A talent review is an important meeting where leaders and managers come together to assess the state of their talent. Talent reviews help identify who’s doing the best work, who’s ready for promotion, and who might be a retention risk.

When done well, talent reviews fuel the future success of an organization. They’ll give you a clear, real-time understanding of your talent pipeline so you can make the right decisions at the right time and retain top talent.

Here are five talent review best practices guaranteed to help you optimize your approach:

1. Make sure your talent review process is agile.
   You can’t understand your people, their performance, and your opportunities if you’re only discussing talent once a year. Keep your talent review process frequent and adaptable.
2. Evaluate talent at all levels of the organization.
   Most organizations only conduct talent reviews at the Director level and above. But this approach is limiting and disengaging. There are high-potential employees at every level of your organization who should be given growth opportunities or might be at risk for turnover.
3. Encourage collaboration and calibration.
   The modern organization is less hierarchical and more collaborative than ever before. Employees often interact with cross-functional teams and other leaders. Your talent review process should account for these relationships and experiences.
4. Root talent decisions in better data.
   Many organizations use less-than-reliable data to fuel important talent decisions. The traditional 9-box has become a widely accepted practice for rating talent. But there are many issues with this approach.
5. Rely on technology to help carry the load.
   You might think frequent and collaborative talent reviews sound like a lot of work. That’s because leaders spend hours upon hours manually gathering, organizing, and presenting the data back to reviewers. But this doesn’t have to be the case! You need to find technology that supports your efforts and that creates efficiencies in your talent review process.

Your talent review tools should help you objectively and collaboratively assess performance, growth potential, and retention risk. Looks for tools that have:

• Reliable performance feedback: collect actionable and objective ratings with a simple framework
• 9-box or 4-quadrant options: quickly identify talent risks, and those ready for promotion or development using a model that fits your needs
• Calibration settings: allow multiple raters and easily filter data for effective calibration sessions
• Collaboration options: comment and add talent insights over time
• Integrated succession planning: seek successor nominations and automatically pull ratings into succession plans

Conducting frequent and collaborative talent reviews requires a partner you can rely on. For the last 20+ years, our customers have trusted us to deliver reliable expertise, technology, service and results.

We help you uncover meaning.
Administer lightweight, frequent, and unbiased talent reviews to understand the full picture of your talent pipeline. See the connections between performance, growth potential, and retention.

We make action easy for everyone.
Completing, analyzing, and acting on talent review data needs to be easy for managers, leadership, and HR. Our solutions help reduce administrative burden, integrate into manager workflows, and facilitate strategic leadership discussions.

We’re a partner you can rely on.
You’re on a journey – and we’re with you every step of the way. You can rely on our dedicated team to provide strategic guidance, ongoing coaching, timely tech support, and safe and secure practices your programs need to be successful.