What is a Performance and Talent Management System?

Performance and talent management systems have been acquiring importance of late as management systems that help track employee performance in a more comprehensive manner than human resources management systems (HRIS). Where a performance and talent management system differs from an HRIS is that while the latter takes the physical aspects of the employee records into consideration; a performance and talent management system goes beyond just the numbers and incorporates the qualitative aspects of tracking everything from recruitment to retirement.
A performance and talent management system is meant to help overcome the shortfalls of an HRIS. An HRIS is primarily meant to input physical values relating to the employee, such as time in and time out, payroll, deductions and such other items. A performance and talent management system is more of a strategic inputter for the enterprise. It helps to locate, invite and nurture talent, and then helps HR to measure and quantify these and arrive at reasonable decisions.
The four cornerstones of a performance and talent management systemSince a performance and talent management system is more detailed and of a slightly different nature from an HRIS; it is built on a few cornerstones of its own. These pillars of a performance and talent management system, which help to round up the product and make it what it is, can be summarized into the following:
RecruitmentThe first important feature of a performance and talent management system is the one relating to recruitment. The performance and talent management system should have software that tracks everything about the employee’s recruitment, starting from the time she was a candidate, to the time of onboarding. It usually has an interface that tracks everything from the ad calling for the position to be filled up to the actual joining. The recruitment feature of a performance and talent management system also offers the opportunity to upload ads on the social media and the web. It is thus an important feature that helps to streamline and document all stages of the recruitment.

Learning and developmentAnother important element of a performance and talent management system is the way it helps to keep track of the employee’s training programs. It helps to identity the training needs of each employee based on the feedback HR gets from the reporting manager. It then documents the training that took place after the program was planned and executed, and finally, also the extent to which the training met its purpose. A performance and talent management system should have a learning module that familiarizes it with the latest learning trends in the particular industry and should help it initiate training needs that are best suited for the employee and the organization. Performance managementOne of the other core features of a performance and talent management system is the one that helps management evaluate the performance of the employees. Employee performance is the most important criterion for judging an employee’s abilities, strengths and weaknesses. These days, the traditional annual appraisal methods are making way for specific task and goal-oriented assessments, because many organizations think that it makes sense to give a person a task to carry out and judge her abilities in relation to how she carried it out, rather than waiting for a whole year to do so. A performance and talent management system aligns perfectly well with this concept, as it keeps track of employee performance management during a defined training program or task, as well as in relation to a timeframe.
CompensationLike performance, the direction of compensation too, is changing to a more task related nature. A few organizations are no longer waiting for a whole year to add bonuses to employees who show exceptional qualities at work. They are quick at offering rewards more for specific tasks than over fixed durations of work. This is another area in which a performance and talent management system comes in handy, since it measures compensation on a task-to-task basis.

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