Diving deep into your talent pool

Supporting global business planning with strategic talent & succession management software

Increasingly organisations operate in a fast moving and competitive global environment where the ability to attract, retain and develop a broad range of talent – across all areas of the business - is critical to success.

This creates new challenges for corporate HR departments. They have to look beyond managing successors for a few key positions to a much wider and deeper talent pool. They need to create career opportunities that will both retain key people and ensure that they develop the range of skills and experience that their business may need in the future. They also need to be able to see the complete picture - it no longer makes sense to retain the most valuable and knowledgeable employees at divisional or country level. Talent must be nurtured at the local level, but then made available to the whole business.

Long seen as a ‘niche’ exercise, focused on only a few key positions and people, succession planning has now rightfully taken its place as an important strategic activity. It ensures that companies can build and manage the talent pipeline that is essential for their long-term future.

NXP is a newly independent company (founded by Philips) that specialises in designing semiconductors and software for mobile communications, consumer electronics, security applications and in-car entertainment. Employing 37,000 people across 20 countries worldwide, NXP is Europe’s second largest semiconductor company and a top ten supplier worldwide.

NXP realises that to achieve their ambitious growth plans, succession planning is vital.

Carmen Morilla, Project Manager in the HR department at NXP’s headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands explains: “Succession planning is even more important to us now we are an independent company. It is critical that as well as attracting new talent into the business we retain staff that are familiar with our way of working and have knowledge of our company, products and philosophies. One of the ways we can do this is through succession and career planning.”

“As a global company with operations in Europe, Asia, Greater China and the Americas, it is our goal to manage our talent pool effectively worldwide, for the benefit of the business as a whole, rather than keeping talented people at divisional or country level.”

To help them achieve these objectives NXP has implemented the latest version of Cezanne’s Succession & Career planning software, re-branded internally as Talent Track. Over 150 users in the HR departments and in senior management across NXP worldwide have secure access via the company intranet to the system, which holds data on over 2000 of its key people.

Identifying potential
NXP uses the succession and career planning software tool to track and actively manage the careers of those employees identified as having potential during the annual performance management reviews.

NXP has introduced new company values as part of the competency framework (based on Hay) included in the performance reviews. Staff are measured according to their success in meeting the values criteria, and all the information is discussed and captured during the review.

All executives that are identified as being part of the ‘talent pool’ are aware that there is a ‘management system’ and talent review discussions are held as part of the annual employee appraisals and development process. A two way process enables those employees selected to have input into their development plans. In this way the company is able to align individual aspirations with agreed, set, measurable business targets and career steps.

“We use Talent Track to capture many different aspects of people and positions – for example work history, progress over time, which countries employees have worked in as well as which positions require what experience. We recognise that training programmes can assist in career planning, but there are also many other experiences and aspects that need to be taken into account,” explained Morilla.

Building the talent pool for the “Next Experience”
NXP stands for Next Experience and reflects the company’s ambition to develop the next generation of consumer entertainment products. The fast moving and specialist nature of their business means that NXP needs to do more than just succession plan for key positions. They also need to ensure that they have a healthy talent pipeline to support future business initiatives.

Cezanne’s Succession & Career software is used to hold information about the talent pipeline - those who have been identified as having potential for key roles in the future - so that it can be analysed. The reporting functions available in the system allow NXP to not only see snapshots of departments and individuals, but also to analyse how a particular population has changed over time.

A user can select a group of people, for example high potential employees, and then look at the dynamics of this group between specified dates. They can see who has entered or left the group in more detail, and where gaps and skill deficiencies have formed. This allows NXP’s HR team to take a more informed and proactive role in building and managing the talent pool.

Improved decision-making
For NXP a key benefit of the software is that they have a single, easily accessible source of accurate data about people and positions across the business, improving the quality of information used for decision-making.

“There is a huge amount of data involved in the discipline of talent management. Without a system we would have to rely on updating manual spreadsheets and storing information locally. It would be an almost unthinkable challenge to keep the information up to date, and use and share it globally,” said Morilla.

“For example, the analysis and reporting available in Cezanne’s succession planning tool enables us to easily make decisions on critical appointments. Being able to fill key internal positions enables us to keep highly talented people.” explained Morilla.

Taking advantage of best practice
In implementing their Talent Track solution, NXP borrowed heavily from the tried and tested approaches adopted by Philips.

Carmen Morilla explains: “Philips already had strong succession planning processes in place, and NXP has adopted and refined many of the same approaches in order to minimise disruption to staff.”

Making talent visible enterprise-wide
Access to the system currently is limited within NXP to the HR teams and Managing Directors of each of the country subsidiaries. This enables senior personnel to look across the company when considering succession planning at the highest and most strategic levels.

“Using Cezanne’s Succession & Career software enables us to have a global overview of personnel across countries, divisions and departments, as well as being able to drill down to specific detail on individuals. For us it is an integral way of working – we can supply top executives with all the information they need to ensure that we meet the future needs of the business, as well as our key employees,” concluded Morilla.

Underpinning this enterprise-wide view of data is a sophisticated security model that controls access to data based on roles, which can be defined right down to an individual and country level. This is crucial as the system holds very personal information about individuals who play an important role in the company.

Copyright © 2007 Cezanne Software. Cezanne Software is a registered trademark of Cezanne Software S.p.A.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

You are receiving this e-mail because you have expressed interest in Cezanne Software and our products and services. To protect your online privacy, we do not rent or sell your e-mail address to third parties. To be removed from our e-mail list click here.
You will receive an e-mail confirmation that your e-mail address has been removed from our list.
To learn more, please visit www.cezannesw.com