Segmenting Your Workforce: A New Method to Help Evaluate Top Talent

As part of their strategic planning process, companies divide customers into segments.

This helps them identify and address customers’ specific needs. It allows them to focus attention and tailor resource allocation to develop each segment differently according to potential to generate more revenue, higher margins, increased satisfaction, etc.

Companies should do the same for jobs and talent.

3 steps to segment your talent and workforce

The idea is to invest disproportionately more resources to attract, develop and retain top talent and put them in the most important jobs. This approach is fundamental to strategic talent management because it recognizes that potential value creation, cost to replace, and risk of loss are higher for top talent.

Here is a three-step process to get started

Identify “crucial jobs.” This includes jobs that have the highest impact on organizational performance and development.
Place talent in the proper segments. Individuals may be assigned to multiple segments.
Identify crucial jobs with non-top talent. Look for opportunities to better match crucial jobs and top talent.

Differentiation might be seen as callous and dismissive of non-top talent. In reality, it’s a way to increase performance sustainability and ROI in talent.

You need a value-proposition for each segment

Effective communication is absolutely essential to avoid having non-top talent feel like second-class citizens. One way to do this is to articulate a unique employee value proposition for each segment.

As an example, here are some segments that clients have used.

CEO Successors;
Level 1 Successors;
Leadership;
Functional/Technical;
Diversity.

Does your organization use segments? If so, please add them in a comment below. It will be interesting to see how companies differentiate talent.

This originally appeared on the iTM System Group blog.