Today we talk about the best way to mentor talent within the company, and our sister site Mid-market Insight talks to CFO Neil Herbert on what mentoring initiatives Capital One employs.
“From a mentoring perspective CFOs can be influential in recruiting or selecting senior mentors from within finance and across the business who display the key attributes and technical knowledge to benefit less senior employees in the line with finance’s vision and strategy,” explains Wheeler.
She adds that mentoring programmes can be used to attract talent as part of a recruitment process and a part of an organisation’s employee value proposition (EVP) to show that the company values employee development and that it will invest in new recruits’ future careers.
Banks says that mentoring can also be used to understand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to attracting and retaining employees. It also offers the opportunity to find out which skills, messages, or values are missing.
“Mentoring enables senior management to gain a clear view of the staff who work for the business, and it attracts them because it shows that managers value them,” he explains, before adding that people go to work to earn money.
Yet, while this is true he says they also need to feel valued and nurtured, and so talent management and mentoring schemes should, in his view, mean what they say and not just be used as a marketing tool.
He emphasises that investment in staff through mentoring and talent management initiatives can enable staff to feel happy, valued and motivated. Helping employees to develop their skills can also in his experience lead to “increased productivity as well as increased profitability and growth.”
Conversely, if organisations don’t invest in their staff, don’t listen to them, don’t train them and don’t communicate with them, then they will lose their talent and their knowledge.
This approach won’t drive the business forward, as Banks says, because the organisation will need to continually have to spend extra time and money on replenishing what he calls the ‘work pool’. This can cost more than investing in staff mentoring, talent management and training as well as reduce organisational ROI.
In tomorrow’s article we discuss the best approach to supporting new starters once they have gone through the recruitment process.
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