Talent Management System (TMS): Guide for HR Managers

A strong talent management strategy is the cornerstone of building and developing a high-performing workforce. For employees to reach their highest potential, talent teams must actively recruit, retain, and grow the best talent. This work becomes much simpler and more efficient with a talent management system (TMS). 

Selecting and implementing a TMS can pose several challenges, though. Your human resources and talent teams might already use several tools that a TMS will replace, changing multiple workflows in one fell swoop. Additionally, users will need ongoing training and guidance to adopt the new software. 

By learning about the capabilities and features of a TMS, you can make an informed decision about which TMS will best enhance your talent operations and empower your teams based on your organization’s unique talent needs and objectives. In this article, we’ll cover what a talent management system is, its benefits, and factors to consider when choosing one.  

In This Article

What Is a Talent Management System? 

A talent management system, also known as a TMS, is software that integrates and supports key talent management activities, including onboarding, performance management, learning and development, skills growth, compensation, and succession planning. Rather than talent teams executing their workflows across separate tools, a TMS consolidates operations through several modules. Each one manages a specific talent management process. 

Because a TMS supports end-to-end talent management efforts, it can benefit not only your HR operations but also your entire workforce, from applicants to employees to managers. 

Benefits of a Talent Management System

A TMS optimizes tasks for a variety of departments and users, including HR, management, and individual contributors. The advantages of using a TMS — including collaboration, retention, and employee development — vary depending on the user and their needs. We’ll examine the details of each benefit below. 

Centralized Data for Easy Collaboration 

A TMS integrates all talent-related data into a single location, including existing roles and associated competencies, information about current employees’ career paths, and candidates’ work history and skills. 

With all data in one place, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can deliver insights to help with the following tasks:

• Crafting a standardized system of skills and related roles through a skills ontology  

• Tracking talent strategy success rates around hiring and retention 

• Gaining insights into your existing workforce, including skills gaps and talent supply and demand

Over half of C-Suite executives say that employee upskilling and reskilling would be one of the biggest productivity boosts within their organizations. So identifying capability gaps and creating a plan to fill them is a must-have not only for your organization’s productivity but also for increasing your retention rates by providing opportunities for learning and development. 

Improved Employee Retention Efforts

Retaining employees requires concerted and ongoing work to help individuals envision their career growth within an organization and access opportunities to achieve their goals. A TMS can analyze data from employee profiles to generate customized career paths that visualize an employee’s journey to their next internal role with concrete milestones along the way. 

While career growth is important, employees are also less likely to leave an organization where they’ve cultivated meaningful work relationships. A TMS uses data to identify best-fit internal mentors and career coaches. This one-on-one development benefits both mentor and mentee in their development. 

Customized Employee Development Opportunities 

Employee development is more than mentorship and a career path. Employees need frequent opportunities to acquire new skills. These opportunities might come from short-term internal gigs, temporary transfers, or on-demand learning. 

A TMS combines a comprehensive overview of employees’ skills and goals with insight into open roles to create a talent marketplace that matches employees to job opportunities and projects. Talent management systems can integrate with learning management systems to provide personalized suggestions for articles, videos, podcasts, and courses to help gain the skills they need. 

Talent management systems can realize all of these benefits and more by managing all talent processes in one place. 

How Do Talent Management Systems Work?

 A talent management system works as a single platform comprising multiple modules that streamline a variety of talent management processes: 

• Workforce plans: Because a TMS hosts all the data about existing and open roles, as well as candidates and current employees, it can highlight skills gaps your workforce has today and might experience in the future. For these gaps, a TMS can suggest where to upskill, where to reskill, and where to acquire.

• Employee preboarding and onboarding: A TMS engages employees from their very first day on the job by helping them learn to succeed in their current role—and to envision their career path as they mature within the organization. A TMS provides personalized learning plans so that employees continue to gain new skills both during and after initial onboarding.  

• Employee development and performance management: Once an employee has successfully onboarded, a TMS can help employees define their career goals, discover opportunities to upskill, and find a mentor to nurture their career growth. Through the TMS, employees and managers can regularly collaborate through performance reviews and feedback sessions. 

• Employee retention: Through employee relationship management, a TMS can make personalized development plans for each employee, monitor career progress, and signal potential flight risks. A TMS can also track employees’ activity by analyzing activities like internal applications to open jobs, engagement with learning material, and skills acquisition. 

• Succession planning: With AI, a TMS can analyze the skills and titles within your organization to identify internal employees who can fill critical roles that are vacated to mitigate risk. Hiring internally also saves the time and effort of sourcing, interviewing, and onboarding a new employee. 

As you look for a talent management software solution that includes all of these capabilities, several factors may determine which TMS is the best fit for your organization. 

What to Consider When Choosing a Talent Management System 

Despite obvious benefits, a TMS is not one-size-fits-all. Every organization’s workforce and talent strategies are different, so it’s important to take your current pain points into account. In general, however, a TMS should be able to perform the following actions:

• Provide insights into your workforce, including skills gaps

• Personalize learning and career paths for employees 

• Give your managers visibility into employees’ development 

• Assist succession planning 

• Reduce manual work through automation

A TMS should maximize efficiency by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks and aid critical decision-making by providing novel insights. An AI-powered TMS will eliminate overhead in your hiring, retention, and development efforts while bringing clarity to your strategy through data and intelligence.          

Optimize Your Talent Management Processes with Phenom

 By unifying talent activities into a single platform and incorporating automation, a talent management system can drive collaboration, accelerate workflows, and help your workforce reach its highest potential. A TMS enhances the entire employee lifecycle, from hiring to onboarding to development to promotion. Beyond the individual employee, a TMS helps HR teams gain critical insights; employees can chart their career growth; and managers can develop stronger teams. But even with the many benefits of a TMS, the work involved in selecting, implementing, and adopting a TMS can require multiple stakeholders, a procurement process, and a lengthy implementation. 

At Phenom, we know how important talent management is to your organization’s success. Because your TMS plays a vital role in the day-to-day work of your employees, we look to expedite the implementation process by onboarding your teams through support, education, and best practices. We’ll help you train users on our platform and craft custom adoption strategies tailored to your organization. Once your organization is live with Phenom, it doesn’t stop there. We regularly lead workshops and offer comprehensive on-demand, self-paced learning content. 

Learn more about how an AI-powered platform can optimize your talent management processes by exploring Phenom for Talent Management or scheduling a demo.