Talent Practices in HR

Talent Practices in HR

Home Depot has long recognized the value of talent management, for a number of reasons. This has led them to a policy of promoting from within, especially for their front-line managers. The company believes that its front-line managers and staff give it a competitive advantage in the do-it-yourself industry because this talent increases the talent level of the workers, improves customer service, and allows the corporate culture to be better disseminated through the organization.

The company's hiring policies, in particular with respect to the talent pipeline, are focused on hiring and retaining the workers that are best able to meet the challenges and objectives of the human resources department. Home Depot believes that if it provides a high level of service to its customers, for example, that this will give it a competitive advantage in the industry. It found that certain types of workers (older, ex-military) provided higher levels of service and were more oriented towards long-term employment, so it developed an HR strategy that would give it more access to these groups. The company also realized that maintaining a strong position with the Hispanic market was going to be critical to long-term success, and therefore has made an effort to cultivate a talent stream from that pool of workers as well.

For example, Home Depot began to cultivate the channel by which it received older workers by partnering with AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons. This group helped give it access to older workers that were willing to work part-time. Often, members of this group do not actively seek employment, or would not realize that Home Depot was a good match, so this effort on the part of Home Depot to create this partnership allowed it better access than competitors to this group.

Likewise, Home Depot created similar partnerships with groups representing ex-military and a pair of Hispanic organizations in National Council of La Raza and Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. The company partnered with Veterans Affairs as well as donating to military organizations and charities in order to raise its profile with veterans as a potential post-service employer.

In addition to these channels, Home Depot has cultivated a strong internal channel that brings talent from within the organization to positions where that talent can enter management. There are internal talent reviews and the company evaluates its employees in terms of their ability to become leaders in the future. By providing a leadership review, Home Depot ensures that the right employees enter the internal leadership pipeline and once there that they can receive the support that they need to optimize their leadership potential within the firm.

This ensures that these strategies ultimately lead to top leadership talent emerging within the firm, the company's leadership pipeline has a number of different components. The company has, for example, "taken what is a successful formula for early-career entrants and applied it to those who may be successful midcareer professionals," allowing the company to successfully recruit such professionals but move them quickly up the leadership pipeline, as though they were the same as hot young graduates in the talent pool.

The Internal Audit Leadership Program (ILP) is a program that focuses on the new career entrants. This program is oriented towards the leadership potential of these employees. They have not had leadership positions, so the purpose of this program is to identify those that should be put into a fast-track leadership stream, based largely on measures of their leadership potential in the future. Another valuable program for Home Depot is the Store Leadership Program (SLP), and that is the one focused on midcareer professionals making a career change. This program functions much the same as the ILP, but with these midcareer professionals their leadership potential is already established, it is only their knowledge of the job and the company that needs to be upgraded. Thus, both groups are treated relatively equally, but funneled into programs that help them to overcome their specific deficiencies as potential leaders.

Home Depot has learned three key lessons about talent channel management. The first is that the more channels it has, the better. The company has developed such a broad number of channels because it needs to fill some 17,000 managerial roles every year. As a result, Home Depot has found that it needs a strong influx of talent into the organization. In addition, the talent that it brings in should be diverse in nature, in order to meet the diverse needs of its customers. Older workers are reliable and service oriented; younger workers have great long-term potential and minority workers help make the stores more attractive to minority customers. Thus, it has proven essential that Home Depot cultivate as many channels as possible to continue bringing talent into the organization.

The company has also learned some valuable lessons about pipeline programs. These programs need to have strong buy-in across the organization, especially from the front-line managers who must work within these frameworks. The programs cannot be too special, Home Depot has found. If they are too special, this could create resentment among their peers. This not only creates negative vibes in the workforce, but it also can undermine the future managerial ability of the workers in these programs. Overall, however, the pipeline programs help to give good leadership candidates the types of skills that they will need to succeed as leaders in the future.