Integrated Talent Management: What It Is and Why It Matters

Integrated talent management (ITM) is a set of principles that guide the way companies find, manage, promote, and support talent—all extending well past the point of hire. These principles make it easier for HR teams to do their job, can help to reduce worker turnover, and can improve the ways in which you expand your company.

Why is integrated talent management important?

When you focus on integrated talent management, you place an emphasis on supporting team members throughout their entire lifecycle with your company.

Traditionally, Human Resources and recruiting teams operated in silos. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve probably been exposed to a system that looks something like this:

1. Recruiters find and hire candidates
2. HR onboards the new worker
3. A hiring manager trains and evaluates the worker for performance
4. Worker leaves their position through resignation, retirement, or promotion
5. Repeat from step one

When you use this traditional model of finding and onboarding talent, you’re left with a lot of disjointed data. The recruiters have their applicant tracking system (ATS), HR uses a different program to manage benefits and payroll, and managers often keep their own notes on workers.

What goes into a file in one location—say, a documents folder on the manager’s computer—may never make it to the relevant recruiting and HR files. The systems in place aren’t designed to communicate with each other. This makes it harder to create connections between valuable data points that can provide insights to improve hiring, worker experiences, team retention, and more.

While there are certainly still defined roles and access levels within the integrated talent management process (recruiter, HR business partners, and managers), the flow of information is more transparent—often with the help of specialized talent management software.

The benefits of integrated talent management

The benefits of integrated talent management form a circle, with each item on the list supporting the next:

• Improved recruiting. As you better understand your high-performing team members’ roles and what drives them at work, you can improve the way in which you attract and hire new candidates for jobs.
• Effective onboarding. When you understand what drives your team members, you can craft better onboarding and training experiences that create a strong foundation when someone starts to work with your company.
• Higher worker retention rates. The strong foundation created during onboarding sets the stage for new team members to be engaged and enthused by their work, which aids in retention.
• Better 1:1 meetings. When you have longstanding work relationships with the same trusted team members, you can get more out of your one-on-one meetings and performance reviews. By going beyond simply providing notes, and instead receiving and listening to team members’ feedback, you can get a better sense of what makes someone the right fit for the job (and how to retain them even longer).
• Improved organizational structure. As you continue to work with, promote, and reward your team members, you can refine your overall organizational chart and make sure you have the right people in the right roles.
• Succession planning. Workforce and succession planning is a lot easier when you have a good grasp on your organizational structure, your team member’s skills, and what competencies you need to hire for.

How does the integrated talent management process work?

There are seven steps that make up the entire integrated talent management planning process. Each of these steps either directly correlates to or supports one of the benefits discussed above.

1. Talent planning

Effective planning is the cornerstone of an integrated talent management strategy. If a plan feels hard to develop at first, don’t worry. As you devote more time and resources to building out the rest of your integrated talent management system, you’ll find that it becomes easier to create and fine-tune your talent plans.

2. Talent acquisition

Having a strong understanding of your talent needs—including the skills they should have—will help to make the talent acquisition process easier.

The integrated talent management model doesn’t mean you’re only hiring full-time workers, either. It’s really all about finding the top talent for specific skill sets, and building talent pools of high-potential candidates. This process can include hiring permanent team members, regularly working with trusted independent talent, or sourcing specific skills on an as-needed basis.

3. Onboarding

You’ll need to have a good onboarding process in place whether you’re hiring full-time, part-time, or working with independent contractors. You may need to develop different onboarding experiences for each type of team member—onboarding specialists and instructional designers can help with this.

4. Career development

Because integrated talent management doesn’t stop at the point of hire, keeping a focus on career development (including leadership development) is key. This can include creating opportunities for team members to improve core competencies, as well as allowing team members to explore new or advanced career paths.

An organizational development consultant can help you create ongoing training programs that help your team members advance in their skills and within your company. By emphasizing talent development you can continue to cultivate new skill sets within your company as well as boost team member engagement in your company.

