How to clearly connect your top talent to value

As we facilitated the fifth weekly meeting to identify our client’s top talent prospects, it quickly became clear that the binders we printed, detailing available talent and critical future roles, were being entirely ignored by the executives gathered. Instead, our client gravitated immediately to the digital, interactive app we had just introduced into the meetings. The new app, called TalentMatch and developed by McKinsey, took center stage.

This unique visualization technology brought together information about the success criteria for specific roles and reviewed them side-by-side with talent in the organization. It enabled senior executives – in this case, our client’s CEO, COO, CFO and CHRO – to visualize the most important information about their leaders of today and tomorrow and connect employee talent that would create value in the long term.

This sort of information gathering and assessment is increasingly critical since an organization’s ability to create value hinges disproportionately on few critical roles that may or may not reside at the top of the org chart. HR professionals also say it explains why talent matching grows in prominence as there’s an acute shortage of talented professionals on a global level creating a talent gap at the top of many organizations.

Through McKinsey’s TalentMatch solution, leadership sees clearly the strengths of star talent, flags career-development needs and matches that talent to critical roles. It also enables interactive digital experiences that make paper profiles unnecessary.

In our client session, leadership was able to see the profile information they needed from six large screens installed in the client’s boardroom, facilitated by our human-capital experts. From the ongoing work with TalentMatch, some valuable benefits were gained:

  • Spreading out the data visually helps executives quickly master toggling between a candidate profile, role card and assessment data. Visualizations allow leaders to assess a candidate’s overall fit for a role, help uncover specific areas for development by highlighting low scores on criteria and compare multiple candidates at a glance. The integrated metrics dashboard provides information on how many roles are unfilled and the business and geographical mix of those selected across all critical roles.
  • Senior executives quickly identify the attributes and experiences where candidates have gaps and drill down to what drives those deficiencies and how they could put value at risk.
  • High-speed but high-impact discussions develop, which means executives more quickly generate practical solutions for shoring up the core gaps of promising candidates for key roles and for minimizing the risk to the corporate value agenda.
  • The technology improves the talent dialogue that occurs since after just a little while, the screens were ignored, and the conversations were natural for everyone.
  • TalentMatch lets the executives view talent holistically. If an employee appears on more than one shortlist to fill a role, TalentMatch flags it. If a particular area of the business seemingly lacks a strong successor bench, that too is easy to judge.

TalentMatch offers the visualization and information leaders require to make excellent, informed talent decisions. More organizations are adopting digital technologies that help take the guesswork out of talent management, development and matching truly top talent into career- and value-enhancing roles. TalentMatch can aggregate personnel data, link candidates to appropriate posts and support the recommendations.

The authors wish to thank Andrew Holbrook, Carolyn Pierce, Soufiene Bouraoui, Phillip Gee and Rich Ramm for the practical insights they provided for this post.

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