The Talent Management Process: A Definitive Guide for 2026

Building a great team isn’t luck—it’s strategy. And it all starts with effective talent management, a process that can have a significant positive impact on the long-term success of a business. Talent management involves seven key components. Together, these steps help you attract, hire, build, and retain a strong workforce made of your industry’s top talent.

What is talent management?

Talent management is an ongoing, strategic process that involves attracting, onboarding, developing, and retaining workers to drive positive business outcomes. Talent management can have a significant impact on an organization’s overall success, including team member motivation, customer satisfaction, and business revenue, among other factors.

HR leaders are always looking to improve their talent management strategy. The right approach to talent management can help a company evolve and scale as business needs shift. Advancing critical talent management capabilities is top-of-mind for CEOs and CHROs as they continually respond to changing workforce patterns.

The talent management process in 7 steps

Before digging into the seven steps of talent management, you’ll want to develop a talent management strategy (if you don’t already have one). By planning your strategy in advance, you’ll be able to work more effectively as you move through the entire talent management process outlined in this guide.

1. The recruiting process

Talent management begins with talent acquisition—more specifically, planning for the candidates you need to recruit and developing strategies to attract the type of talent you’re looking for. You’ll need to determine:

• How many people to hire
• Whether the need is full- or part-time
• If the new hire needs to work in your office or if they can work remotely
• What skills and core competencies a hire needs—and which are optional
• Whether any prior education or work experience is necessary for the role
• If the hire should already have, or be willing to get, specific certifications

Once you’ve worked out the details of what an ideal hire will look like, you can then begin moving though the recruiting process to attract the ideal candidate. This involves:

• Selecting a talent pool to target
• Creating a job description
• Posting the job description online
• Developing recruitment campaigns if needed
• Reviewing resumes or proposals for the right skills
• Creating a shortlist of top candidates
• Scheduling time to chat with each top candidate
• Conducting any necessary prescreening assessments

You can opt to do these recruiting steps yourself, work with a staffing agency, or bring in a recruiting coordinator. You can also explore other alternative staffing solutions, which can be a great way to improve and streamline your recruiting process—including working with independent talent or starting an internship program.

2. The hiring process

Once you’ve identified several top candidates through the recruiting process, you can move forward and select your final candidates. This can involve:

• Assessing each candidate through several layers of individual and group interviews
• Testing each candidate for skills related to the position
• Fact checking their resume and work experience
• Finding out their payment requirements

Once you’ve selected the final candidate, move on to hiring and onboarding. The hiring process involves several steps, including:

• Extending an offer to the candidate
• Receiving the candidate’s acceptance
• Setting a start date
• Properly classifying the new hire
• Establishing how the new hire will be paid (such as adding them to your payroll or providing an email address to which an independent contractor can send invoices)
• Arranging any necessary systems access, such as a company computer or email account

After your new hire is properly classified—meeting appropriate legal and tax requirements—and the preliminary paperwork is done, you can move forward with their onboarding and training experience.

If you plan to hire multiple people with similar roles and skill sets, you’ll want to develop a repeatable training program that you can use to get every new hire onboarded and aligned. An onboarding specialist can help with this.

As an example, a remote team member onboarding program might include:

• An introduction to the company organizational structure
• An overview of key processes and systems
• In-depth training on specific tools to be used by new hires
• Information security seminars
• One-on-one conversations with a colleague or mentor

Creating a comprehensive onboarding process can potentially help new team members stay at your company longer—the first six months at work is a critical time when new hires often decide to stay with a company or leave as soon as possible.

This, in turn, saves your company money. According to Gallup, replacing a team member can cost as much as two times their annual salary.

3. Professional development

Onboard new hires with effective communication and provide continuing training. By offering your teams career development opportunities, you can:

• Further cement team members’ commitment to their role and work
• Open up career paths for team members to advance in new roles
• Prepare team members to become leaders
• Provide teams with the chance to upskill
• Improve internal capabilities and processes through the adoption of new tech
• Increase job satisfaction and retention rates

Offering professional development and learning opportunities is also an important part of an integrated talent management strategy, which can elevate the quality of your hiring.

Professional development initiatives can take a number of forms, such as:

• Bringing a consultant or trainer into your office to train your team
• Paying for your team members to attend an online workshop
• Scheduling an off-site event full of hands-on learning and brainstorming sessions
• Attending an industry conference
• Covering the tuition cost for work-related classes at a local university
• Asking each team member to give a presentation about their role and work
• Running an office book club and hosting monthly discussions
• Setting up fireside chats with company leaders and industry experts

An independent organizational development consultant can help you craft the right program for your team members.

4. Team member engagement

Plan to continuously engage your team members as a retainment strategy. Ideas to engage and build loyalty include:

• Working with team members to set goals that excite and motivate them
• Supporting team members’ well-being and work-life balance with flexible or hybrid scheduling and time off
• Giving team members support as they work through tough problems or toward stretch goals
• Creating opportunities for collaboration and teamwork

There are actually three types of team engagement that you can cultivate at work: cognitive, emotional, and physical. Taking strides to build engagement in each of these areas can help team members feel comfortable about and proud of their work with your company.

