Getting the most out of an organization’s workforce is a never-ending battle that requires HR and business leaders to continually balance (and re-balance) the selection, motivation, guidance, advancement, and development of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of employees simultaneously. Given the range of individual differences in skills, motivations, personal traits, and preferences, understanding how to generate the maximum value from each person in sync with their teammates is a stretch assignment at the team level, much less at larger organizational levels. Designing and conducting objective talent reviews is a significant way to understand and manage talent in organizations of any size.

Performance management and advancement processes traditionally rely on (as in starting with) the quality of individual managers’ skills in the observation and equitable evaluation of individual job performance and future potential. HR professionals are well aware of the typical shortcomings of those managers’ talent decisions, which can include limited views of actual individual and team contributions, a lack of awareness of how vulnerable they might be to polished self-promotion, and non-comprehensive performance assessments based on notable, more visible achievements.

The fact remains that it is increasingly difficult for any single manager to produce comprehensive assessments on their own in this age of cross-functional projects, smaller team efforts, digital collaborations, and work conducted by employees and/or contractors in geographically dispersed and hybrid work locations. Objective talent reviews solve many of these issues and shortcomings, delivering significantly improved accuracy, fairness, and business value across many of today’s most important talent management processes.

Understanding talent reviews and their purpose

A talent review is a formalized presentation and consideration of a group of employees’ capabilities, achievements, future potential, and development opportunities conducted with a group of job family managers and experts. It is designed to generate a healthy, balanced, and constructive understanding of each employee’s value proposition and how those can be best equipped, developed, and deployed to better achieve larger organizational objectives. Talent reviews are designed to be recurring, allowing for the ongoing assessment and tracking of each individual, and are considered an investment in the development of an organization's human resources.

They are used to assess, calibrate, and compare people in similar job families and levels, and to generate a common understanding among all leaders and managers within and across their assigned organizations of their current capabilities, conceivable growth opportunities, development plans, and deployment options. The purpose and value of objective talent reviews is to optimize the evaluation, engagement, advancement, and leveraging of their strengths against evolving and future operational requirements.

The outputs of conducting talent reviews represent high-value contributions to both a talent strategy (e.g., Build, Buy, Borrow, Bounce, Bind, or Bot) and an integrated talent management strategy (e.g., performance management, L&D, succession management, recruiting), and an input to robust workforce planning and HR Strategy.

The key elements of objective talent reviews

Talent reviews are designed to overcome and outperform individual evaluations of an employee’s contributions and value by engaging multiple perspectives and assessment criteria to overcome naturally occurring human biases and perceptions that can drive over- or under-evaluations. Consider, for example, the widely held but flawed assumption that “the past predicts the future” as it relates to potential future success. That concept fails to account for the novel circumstances encountered when transferring one’s skills into a new work environment or market, or the additional pressures experienced when taking on new responsibilities and expectations.

Similarly, the value and accuracy of performance reviews have been widely challenged, with research from the experts at Hogan Assessments stating that “performance reviews and supervisor nominations tend to be good at identifying the people in an organization who 'look' like leaders.”

Objective talent reviews are designed to solve many of the challenges posed by traditional talent management methods, bringing greater accuracy, leadership agreement and support, and business alignment to the assessment of employees' current and future contributions. For example, research has demonstrated that only 30% of high performers are also high potentials, and 90% of high performers struggle with the adjustments required to meet the increased responsibilities and expectations when moved into higher-level jobs.

Designing and conducting talent reviews that achieve their promise is based on two essential and foundational elements:

Multi-rater evaluations

Talent reviews bring managers, leaders, and other role experts together to share, consider, and compare the performance, behaviors, and contributions of a set of jobholders. Their job is to jointly “calibrate” the performance of all employees within a job family and/or level. The direct supervisor collects performance feedback and insights from other managers (e.g., project or partner) and team members, and briefly presents that feedback, along with credentials and capabilities, skills and experience, performance against goals, significant contributions, future potential for growth, and an overall evaluation of each employee. 

The other managers then act as a council, asking questions to clarify the (relative) difficulty of their goals, how well they demonstrated behavior and organizational value expectations, and align on a final rating. The value of having multiple experts evaluate the performance of similarly placed and skilled workers in a single session is greater accuracy and consistency in ratings across managers.

Comprehensive and standardized criteria

Conducting objective talent reviews requires using assessments with common, well-defined, and measurable criteria. These will differ by role and job level, but are always related to required skills and knowledge, the ability to effectively apply those to assigned tasks, and the results or outcomes achieved. Given that these reviews are group activities and often cover multiple employees per session, the ideal blend of criteria used in talent reviews should be summarized for presentation and discussion, with sufficient supporting detail to back the manager’s proposed rating.

