Olympic Talent Management

Published by Alice Snell, on 13/08/2008

There’s no doubt the competition level is high in China with the Summer Olympics. And it may be the same on the business front. It seems that hiring and retaining world-class talent is just as competitive.

The McKinsey article, How to address China’s growing talent shortage, opens by highlighting the trials:

“The growing need for talented managers in China represents by far the biggest management challenge facing multinationals and locally owned businesses alike…44 percent of the executives at Chinese companies surveyed by The McKinsey Quarterly reported that insufficient talent was the biggest barrier to their global ambitions…”

The article, Chinese ‘Pay Now, Worry Later’ Mentality May Be Retention Killer, describes the hurdles associated with the sport of job-hopping and notes:

“Organizations can mitigate some of their recruiting and retention woes without throwing money at talent. Implementing some basic building blocks of effective reward-program management into compensation considerations might be a good place to start.”

So the judges would say that unified recruiting and performance management practices and a strong employee value proposition are compulsories for the competition in China as they are worldwide.

The Beijing Olympics surely contributed to other business talent shortages by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs to work on the event. Estimates for the 2012 London Olympics peg this number at 100,000 with 27,000 in service industries.