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Published March 2008

Sunbelt Rentals: A Mid-Level View of HR From the Trenches

Ty Burton

HR pundits often talk about talent management at a very high level — a highly conceptualized strategy rather than a practice. While these discussions are important, they provide little value to HR practitioners working in the trenches to produce and execute a talent management framework within their respective organizations. What many HR professionals need is a view of the tactical side of talent management from a mid-level perspective. Such was the case at equipment supplier Sunbelt Rentals.

Ten years ago, Sunbelt was a small, $60 million operation. Today, with the recent acquisition of one of its top competitors, Sunbelt is a $1.5 billion company with more than 450 locations. Not only is the company experiencing growth through merger and acquisition activity, it's enjoying organic development as well.

This introduced a new set of challenges and opportunities. Talent managers now had to manage issues they hadn't focused on in the past — specifically, engineering a cohesive effort throughout the company to cultivate and develop talent. Sunbelt's leadership team realized failure to grow, develop and manage talent in an integrated fashion meant the organization could potentially lose tens of millions of dollars each year in unnecessary recruitment and termination costs, not to mention lost productivity.

Thus, the key priorities for talent management at Sunbelt became to design programs to attract, develop and retain talent across the organization; enhance management and employee capability through training; and increase internal bench strength for key positions.

First Things First

Initially Sunbelt's talent managers had to ask themselves, "How do we go about creating a robust and highly integrated HR system that is aligned with the business?"

The answer to this question came in the form of competency identification, first on the operations side and later on the corporate side. The company held a number of focus groups with key executives and conducted manager and high-performer interviews that together manifested a set of core functional and leadership competencies.

The beauty of taking a competency-based approach is it allows an organization to select, evaluate and develop employees on a clear and consistent set of criteria. For those in leadership positions, this approach further enables them to set priorities and goals, select the right candidates, monitor performance and development, and give concrete performance feedback and coaching. The competencies also allow every Sunbelt employee to align individual goals with the larger goals of the company and provide a road map for career development.

A Clear Line of Sight

Sunbelt Rentals' recruitment philosophy is to fill positions with internal talent before looking outside the company. This approach provides a higher level of employee satisfaction and has become a major retention driver. In fact, the vast majority of management positions are filled internally.