A three-dimensional assessment brings consideration of the following into discussions:

1. Critical role skills presence, proficiency levels, and success achieved in an observed, measured manner. For example, a manager might state, “Mary demonstrated her mastery of AI coding expertise by developing five Agents that fully automated the calculation of Q3-Q4 staffing requirements by skill level for the manufacturing line in the Aurora plant based on production requirements.”
2. Application experience and success, with breadth and depth (e.g., speed, accuracy, effectiveness) based upon documented achievements, contributions, and progress/completion of goals. For example, Bob’s manager might present: ”He demonstrated his understanding and expertise in opening new sales accounts across 3 different customer segments (SMB, large state, and multi-national accounts) in his territory, driving his FY sales goals at 172% performance while breaking new ground for the company in governmental sales.”
3. Behavioral demonstration of desired soft skills and traits, such as leadership, influence, collaboration, innovation, problem-solving, or conflict management. An example of how a manager might share this is: “Robert serves as a role model on the team with his commitment to continuous learning, experimentation, and data-based decision making. He created a team development program that meets weekly and uses current client issues as examples of how to perform root cause analysis, model solution options, and apply basic statistical analysis methods to determine the most appropriate solutions. These have resulted in new and innovative client solutions, reduced expenses, increased project profits, and rapid skill development with those on his team.”

The use of competencies, such as those in a leadership competency model, can be very effective, especially when they blend technical and behavioral capabilities and are scored or rated on the frequency and extent to which the behavioral elements in each competency are observed throughout the performance period.

The primary objectives and outcomes of objective talent reviews

There are plenty of reasons and benefits of talent reviews, each providing distinct benefits to an organization. The value of implementing the practice across existing talent management processes lies in its focus on significantly improving the objectivity, clarity, and fairness of talent decisions across managers, functions, and business units. It can drive significant improvements in the organization’s ability to:

• Understand current human capabilities across functions, operations
• Plan, develop, and manage talent pool capabilities as business requirements evolve
• Build more robust talent pool pipelines and bench strength
• Engage and motivate the workforce across roles, job levels, and locations
• Guide staff coaching and development by managers with greater precision
• Enhance the objectivity, fairness of talent assessments
• Identify “hidden gems” (future leaders, individual contributors) throughout the organization

At the same time, there are foundational mindset shifts that most often require formal change management techniques to embed objective talent reviews into an organization's leadership and management culture. Consider that the more these are used, especially early in their adoption, the more they can be viewed as threatening to individual leaders' or managers’ perceptions of their job autonomy and authority. Managers can become resistant when their perceptions and judgements about an employee’s rating, job performance, merit pay increase, readiness for advancement, or identification as a high potential are challenged and disputed by others. As a result, awareness and preparation for a handful of critical and new perspectives are useful as talent reviews are implemented. Examples of those “rules of the road” while participating include:

• All employees are considered organizational resources, “owned” and managed collectively, vs. by the direct supervisor or manager.
• Many employment-related decisions leverage the combined wisdom and experience of a committee of experts.
• Objectivity takes precedence over “gut-feel” or “experience”, while fact and observationally informed human judgement continues to guide decision-making.
• Fairness and reliability in employee assessment are driven through multi-rater input and evaluation.
• Line manager effectiveness in staff hiring, management, and development is a standard expectation, and thus is measured and tracked.
• Reliable and trustworthy feedback for all team members is culturally valued and the basis for equitable rewards and recognition.
  
  

Talent review uses and applications

Talent reviews can serve multiple purposes and have been successfully applied to assess and plan employee contributions and capabilities in crucial talent management processes. Some primary examples include:

Performance management

Conducting objective talent reviews as part of the performance evaluation process enables more equitable assessments and comparisons across people in similar job functions, roles, and levels by all their managers simultaneously, using the same criteria and standards. Using this process to make higher-quality, better-balanced assessments, employees can be “calibrated” relative to one another on how challenging their assigned goals were, how difficult their achievements were, given the business conditions, and how well they leveraged their technical and soft skills relative to the opportunities and challenges they faced.

Related and subsequent merit pay, total rewards, advancement, and development decisions can be made more equitably and with greater transparency across leaders and managers in the same, similar, or related functions, and across business units and geographic locations.

Succession management

The most common application of talent reviews is in succession management processes. It is used to review the current status of replacement talent pools for key or strategically critical roles, identify and discuss potential successors, and review and enhance planning for high-potential (HiPo) pools and individuals. It is designed to identify the highest performers, most valued contributors, and others critical to achieving business objectives. It is also essential to identify and discuss employees who may be flight risks, and to design plans to further engage and retain them.

Business or operational talent gap identification

A formal review talent from targeted functions, departments, or other employee skill groups is used to manage strategically critical and competitively differentiating talent pools. Consider roles that are not only essential to meeting corporate or market growth objectives, but also harder and more time-consuming to recruit, replace, or develop, such as AI engineers, advanced manufacturing experts, data scientists, and specialty physicians and nurses. Such sessions focus on the people and their skill levels to identify:

• Skill gaps as the basis for hiring, upskilling, and outsourcing programs
• Skill overlaps and transferable capabilities
• Deployment or assignment, mobility, development, and replacement preparation
• Requirements and plans to accelerate the readiness of pool candidates
  
  

Mergers, acquisitions, reorganizations, and force reductions

Talent reviews can be highly effective as a key M&A activity, especially when managers from both organizations participate in determining staff redundancies and talent gaps that will need to be filled. Similarly, objective talent reviews can be effectively used when planning reorganizations related to strategic changes where new or updated business directions have been defined. Other use cases include circumstances such as reduction-in-force planning, or when operational requirement shifts require “new blood”, fresh thinking, upgraded skill sets, or higher staffing levels. Any of these can be suitable uses for conducting talent reviews due to strategy changes, business turnarounds, new market entries, product or service enhancements, or key talent shortages.

