these top performers—or teach their managers to do this—and map out a career roadmap. Now, this should be a regular part of your employee onboarding for new hires, but far too often this is neglected in most organizations. The goal of these meetings is to get a sense from your top-performing employees about where they see themselves in your organization in the next three to five years (preferably longer). Then talk about how to provide the employee with the training and mentorship they need to help them achieve their goals. Ideally, you’ll want to meet with the employee on a regular basis, but specifically discuss their progress towards the career roadmap every 90-days, and certainly, no more than every six months to make sure they are moving down the path appropriately and provide feedback to course correct as needed. Train your management team to work within these guidelines and make employee retention and development a key part of your leadership and corporate goals.
Creating an internal pipeline of candidates is time-consuming but making that time investment in your people is absolutely critical if you want to engage and retain your best workers. Waiting until an annual review means you run the risk of losing the employee to the next recruiter calling to steal that great person away from your company.
Blackstone Talent helps companies manage their internal pipelines by providing them with a continuous flow of fresh talent to backfill those promoted to higher positions. We can help you meet your hiring goals. Contact us today.