The job market is tight, with economic slowdowns and business disruptions making it increasingly difficult for jobseekers to find a position. Companies across Southeast Asia are taking a conservative stance on hiring, with data from Aon showing that the majority are keeping their headcount flat and hiring only to replace.

Yet talent remains a top risk for companies - specifically, top talent. Aon's data also shows that between 2021 and 2024, the failure to attract or retain top talent rose from the ninth greatest risk to the fourth.

"If you don't have top talent, you will not be innovating at the pace that you would want to as an organisation," said Rahul Chawla, managing director of Aon Southeast Asia Talent Solutions.

For that matter, many of the top risks faced by organisations today are closely intertwined, he added. The number one risk, cybersecurity, is not only an infrastructure issue but also a culture issue, and talent drives culture; it drives adherence to compliance frameworks which support cybersecurity and other aspects of organisational resilience and protection, he explained.

How are we defining top talent?

It's a combination of performance and potential, said Wan Hua Cheng, Aon's director of talent analytics for Southeast Asia.

Potential refers to an individual's ability to advance in the organisation and take on a leadership role, whether in terms of managerial leadership or technical leadership. This in turn requires upskilling potential, which she defined as a combination of personality and cognitive ability: personality in the sense that the individual wants to learn, and cognitive ability in the sense that they are able to learn.

"Can this person onboard and learn new information quickly?" she said. "Because if they struggle with onboarding new information, if you try to move them internally and get them to learn new skills, they're probably going to fail. They're not going to be happy, and it's not going to solve anything for the organisation."

Performance, meanwhile, is more specific to the organisation, and should in most cases be assessed by the organisation's own performance matrix or competency framework. However, she also noted that although plenty of organisations have competency frameworks that help them define performance, a lot of them do not keep their frameworks up to date, and this can create challenges in an environment where rapidly changing market trends are the fifth most serious risk businesses face today.

What happens when top talent can't deliver?

Typically, potential is the reason why high performing talent fails to deliver, said Chawla. 

"They don't have the the software - the soft skills and the learning agility to go beyond what they are delivering right now. Let's say you have a star relationship manager for a consumer bank. What happens if relationship management becomes fully automated? Can that person take up different roles. That's one place where your top talent might fail."

Then there is the culture issue he touched on in relation to cybersecurity: when someone who is technically very strong, perhaps in the kind of technical leadership position that drives innovation for the organisation, is unable to adapt to different types of responsibilities.

He cited some common risks arising when a technical superstar is moved into a management role:

"How are you at interacting with teams? How are you building teams? Are you abrasive? Are you able to protect the company culture? What kind of communication skills do you have, how do you interact with various stakeholders or with regulators?"

Some organisations, he said, are addressing this by setting up different career paths - technical and managerial - and directing top talent into the appropriate path based on their capabilities. This allows the superstar contributors to continue delivering value to the organisation in the way they are best at.

How do we actually attract or retain top talent?

Although there is no blanket approach that works to solve this challenge, Chawla and Cheng cited a few broad findings from Aon research.

Hire for skills and upskilling potential: this is a strategy more commonly applicable to internal mobility, incorporating the performance-potential paradigm Cheng described.

Focus on the fundamentals: financial rewards, job stability, and an inclusive work environment. Particular attention needs to be paid to ensuring that compensation is fair, equitable, differentiated, and transparent - top talent knows what they are worth.

Wellbeing needs to be "underprogrammed" and "overoutcomed": not just the typical focus on physical wellbeing, but also mental wellbeing and financial wellbeing. These are frequently intertwined, Chawla pointed out, with mental wellbeing reflected in physical wellbeing and the correlation emerging in medical claims.