The Talent Solutions Practice

Talent is absolutely critical to the success of any organization, and we know that the war for talent has resulted in an increasingly competitive landscape. There is a talent shortage in the marketplace, the future of work challenges organizations to continuously re-think hiring needs, and clients in every industry are proactively looking to expand their candidate pipelines and diversify their employee bases. The cost of recruiting is high, the cost of a bad hire is significant, both from a productivity and a culture perspective, and yet finding the right hire from a skills and potential standpoint can feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

We work with small, medium, and large clients across industries to provide solutions throughout the full talent lifecycle. While we are engaged in a variety of ways, we are most commonly called on to focus on the following talent priorities:

  • Talent Selection and Optimization
  • Talent Development and Retention

Talent Selection and Optimization

Assessing candidates is an important skill, yet many organizations do not train or prepare interviewers to rise to the challenge. Too often, hiring decisions are over-indexed on resume and experience coupled with “fit,” which is loosely defined and can have the unintended result of creating homogenous teams. We work with clients on full cycle talent selection design, creating skillfulness, judgement, and cultural assessments, case studies, and customized interview guides that leverage our proprietary indicators of high-potential, the key flags that correlate with intellectual adaptability, intrinsic motivation, and social awareness and participation.

We are not recruiters, but we work in parallel with search firms, ensuring that candidates sourced are thoroughly and holistically evaluated with an eye toward delivering a positive candidate experience. We train interviewers to allow them to hone their abilities to read people at a deep level—and quickly—to understand the core potential of candidates. Our goal is to ensure that the recruiting process is robust, consistent, structured, and data-driven, yielding high quality hiring outcomes.

Talent Development and Retention

Organizations spend a tremendous amount of time and people hours on recruiting, and once employees are hired, it is critical to provide them with the right education, experience, and exposure to allow them to flourish and succeed within the organization over time. We work with clients to align key new hires with coaches, facilitating their assimilation into new roles. To do this, we …

  • Create Arch Profiles for emerging and senior leaders—personalized development plans that incorporate team and stakeholder feedback to inform coaching conversations, reading lists, and a short-list of executive education programs in the market.
  • Develop performance management systems and processes aimed at allowing employees the ability to monitor progress against personal and firm goals, receive peer feedback, and engage in meaningful discussions with managers.
  • Run customized talent and retention programs with a focus on female and under-represented talent, creating organizational experiences that facilitate deeper, more authentic relationships between target talent and their organizations through both individual employee and manager coaching and sponsorship.
  • Provide clients access to Admired Leadership Digital®, an interactive online library of 100 of the most impactful individual routines for developing leaders, inclusive of video tutorials, study materials, and an introduction to a community of like-minded leaders.