Talent Management Software – Top 7 Picks For 2023

Talent management systems are popular for companies who want to streamline their HR processes and more efficiently manage their people development. Depending on the tool you use, you’ll be able to manage the entire employee lifecycle from one system or opt for a single step within it. For example:

• Recruiting & Talent Acquisition: Create a seamless hiring process by using a built-in ATS or integrating with an applicant tracking system you already use. With recruiting features, you can streamline the application and interview processes, allow employees to leave candidate feedback in a centralized place, and quickly send offer letters that candidates can sign digitally. All in all, candidates will have a positive experience and you’ll have less administrative work to handle in the process.
• Onboarding: Streamline your onboarding process by digitizing paperwork, collecting necessary signatures and forms before a new hire starts, and focusing their first day on what really matters: team introductions, trainings, and actually getting to work.
• Offboarding & Succession Planning: When someone leaves your company, you can manage their exit with ease. This means automating exit interviews, providing clear FAQs about things like last paychecks, and developing succession plans for their replacement — all while remaining compliant throughout the entire offboarding process.
• Learning Management & Career Development: Providing opportunities for your employees to hone their skills and advance in their careers is a great way to boost employee engagement and morale. Some TMS providers offer eLearning options with course modules, training templates, education, and other employee development opportunities.
• Compensation Management: Many of your workforce management processes can be wrapped into a talent management system. This includes time tracking, PTO requests, payroll, etc. ‍
• Performance Management: Rather than do employee evaluations once or twice a year, make performance and feedback a regular part of the job. This means tracking performance, setting goals and creating benchmarks, getting feedback from employees on the company culture, etc.

We always like to give you a clear sense of what to expect from any HR solution we highlight — and that includes the negatives. After all, no solution is perfect. With talent management systems, there are two key considerations to keep top of mind as you search for a provider. That way, you can prepare appropriately and maximize chances of success with implementation, rollout, etc.  

• Know what you need now: As you’ll see during your own research and demos, talent management SAAS providers offer a variety of features. In most cases, no one vendor will be “best in class” for each use-case and/or talent management module. So, to ensure success and a positive ROI, you really need to identify which area of talent management is a priority for your company. That way, you can find a provider that is as close to “best in class” for your needs. Not to mention, you’ll only pay for what you’ll actually use and benefit from.‍
• Anticipate growing needs: Not to make things more complicated, but you should also do some forecasting of your needs in case you’ll need a feature in the future. Then, look for solutions that offer what you need now and what you think you’ll need down the line. See if they’ll create a customized pricing package, too, so that you don’t pay for the future feature until you actually start using it.

As with a lot of HR software solutions, ROI isn’t something you see immediately. Fortunately, we have a variety of HR Tech ROI Calculators you can use to actually see how an investment like this will impact your company’s bottom line. 

In addition to that are the intangible benefits.

• Employee Lifecycle Tracking: You’ll have the ability to track employees throughout their entire lifecycle with your organization, from hire to alumni. Doing this will allow you to create a holistic picture of your people, see who your best performers are, where you need to invest in employee growth, and more. All in all, it will allow you to make informed people decisions that will positively impact your company's bottom line.
• Streamlined Management: When you can manage the bulk of your core HR functions with one vendor and one HR system, your job is just easier. You could have one performance management software solution, a learning management system, a human capital management program, and other separate software systems for your HR management. Or, you could roll it all into a single talent management suite that offers everything. That means no more switching between programs or tabs, or risking data entry errors from one platform to the next. Not to mention, your employees will only have to learn how to use ONE platform versus many.‍
• Automation: When you can automate the necessary busy work -- like onboarding paperwork or PTO requests, for example -- you free up time for yourself and your company, allowing everyone to be more productive.

Most talent management providers create pricing packages unique to each company. They are typically done on a per employee per month basis and also depend on the actual modules and features you get. Make sure you talk about pricing on your demos and ask each vendor you meet with to put together a pricing package for you. Typical ranges are $10-20/employee/month.

