The convergence of social business software with conventional enterprise applications will have a tremendous effect on the marketplace, especially for talent management.
Social networking promises much richer data about a person, but in a less structured way. If implemented correctly, these tools can provide a rich repository of data that can be used by anyone to locate skills and subject matter experts on a given topic.
Today, the biggest criticisms of talent management products are that they have poor analytics and are poorly utilized by its employees. The primary reason for low utilization is that employees rarely, if ever, use their talent management system except for periodic performance reviews. But talent management is far more than just a seasonal review of how someone performed to expectations on the job. To be effective, talent management must go deeper into profiles of individuals to truly uncover their full potential. Moreover, the profiles must include data that highlights their skills, experiences, career aspirations and all of the interactions for that individual from within the company (or the network).
Hence, why I argue talent management must move their focus on employee engagement. And what better starting point, but none other than the “Talent Profile.”
The talent profile in your typical talent management solution only tells a partial story about an individual, and this is where it needs to evolve. It provides structured data around things the organization needs to know about the person for their current job plus some common data about all people. However, most people have a wealth of skills and experience that are not able of being captured as this kind of data format. This is one of the benefits of integrating social networking technologies, to include a more comprehensive set of personal and professional data.
The talent profile should also empower the employee with tools for keeping their professional data up to date and accurate. If implemented correctly, the profiles create a repository of employee information for everyone to use. ONe use case is career management. With talent profiles, employees can openly compare themselves to future positions inside the company (job profiles) to determine their readiness and what kinds of skills they are missing. Such an approach, where employees feel inspired to develop skills and empowered to chart their own career path, is a sea change within current corporate training and career management. However, managers and employees will readily agree that more visibility into the skills people have and the skills jobs require is a huge benefit.
I hope this is helpful, and hope everyone understands that talent management applications need to grow up!