Key steps when designing, planning, and conducting talent reviews

1. Plan effective talent reviews

Prior to any talent review session, its purpose and outcome requirements should be clearly stated and communicated. The appropriate attendees are then invited and given specific instructions on the data, observations, and insights they are required to bring and be prepared to present, discuss, and challenge. They must be introduced and/or reminded about the “rules of the road” listed above.

When planning talent reviews, prepare participants with a brief document, or use these as a brief session-opening “level setting” presentation:

• Restate the organization’s strategic mission, primary objectives, and risks for the next 24-36 months.
• Provide a translation of the business into talent priorities at each level and role/job family to be discussed in the session.
• Clarify the talent review criteria, with an emphasis on proof using multiple examples (e.g., frequency of demonstration – never, occasionally, often, consistently) of both technical and “soft” behavioral skills.
• Offer access to objective methods and data for managers to use in preparation and evaluation, such as performance appraisals, multi-rater survey (e.g., 360-degree) data, and validated skills (e.g., coding, coaching, advanced sales) assessments.
• Provide access to quantified outcome data related to market (customer spend, satisfaction, and retention), financial (revenue growth, expense management), operational (production volume quality, process efficiency), and talent (employee retention, development, engagement).
  
  

2. Conduct talent review meetings where managers calibrate employees 

Develop clear guidelines and guardrails for participation, and engage a facilitator (e.g., HR or business leader) to manage session flow and logistics. Provide guidance on time limitations for presentation and discussion of each employee, parameters around generating group agreement, and the absolute requirement that all input is fact-based.

Clarify to all participants that the primary objectives are to generate a better understanding of how each person shows up, contributes, and achieves in a performance, innovation, collaboration, and culturally aligned manner. Remind everyone that the discussions are to remain constructive and that the outcomes are to be considered and held in complete confidence by those in the room. Final decisions are to be documented and communicated within a set timeframe only by the responsible manager.

Have managers take turns briefly (e.g., 2-3 minutes) presenting the required information (e.g., name, grade, job title, time in role, strengths, development needs, flight risk level, readiness for movement, aspirations, proposed advancement or mobility roles, rating) on each employee. The floor then opens for 5-8 minutes to all other participating managers, who can ask questions to clarify the assessed capability, contributions, and opportunities for other projects or jobs.

3. Generate conclusions and document assessment and next step agreements

All decisions made by the group(s) of managers should be captured by a third party (e.g., an HR facilitator or an assigned administrator) to ensure accuracy and then documented for use in subsequent individual (e.g., performance appraisal) and group (e.g., workforce segment analysis) purposes. While nine-box grids are commonly used to aggregate and summarize employee segment data, other formats can be used to evaluate trends. The summarized data that is most useful for segment analysis and decision support includes:

• Current and multi-year performance trends (e.g., ratings).
• Future potential as assessed by a validated assessment or the exhibition of skills that relate directly to positions of greater authority (e.g., team leadership), handling of novel or difficult assignments (e.g., technical expertise), and a stated interest to lead or participate in more complex tasks (e.g., aspirations).
• Demonstrated impact or contributions to significant business or operational outcomes.
• Risk of departure.
• Readiness and timing for next move.
• Action plans for development and progression, such as transfers, job rotation, coaching, learning, or special project assignments tied to specific capabilities they need to build, practice, and demonstrate proficiency.

Once documented, follow-up steps close the loop on a comprehensive and highly impactful talent activity that drives action and accountability, including:

• Document and assign responsibilities for the employee and manager to include in performance goals as accountability mechanisms.
• Communicate assessment and development outcomes to employees.
• Establish measures, reporting, and upward visibility to enable tracking and accountability.
  
  

Relevant Practices & Tools

Emerging Succession Management Practices that Increase Fairness and Broaden Succession Pools In a Measurable Way. >

Emerging succession management is a refined and enterprise-wide endeavor in which the company proactively identifies a broad range of future leaders and critical skills professionals who might be years away from filling an executive role... more »

Conducting Robust and Impactful Group Talent Reviews for Increased Equity and Fairness. >

A Talent Review process is a formal, structured, tiered progression of meetings that increases the objectivity, transparency, awareness, and fairness of employee capability and potential assessments... more »

Assessing Current and Future Skills-based Requirements and Gaps to be Filled. >

Bringing workforce planning into a skills-based level of assessment requires cataloging the skills required by the positions to be included, identifying the availability of those skills in the current workforce... more »

Going Deep in the Organization with Larger Talent Pools of Potential Succession Candidates. >

One essential element of emerging succession management is the identification and development of talent earlier in a career... more »

The Nine (9) Box Tool: Document and Facilitate Future Leader Identification and Discussing Actions in Succession Management Processes. >

A matrix designed for both use throughout and as a result of the future leader identification portions of the succession management process... more »