As we mentioned earlier, talent management software offers a variety of features depending on what provider you choose and the solutions you need. Here are 10 common features to expect:

• Employee Goals: In today’s world, employees don’t want to wait until their midyear reviews to hear how they are doing. Instead, they want real-time feedback. With online goal-setting modules, employees and managers can set goals, benchmark them against overall company goals, and keep regular tabs on how performance is measuring up to them. The goal (no pun intended) of this type of feature is to keep an open line of communication between team members, so expectations are aligned.
• Employee Performance Reviews: Managers can create comprehensive performance reviews for their team members, which include their own feedback as well as feedback from designated peers within your company. With 360 reviews, everything will be in one place so employees can get a clear picture of their performance and feedback, strengths, areas of improvement, etc.
• Applicant Tracking: Improve your recruiting efforts by streamlining the entire recruiting workflow, from applications, to candidate information, to interview scheduling, to feedback, and everything in between. Not only will you make the job of your recruiter easier, you’ll improve the experience for your candidate. After all, making a good first impression starts as soon as they see and engage with your job posting.
• Learning Management: Give employees an opportunity to hone a particular skill or advance in their careers. You can offer tailored learning, personalized content, eCourses, and much more. Depending on the platform as well as your company’s needs and bandwidth, you can create your own content from scratch or with the help of preloaded templates — or you can use platform-created guides as a start. As you'll see, each learning management system and module is different and comes with a variety of customization options.
• Employee Recognition: Allow managers to give shout-outs to their employees when they excel in a certain area, finish a major project, etc. 
• Payroll: You can take the stress away from payroll with streamlined processes that ensure you pay employees on time, cover federal and state tax filings, and more. Whether you pay via direct deposit or issue actual checks, you’ll be able to take the busy-work away from the payroll process.
• Employee Records: Keep track of all your employees’ information in one place. Data can be as standard as personal and payment information or more customized to include information like office equipment allocations, t-shirt sizes for corporate swag, favorite hobbies, etc. You can finally forego all those individual spreadsheets and documents and unify employee information in a simple dashboard.
• PTO: With built-in PTO functionality, employees can request time off without the back-and-forth associated with email requests. Teams can see who will be in the office when, whether there will be coverage on a requested day off, and more. Plus, employees and managers won’t have to keep track of how many PTO days they have left. It’s all built into an online system that can be access from a computer or mobile device.
• Job Board Distribution: Share new job postings across multiple job boards without uploading them to each individual job board. 
• Time Tracking: Allow employees to clock in and out of work from their computers or mobile devices. Certain providers let employees get specific on the number of hours spent on a particular project or with a particular client, making time tracking and timesheet management a breeze.
• Digitized Paperwork: Whether you’re welcoming a new hire, managing open enrollment, or handling offboarding for a departing employee, your job requires a lot of paperwork. With a talent management platform, this paperwork is all online, saving you time, filing cabinet space, and the environment.
• Employee Satisfaction: Calculate your employee Net Promoter Score and issue other surveys to gauge employee satisfaction and identify any areas of improvement. 
• Reporting & Analytics: Leverage built-in reporting features to analyze your people data in a matter of minutes. Depending on the provider, you can customize reports based on anything HR-related, from workforce planning to approval tracking. Then, you'll be able to make more proactive people and business decisions.‍
• Mobile Access: Some software vendors offer mobile apps in addition to online portals. On the HR side of things, this means you could manage applications in real-time (and thus hire faster). On the employee side of things, they can easily check their PTO balances, request time off, look up payroll-related information, and more while they're on the go.

Demos are a must for talent management software. They’ll give you an opportunity to see a platform in action, get a feel for their company and customer support, ask questions, and more. To help you get the most out of your demos, here are some key questions to ask:

• How will I transition my existing solutions to this suite?
• What is the timeline and how do you help with implementation?
• Do you have consultants you’d recommend?
• How do third party solutions connect to your system?
• Can I buy this module by module?
• How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack and therefore what integrations do I need?
• How will others in the organization use this solution?
• What are the key features I want to ask about?
• What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution

Some software solutions are more complicated than others to get up and running — and that includes talent management software. To help ensure a smooth implementation, you’re going to want to build an internal implementation team, elect a project manager, and consider hiring a consultant. 

After all, there’s a lot of data you’ll need to transfer over as well as mission-critical systems to test before officially switching over (like payroll, confidential employee records, etc.). On top of that, you’ll have to train your HR team and employees as well.

Some providers have consultants you can hire and who are obviously very well versed in managing this type of implementation, so be sure to ask them about this during your demos.

What is a talent management system?

A talent management system is a software or solution designed to manage the entire employee lifecycle from hire to retire.

What is the purpose of talent management?

The purpose of talent management is to recruit, retain and grow the best talent to boost company performance. 

Why is talent management software important to an organization?

Talent management software allows a company to track its employees’ progress as they grow from new hire to potential leadership successor. In addition, by putting effort into talent management, companies can see a jump in employee satisfaction and retention. 

What are the key components of talent management?

Key components of talent management include:

• Recruiting
• Onboarding
• Performance management
• Compensation
• Learning and development
• Succession planning
• Offboarding