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Assessment & Evaluation

Published February 2007

Talent Measurement: A Management Necessity

 

  Chris Moore

Top learning analysts predict talent management will be the next "killer"  application. They also maintain learning management system (LMS) vendors are leading the way in providing talent management solutions that integrate the processes for performance management, staffing, competency management and learning management.

This is good news and bad news. The good news is the LMS marketplace is relatively mature — you probably already have experience with one or more LMS vendors and know the level of quality and support you can expect from their talent solution. Here's the bad news: LMS systems have traditionally been data rich and information poor. Have you ever met LMS customers who were happy with the reports they get from their system? Are you?

The LMS vendors can't seem to provide their customers with meaningful, strategic reports that really measure what you are trying to manage: change, impact, readiness, efficiency, productivity and other key indicators of successful learning initiatives. So, will it get any better as these vendors build out their talent management solutions? You can only hope they learn from experience. But as Rick Page would tell you, based on the title of his best-selling sales book, "Hope is not a strategy." So, what's a talent manager to do about it?

The phrase "managing talent" seems to garner much more interest and support from the executive suite than traditional references to the same set of processes years ago — "managing learning" just doesn't seem to have the same pizzazz. As a result, executives are keen to know where they align in terms of attracting, building, engaging, leveraging and retaining top talent. The opportunity for talent managers is to take the aforementioned processes and develop a series of talent measures that best define success in the eyes of their stakeholders.

Start with Strategy

Your talent strategy holds the keys to your measures of success. To unlock those measures, start by mapping your talent strategy to a high-level set of goals. If you don't have a formal talent strategy, the primary talent processes — attract, build, engage, leverage and retain — serve as a great foundation on which to build. With your overall business priorities and corporate goals in mind, formulate long-term goal statements that characterize your ability to reach a vision of success for each process.

Your first talent measures will come in the form of key indicators. These high-level metrics help direct your progress toward reaching your goals. Think of each indicator as the end state or outcome for each goal. If you are aligning a goal to each of the talent process areas, you simply can phrase the process area in a manner that depicts successfully executing the process (i.e. attracting talent, building talent, engaging talent, leveraging talent and retaining talent). The periodic value for each indicator will be normalized, aggregated and averaged from a series of composite measures.