Real World Talent Management

1. Kwantlen Polytechnic University
School of Business
Assignment #4
«Real World Talent Management – Mini Case»
Talent Management
HRMT 5170 (P50)
Prepared by
Name: Vandana Narwal
Student ID: 100422913
Submitted on:
03/14/2023
© 2023

2. Table of Contents
PART 1...................................................................................................................................................3
Company Profile....................................................................................................................................3
Interview Summary...............................................................................................................................3
PART 2...................................................................................................................................................6
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................6
Analysis..................................................................................................................................................6
Recommendations .................................................................................................................................8
References............................................................................................................................................10

3. PART 1
Company Profile
Urban behavior is one of the fastest-growing apparel businesses. Currently, the business
is a sub-brand of Urban Planet and has grown by widening the range of its products. Today, the
company sells fashionable clothes for men and women, footwear as well as accessories for
teenage to young adult groups with affordability as their biggest advantage. This company was
founded in 1989 and is now owned by YM Inc. (Urban Behavior Careers and Employment, n.d.).
I chose this company because I am working there as a cashier and sales associate. As I
could reach her easily to get the interview, I decided to interview my assistant manager about the
talent management programs at the company.
Interview Summary
Name: Ritika Chhabra
Title: Assistant Manager
E-mail: chhabraritika51@gmail.com
The interview was conducted with Ritika Chhabra who is Assistant Manager at Urban
Behavior. She is in a managerial position and has the authority to lead a group of people, monitor
their performance and guide them in case of any discrepancies. She told me that she is also
assisting in the talent acquisition processes like recruitment, onboarding, and training tasks. So,
she has complete knowledge of various human resource practices and talent management
programs run by the company.
Now, at Urban behavior, Ritika had spent a total of 9 months and acquired great
knowledge about the company’s organizational values, target customers, number of employees,

4. cost management in human resources, and performance metrics. She shared her experience of
working in the retail business and leading a team with the authority to manage and guide them.
When asked about the company’s basic organizational structure, she said that the top-
level management is the main power that takes final decisions here. The employees work under
executives and managers and follow the assigned tasks. Each administrational region was
departmentalized like customer services, human resources, IT team, marketing team, and finance
team. There was moderate flexibility in job positions as employees could connect inter-
department and share the tasks too. This working culture has promoted interpersonal
relationships between the employees and their communication practices too.
Furthermore, I asked her about the talent acquisition strategy of the company as we know
that the labor market has been very competitive due to a shortage of skilled workforce. She also
agreed that talented staff is very hard to find in the current scenario as employment and literacy
rates are fluctuating too. Therefore, it is very hard to find high-performing candidates with work
experience and the right qualifications too. However, the company does have a recruitment
strategy in which the candidates are scored on the basis of different attributes like qualification,
experience, projects handled, etc. Once all the candidates are scored, they are arranged on the
basis of scores in descending order. The candidates with the highest scores further proceed with
interviews and selection processes. Moreover, there are different channels used by the company
to source talents like LinkedIn, indeed, and other sites. Once the manager analyzes which
sources are attracting high-performance clients, those are invested in again.
Now that we talked about acquiring talent, I asked her about the organizational strategies
to retain the talent and manage their skills so as to utilize them to their full potential. In response,
she told me that the talent management program at UB is not very complex as it includes

5. foundational practices of defining specific roles and responsibilities of each team member. For
example, in the product sales department, a staff member is assigned the role of a sales associate,
then he/she has complete knowledge about her tasks, deadlines, targets, the market they have to
cater and product knowledge. These things are expected from them and they must perform well
to get high-performance appraisals. However, she added that although motivating employees by
incentivizing them with good appraisals and specific team roles has been quite beneficial in
talent retention, the rate of top-performance employees leaving the company remained
significant. This number is a big challenge to the talent management program for the company.
She added that the performance metrics which are usually tracked by the company are customer
satisfaction, feedback, new clients added, costs associated, targets achieved, etc. These
qualitative as well as quantitative metrics help in keeping a track of employee performance and
talent management results which prove to be very resourceful at the time of assessing the
company’s promotional strategies.
Further, when asked about any other challenges that the company’s talent management is
facing, she insisted on telling me that overall, the company’s work culture is quite harmonious
and welcoming for new employees. communication practices and team building activities take
place frequently to maintain decorum, however, there is still a hidden conflict between internal
and external talent. The current employees constantly apply for top managerial positions in the
hopes of getting career advancement and higher compensation, however, the talent acquisition
strategy of the company follows the notion of hiring new talent and skills for top-performing
jobs by identifying such talent and potential. This is a minor issue at the company that has not
yet surfaced very clearly but is lingering behind the curtains for sure.

