This is an especially pertinent article as last week saw us running our annual recruitment technology event.
Talent management, as the name suggests, is about hiring and keeping the best talent in your industry. This is not the easiest thing to do, even if everyone in charge of sourcing talent is on top of their game.
For starters, human nature is unpredictable. Someone with all the right qualifications might lack the soft skills to do well in their work. Meanwhile, someone else who has poor interview skills might be the perfect person for the job. In addition to trying to sort out personality quirks and weighing the probabilities of a candidate’s success, there are a lot of numbers to crunch, ranging from wading through a long list of candidates to keeping accurate metrics on job performance.
While an understanding of human psychology can help sort out the best candidates for a particular open position, technology does most of the heavy lifting. In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to state that technology has improved every facet of talent management from recruitment to development and promotion.
Whether you’re running a recruitment agency or managing a business’ HR department, choosing the right talent management software makes all the difference in whether your talent management is an orderly or chaotic process.
Understanding Talent Management Software
Although the technology available for talent management is robust enough to solve most human resource problems, the real challenge is picking the right software for your company.
Since there are so many options available for almost every aspect of talent management, the features of most talent management systems require some study to differentiate between what you want and what you need. Since talent management is a complex discipline, the software managing it tends to cover diverse aspects.
When doing your research on the best talent management software, you have to be clear about your purpose. Without a sense of direction, it’s easy to become bewildered by the range of features and software choices available.
A Quick Checklist
Here are some questions to ask when deciding what features you need from talent management software:
- Do you need to automate hiring and recruiting processes?
- Do you need to monitor the performance of promising individuals who have joined your company?
- Do you need to track learning management for your company’s professional development programs?
- Do you need a way to assess the achievements of employees in different departments in a quest to identify and nurture future leaders?
- Do you need a way to analyze employee information to help people flourish in their careers?
- Do you need a better way of figuring out compensation to keep employees motivated and comply with labor regulations?
- Do you need software for succession assessment to replace professionals who are planning on leaving the company or retiring?
- Do you need to upgrade your IT architecture while trying to do so with minimal business disruption?
As you can see, it isn’t possible to create generic talent management software that does just about everything. It works much better to have specialized modules that cover almost every aspect of talent management.
A Billion Dollar Industry
In an increasingly technologically-oriented world where machines replace human labor, the key to company success is hiring the right knowledge workers and providing the necessary developmental training to help them stay abreast of industry advances. Successful companies not only hire the right people, but will also take the necessary steps to close any skill gaps. In addition, they create a corporate culture that encourages their best talent to stay on board.
It’s not surprising, then, to learn that the talent management software industry has become a billion dollar industry. According to a Forbes article by Josh Bersin, The Talent Management Software Market Surges Ahead, “New research shows that this exciting market grew by 17% last year and is now over $5 billion in size. Why? Companies have now realized that “talent optimization” is key to their business success. And without integrated software to manage the people-processes in a business, it’s very hard to do.”
