systematicHR

Forget about talent management. What we need is talent development.

Jason Corsello of the Yankee Group and The Human Capitalist wrote about emerging talent management software trends a few weeks ago. As part of those trends, a Yankee Group survey indicated that the growth of that HR technology industry segment would double by 2009. ((The Yankee Group, April 5, 2006. Press Release. Retrieved from http://www.yankeegroup.com on April 26, 2006.)) This should seem like a conservative estimate to most of us as modern tealent management technologies take hold. Increasingly there is value to be gained from good implementations of talent management, and the deeper organizations get, the better off they will be.

The future of talent management has nothing to do with what the vendors are selling today. Talent acquisition, performance management, compensation management are necessary systems, but not really what the meat of the talent management strategy. In order for talent management to provide value, employers must begin deploying the less purchased modules such as succession planning, learning management, and other workforce development functionality.

Perhaps this is a futile argument, but I draw a line between workforce talent management, and worfoce talent development. Recruiting, performance, and compensation systems assist in the management of talent, but do not necessarily move the organization forward in a development sense. (I sense some serious dissent brewing among the readership…) My point being that the value of a systems comes in the forward though, not the retrospective thought. It’s not that an organization can’t create value out of recruiting and performance, but unless there’s a broad based paradigm shift, recruiting is there to fill gaps and vacancies, and performance & compensation are backward looking. I believe that organizations need to think about developing their talent, not managing it. This means recruiting with an eye focused on the value a particular individual can contribute, true forward thinking performance, succession, learning and other development activities.

Besides needing a shift from how we think about managing talent to developing talent, the way vendors roll out portals wil lbe critical. A poorly designed portal will not succeed. Organizations will depend on great portals for hightened employee and manager adoption rates. Without the ease of use in the user interface and processing logic, it really won’t matter how much thought an employer has put into their talent strategy. Vendors that invest time into great portals today will add immediate value simply by generating higher interest and adoption, making the overall change management cycle less costly, faster and more effective.

The last item in talent is business intelligence. Shaping and developing the workforce is all about knowing what you have, knowing where you want to go, and being able to measure not only the progress, but the impact on the profitability of the organization. True analytics will become ubiquitous in the years to come, and this will lead to and understanding of which talent modules truly have the most impact. Again, I’ll predict that talent management functions will not be leaders, but laggers. The industry will see a reshaping of basic HR understandings and move towards better talent models that look to “shape the workforce.”