6. Overall, the experience of working at UB has been quite insightful and resourceful for
Ritika as she shares her learning journey too.
PART 2
Introduction
Talent management is a strategic process that involves practices aimed at acquiring,
developing, as well as managing the employees in an organization. There are various processes
involved in talent management such as workforce planning, employee development, career
guidance, heredity management, etc. (Cappelli & Keller, 2014). All these human resource (HR)
activities are responsible for finding the right person for the right job. However, there are certain
challenges that are faced by HR teams to develop talent management programs or conduct them.
Research suggests that the major issue revolves around individual identification suitable for the
role and their future attrition practices.
In this research article, based on the interview with Urban Behavior’s HR leader, a
specific challenge of talent management is discussed that is affecting the company’s current
organizational structure and talent dynamics. This challenge is found to be a common issue for
all retail businesses which is why it becomes crucial to address it and identify remedies for the
same.
Analysis
Urban Behavior (UB), a sub-group of Urban Planet, is one of the fastest-growing fashion
retailers in Canada. With a target audience of young adults and adolescents within the age group
16 to 24, the company has been offering uniquely styled and fair-priced fashion items like
clothes, footwear, and accessories (Urban Planet, n.d.). The company has an online presence

7. along with physical locations distributed all across the country, making it an evolving business
with the digital revolution.
Now, the interview with UB’s team leader suggests that the company has been successful
in identifying various talented and high-performance giving employees which is the major reason
for the company’s successful business model. However, despite maintaining its internal
employees, there are certain challenges that the company has to face and the primary one is
talent retention. Talent-Pool is the group of employees in an organization who have high
potential to perform well in strategic jobs and become future assets for the company. Employees
are assessed on the basis of their regular performance as well as their potential to fill the role in
strategic jobs rightly to be identified in the company’s talent pool. Nevertheless, retaining this
group of employees is a major task for employers. It was argued earlier that employee attrition is
due to their self-induced behavioral changes at the workplace, however, recent research suggests
that it is the lack of talent management practices that compel workers to take control of their
careers.
Due to disruptions in the retail industry, there have been many changes in their operating
model and client-customer relationships. Today, customers are getting more influenced by online
shopping experiences and demand extensive product knowledge from companies. Businesses are
adopting modern profit-generating models that integrate technology with innovation, like
subscription services, automatic replacement, etc. Moreover, low entry barriers and large-scale
market access have enhanced the competition to a very high level, thus making it very difficult to
not only hire digital talent but also ensure that they are developing and retaining within the
company. Research suggests that about 50% of global employers experience retention issues for

8. their top-performing employees and about 55% face challenges in retaining their high-potential
employees or the ones who have precise skills for the job (Cappelli & Keller, 2014).
Studies have also analyzed the reasons why top performers and high-potential candidates
become a part of voluntary turnover and the results show that high market exposure and
environmental shocks are the leading causes. The talent pool is aware of their skills and demand
in the market, due to which insufficiency of employers to assure them job security forces them to
think of other options even when they are not looking for it because companies themselves
approach them.
Moreover, there have been speculations that as the workforce is being populated with millennials
and Gen Z, the interest in retail jobs is decreasing. The new workforce feels that such jobs are
less engaging and rewarding than the jobs in other industries (Erickson, 2014). It is through
targeted efforts of internet-age retailers only who are making it possible to retain new talent by
valuing certain working principles like diversity, inclusion, social responsibility, and brand
reputation (Lobaugh et al., 2022). This difference between internet-age retailers and traditional
retailers has come across because the former has embedded agility and digital infrastructure into
their operating models whereas the latter were forced to adapt to this system. Thus, today’s retail
market needs to adopt a highly agile and visible talent-retaining system that can meet the
demands of a competitive and advanced workforce.
Recommendations
The analysis suggests that to have a competitive advantage in the retail industry,
significant changes in talent management practices need to be made that are targeted at
equipping organizations with the best talent and retaining them for strategic job positions
(Whysall et al., 2019). A few recommendations for achieving this goal are:

9.  The idea that retail is a job and not a potential career is one of the root causes of the
talent retention challenges. The company needs to turn this situation into an opportunity
by investing in its employees’ learning, development, and compensation plans. This
includes defining clear roles and development opportunities, providing on-the-job
training to enhance product knowledge, and incentivizing and rewarding the employees
for their value alignment with the company. These practices will ensure that the
employees’ perception of retail not being a growing career option will be changed.
 Enhance employee engagement that ensures that company culture and brand connect
with the employee values. The new workforce wants to feel important and engaged, and
thus creating work relationships and activities that can enhance this will be beneficial for
the company.

10. References
Cappelli, P., & Keller, J. (2014). Talent Management: Conceptual Approaches and Practical
Challenges. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior,
1(1), 305–331. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091314
Erickson, T. (2014, July 23). Today’s Top 10 Talent-Management Challenges. Harvard Business
Review. https://hbr.org/2008/06/todays-top-10-talentmanagement
Lobaugh, K., McElroy, T., & Sloan, N. (2022). Retail talent disrupted. Deloitte United States.
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/consumer-business/articles/retail-talent-
disrupted.html
Whysall, Z., Owtram, M., & Brittain, S. (2019). The new talent management challenges of
Industry 4.0. Journal of Management Development, 38(2), 118–129.
https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd-06-2018-0181
Urban Behaviour Careers and Employment. (n.d.). Indeed.com.
https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Urban-Behaviour
Urban Planet. (n.d.). Urban Planet | Must Have Fashion, Prices You’ll Love. https://urban-
planet.com/