Talent Management
Metrics
TALENT MOBILITY
• Talent mobility is a metric that keeps track of the mobility of employees. Mobility can be
both internal and external. Internal mobility is desirable to prevent external mobility.
• In the last 10 years, traineeships have become very popular. A fair part of the attraction is
that highly educated young professionals can try different roles in a relatively short time
span. Internal mobility chances are often a requirement to retain people who are
constantly looking for new challenges.
• The best way to measure talent mobility is average assignment duration.
TALENT TURNOVER
• Turnover in your talent pool is per definition unwanted. Talents are people who have a high
future potential. These are the people that you want to educate and train so they can be
even more valuable for the organization in the future.
• Turnover is, therefore, a good measure to track. It can be measured using the simple
turnover percentage, or the percentage changes over time.
• Number of separations during one year/ Average number of employees during the year X
100
TALENT DISTRIBUTION
• Talent distribution is another insight that you want to keep track of. This can be very
simple, using demographic variables like age, nationality, gender and so on. Having an
overview of the talent distribution helps you to devise better talent strategies. For
example, if the average age of talent is increasing, you may want to refocus your
recruitment efforts.
• Another important talent management
metric example is to know what
HIGH- percentage of the workforce qualifies
POTENTIAL as talent. Some organizations cap the
percentage of talent at a fixed number.
TALENT This may make sense as it forces you to
only select the top employees as your
HiPos.
• The more traditional recruitment
metrics can easily be applied to your
talent pool. Cost to hire is an excellent
example. It measures the total cost of
hiring someone, including ad
COST TO placement, sourcing costs, the invested
time from manager and recruiter, et
HIRE cetera.
• In case multiple people are interviewed
but only one of them is hired, make
sure to include all their costs in this
metric.
THE REAL COST TO HIRE
Source: Hewitt Consultants
• ..\Recruitment and Selection\Cost of recruitment [Link]
• Time to hire is another recruitment
metric example. It is usually measured
as the number of days from the
moment the vacancy opened up until
the new hire signed his or her contract.
TIME TO • A common cause of a long time to hire
is a delay in approval from the
HIRE manager. Oftentimes the manager
needs to list the job requirements,
approve selected CVs and plan
interviews. Delays in this process
sometimes double the time to hire!
TIME TO FULL PRODUCTIVITY
• Another metric is the time to full productivity. Every new hire needs a few months to
become fully productive. During these months, new employees learn the ropes, get to
know their colleagues and develop a high-quality network that enables them to do the job
well. Depending on the effectiveness of the organization’s onboarding (and inboarding)
activities, this time can be lengthened or shortened.
TRAINING SPEND
• The time and money spent on training activities are important talent management metrics.
Talents are people with a high growth potential. Enabling this growth through learning and
development activities is a requirement for any effective talent management process.
• Training spend can be defined as the number of days in training or the amount of dollars
invested in training. These metrics can be tricky because internal training costs are not
always measured consistently while external training costs are usually much higher.
EXIT INTERVIEWS
• A final metric that you need to keep track of is exit interviews. You will want to know why
your talent is leaving. Always. Knowing the common causes of employee turnover helps to
prevent further damage.
• Standardized exit interviews are, however, quite rare. These interviews often provide
qualitative information that gives valuable input – but technically they’re no metrics. In
order to standardize this, you can work with questionnaires or standardized interviews. An
additional benefit is that doing so will provide more reliable data.
• In terms of talent metrics, it’s good to differentiate on all these metrics
between ‘normal’ employees and your ‘High Potentials’. Because your real
talent metrics are the differences between those two groups. You want your
talent to always overperform and if this isn’t the case, you may want to
reconsider your definition of talent.