5. Performance tracking and analysis

Performance management is an important part of integrated and non-integrated talent management strategies. When you take an integrated approach, though, performance metrics become a rich source of data that can both help you foster workers’ growth and also bring insights about the kinds of talent you need.

Many talent management software programs will allow you to pull reports and discover data for better decision making when it comes time to hire more talent.

6. Workforce retention

A University of Massachusetts report notes that it can cost the equivalent of up to nine months’ pay to replace a team member. This cost varies based on your market, industry, and the type of job—but the fact remains that it’s much more cost effective to build and retain a strong team than to deal with regular turnover.

By focusing on hiring the right fit for each role, bringing in the skilled professionals that you need, and encouraging career development, you can support better workforce retention.

7. Succession planning

As you retain your existing workforce longer, you’ll typically need to reward their hard work and support their continued growth. This often comes in the form of new responsibilities and promotions.

When you promote a team member, you will need to hire someone else to fill the role—but everything you’ve done so far in your integrated talent management plan will help make that easier than ever before.

3 Strategies and frameworks for integrated talent management

Integrated talent management strategies are fairly customizable, and you can tweak the process to suit your exact needs. The following three frameworks, though, are a good place to start when considering how integrated talent management may work within your company.

Approach integrated talent management on a job-by-job basis

If you know you need to fill one or more roles quickly, and are just starting the integrated talent management process, you may want to begin here. To do this, you’ll need to gather members of your HR, recruiting, and management teams together to discuss and share data points.

Look at what makes workers in these roles successful, and identify the specific skills you need new candidates to have. Don’t just stop at the hiring process, though—remember to consider ways you can support these new hires after they join your company, including:

• Pairing them with a mentor or successful senior team member for support during onboarding and training
• Allocating a budget for professional development courses and events
• Developing a culture of feedback with the new hire from day one

Replicate one team’s success across multiple departments

You can also approach integrated talent management on the team level. If there’s a team or department in your company that’s operating at a particularly high level, take a closer look to see what they’re doing right.

They may not even be intentionally using principles of integrated talent management just yet, but you can glean information from their processes and apply them to an integrated strategy.

Use data to predict future needs and gaps

If you’re not in a position to begin hiring for new roles using an integrated talent management approach right now, you can still plan for the future. By looking at data around internal performance and external industry trends, you can get a feel for what skill gaps you’ll need to fill going forward.

Once you have an idea of what your needs may be, you can begin sourcing talent yourself or working with a skilled recruiter to find experts for ongoing work and specific projects.

Important points to consider for successful integrated talent management

The guidelines in this article are just that—a starting point to help you create an integrated talent management strategy. You may find that, in practice, your approach to integrated talent management varies slightly.

As you begin to shape your strategy, think about the following:

• What are your business needs? What does business success look like for you?

• Do you know what kind of talent you need, in terms of skills and type of work, to get the business results you want?
• What’s your current strategy for attracting new talent? How is it working? Does it feel aligned with corporate strategy?
• Why have your top workers (or longest lasting team members) stayed with the company? What do they like, and what would they change?
• Do you have the tools, services, and software needed to make changes to your talent acquisition and management plan?
• How can you improve communication between recruiters, HR, and managers?

You’ll also want to keep diversity and inclusion at the forefront of your strategy. When you start tapping into the world’s workforce to bring in new team members, you’ll want to ensure that your team members feel that they belong—no matter where they are from or what their professional background is. You may want to enlist the services of an HR consultant who is experienced in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Get help from a talent manager

If the integrated talent management process feels like a daunting undertaking, you may prefer to work with a talent manager. These skilled HR professionals can help you pinpoint areas of change and create an effective, integrated talent management strategy.

You can find talent managers on Upwork right now—just log in or create an Upwork account today to begin browsing the profiles of qualified talent managers and make your first, valuable connections.

‍