When playing the piano, your hands must work in tandem to successfully perform a musical composition. You wouldn't expect it to still sound like Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" if your left hand follows the piece's notation while your right hand improvises. They must work in coordination. The same goes for the individual people and talent functions within your HR department.

With the current trend of companies pursuing leaner HR departments, talent-related functions are often the first to get chopped. But you need them as part of your organization's complete talent journey. The talent acquisition team sources and recruits, while talent management leads development with strategies like feedback and performance management, training and career mapping. The standard HR functions involve employee service needs, compliance and organizational feedback. There can also be specialized people-related groups like engagement.

Companies merge divisions and functions all the time. After all, it wouldn't make sense to put each aspect of finance—operations, accounting, accounts payable/receivable, analysis, etc.—into silos. Having too many touchpoints can create a disjointed experience. So why do we allow this with our HR and talent teams? What if we did something transformative and organized them into the same bucket?

Integrated Talent Leverages The Value Of People

It's our people who power our operations and success, so having an integrated, talent-centric HR strategy is vital. By integrating all talent functions, you create a more cohesive approach that ensures the company develops a unified talent front, improves scalability and drives profitability.

I see collaboration failures between HR and talent teams on a regular basis. Let's say a firm lays off a high-performing employee. If the talent recruitment and talent management teams aren't aligned, the former might make multiple hires to other departments in an attempt to fill that gap. The team might ignore existing employees who could've filled the position and then, six months down the line, reopen the exact same role when business picks up. Altogether, the firm could end up going through the hiring process several times just to acquire the same skill set as that original high performer.

If you slow down to reassess your company’s talent approach and talent organization structure, you might realize your people and talent functions aren't optimized for efficiency, effectiveness and growth. It's time to move away from seeing people as just a headcount or an expense. With an integrated talent approach, you're treating your people as an investment.

Creating An Integrated Talent Strategy

Let's reset. When your approach to finding and procuring talent is aligned with your approach to developing and organizing talent, you create a powerful strategy that addresses hiring and development gaps more effectively. Here are four steps to rethink how you can reinvent your people and talent functions with an integrated approach.

1. Reassess Your Work: This step is about understanding what's working and where the redundancies and inefficiencies are. From job posting to someone exiting, what supports, processes and steps will help you drive quality outcomes? Look for alignment, duplication and unclear value in the process flow. Then eliminate wasted work or processes that don't support attracting, hiring, developing and retaining talent.

2. Roadmap Your New Approach: Build out your integrated talent strategy with a support plan that clearly communicates the path forward. It should cover roles and responsibilities, as well as milestones that establish progress toward the next iteration of your people and talent functions.

3. Align Leadership Around Change Management: Executing your integrated talent strategy roadmap requires leadership action. Leaders should energize the organization around this change with a clear vision, supported by consistent communication, updates and messaging. It's also crucial to have a documented process to ensure everyone knows what's happening and when.

4. Monitor And Iterate: Evaluate your success by monitoring important metrics, SLAs and data, then consider areas for improvement and the next phase of your strategy. You might want to focus on improvement in internal NPS scores based on hiring leader feedback, talent retention measures, cost per hire and successful promotion as you go on this talent journey.

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