#HRTechChat: Talent Management -- It Will Blend

It's been about a month since my colleague Jen Dole and I dropped our very first mutual episode of the #HRTechChat podcast. Today's is the second installment in this new internal series wherein we will discuss various issues facing professionals whose day-to-day lives intersect with human resources and human capital management and how and why technology fits into the equation. Jen is now well past her 90-day mark here at 3Sixty Insights. When she joined us, we seriously considered whether to label her practice area something other than talent management. It has become a traditional term, after all, and part of us wanted to be forward-thinking and novel. Ultimately, we landed on the side of tradition, but we continue to wonder when exactly it makes sense today to refer to talent management as, well, talent management.... Conceived by McKinsey & Company in 1997, according to Wikipedia, the concept of talent management itself was once a novel take on the so-called softer aspects of human capital management, things like performance management, succession planning, compensation management, and, depending on who's talking, learning management and career development, too. And, in that time, an age when systematization in HCM was in its infancy, HR departments far and wide, from the leanest at the smallest companies to the most developed at the largest, were busy enough to approach talent management as siloed activities to tamp down. This continued for years. Fast-forward to today, however, and the benefit of hindsight reveals that the practice of so-coined talent management never comprised discrete, neatly defined activities; it was just the relatively archaic state of the technology for it holding us back, forcing us to contemplate things rigidly. The state of the art of technology for HCM today has since evolved to accommodate the fluid nature of what we've long identified as talent management. And we are now at the point where the conventional domains of traditional talent management blend together every day in sophisticated organizations where HR has embraced this state of the art and the forward-thinking workflow that goes along with it. New terms such as the future of work and the employee experience reflect the reality and help these HR teams show and exercise their strategic worth to the C-suite. But don't say any of this to those aforementioned lean HR teams at small organizations. Regale them with tales of a progressive employee experience or a bright future of work, and it may not even make sense to them. For them, it's probably best to call the softer side of HR by its traditional name, talent management. This is because every organization starts with nothing when it comes to HR, and there will always be those among us systematizing their HCM, absolutely needing to approach talent management as an array of discrete, siloed operations in need of order. It may be hard to believe, but this is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg of what Jen and I managed to cover in what felt like the shortest 35 or so minutes ever. I encourage anyone reading this to listen in. The term talent management may yet go away, eventually. In the meantime, however, we'll call it just that for the foreseeable future. Even as the activities of talent management continue to blend beyond the vision of a now-quarter-century-old concept, the term remains a useful signpost for all.