In turn, your team members are likely to be more productive, trusting, and accountable—which helps the whole company’s performance.

5. Performance management

Regular one-on-one communication is an important part of team engagement, performance management and, in turn, team retention. When you’re regularly chatting with your team members, you can remain tuned in to how they’re feeling about their work with your company.

Performance management goes beyond discussing areas for improvement or chatting about current projects. A comprehensive performance management strategy includes:

• Offering opportunities for regular feedback (both positive remarks and constructive criticism) for team members’ performance
• Identifying areas of professional development that can help team members advance in the company
• Having conversations about where team members see themselves in the company
• Helping team members decide where they may be best suited to grow within the organization—and opening up paths to those growth opportunities
• Looking for potential signs of burnout and giving team members appropriate support and resources
• Making sure you’re using team members’ skill sets to their fullest
• Increasing compensation when earned
• Providing flexible work situations when needed

If you do find that a team member is struggling in their role, you can explore the reasons why and look at potential ways to improve work performance, including:

• Scheduling further professional development and training
• Providing support from an employee assistance program (EAP)
• Trying out new time management tools and processes
• Bringing in independent talent to support teams during periods of high intensity

You don’t want to wait until it’s time for an annual performance review to have these conversations. Open, continual communication can be more organic and comfortable for team members, as opposed to scheduled annual performance appraisals. Your HR department or an independent employee training specialist can provide support and guidance when developing performance management plans for your team.

6. Team member recognition

When your teams are performing well, you’ll want to recognize their hard work at both the group and individual level, as appropriate to the circumstance and depending on each person’s comfort with public displays of appreciation. This helps team members feel seen and appreciated. Recognition can also reinforce engagement and retention within your organization.

Team recognition can take several forms, including:

• Public acknowledgement among the team or company
• Fun team outings or events
• Team lunches
• Financial bonuses
• Gifts
• Additional time off

Team recognition is about more than rewarding the very top performers. If your team members have been working hard on performance improvements or achieving professional certifications, take some time to recognize their hard work as well.

7. Succession planning

A succession plan is a map of the potential promotions of leadership roles and other roles over time, including how the transitioning of roles will occur. The succession planning process offers many benefits to both business owners and workers, including:

• Team members gain increased confidence in their job security within the company
• Individual team members get clarity around their advancement path and can set personal goals and make improvements
• Collectively, teams get a better understanding of how their roles and departments may evolve through a sale, acquisition, merger, or initial public offering (IPO)
• Leaders planning to retire can see a roadmap for how important transitions will take place
• Managers have a clear picture of what roles they may need to fill, promotions that could occur for existing team members, and how and when those transitions could occur

Your succession plan can also be part of your larger workforce plan and a complete business continuity plan.

Talent management trends in 2025

Talent management playbooks will continue to evolve in 2025. Advancing technologies, workforce dynamics, and economic factors will create new focus areas. The most successful talent management programs will be optimized using AI tools. Talent management trends in 2025 will include:

• Data-driven talent analytics that improve workforce planning, decision making, and insight into productivity, effectiveness, diversity, equity and inclusion
• Flexible and remote work arrangements that attract and retain top talent and offer structures that enable organizations to hire the best talent from a global talent pool
• Engaging and personalized marketing experiences to attract active and passive job seekers
• Redefining work from job titles to a collection of skills and tasks
• AI-centric talent management programs that improve productivity, reduce workloads, and create opportunities for people to apply their skills to a multitude of projects

Human skills—complex thinking, insightful connections, and fluid collaboration and communication—will become valued skills for team members to have as talent programs change and adapt.

How can the talent management process be improved?

Your approach to talent management will likely be a continually developing process. Every time you hire and onboard a new team member, you’ll gain new insights and takeaways as to how your talent strategy can be improved.

As you continue to improve your talent management practices, you’ll:

• Improve the accuracy and fit of your hires
• Find new ways to successfully onboard and retain new hires
• Build a strong workplace culture
• Gain confidence in your business continuity

Start by improving the following three components of talent management systems—and keep evolving from there.

Focus on workplace culture

Building a strong company culture supports your hiring process right from the very start, as top talent is attracted to companies with a great culture. And it doesn’t stop there—the positive impact of a good workplace culture enhances multiple aspects of the talent management process:

1. High performers are attracted to companies with a great work environment
2. Workplace culture influences (and is communicated through) effective onboarding
3. When workplace culture includes support for professional development, team members continue to feel supported and rewarded
4. Team members are inclined to stay with the same company and advance into new roles
5. Teams speak positively of their company to colleagues and friends, providing referrals that further support hiring efforts

Get support from top management

For the talent management process to work—and continually improve—everyone at your company needs to be on board, including top management. When everyone from the top down is supportive of the talent management process, you can see benefits like:

• A strong candidate pipeline
• Support for training and development plans
• Successful execution of a succession strategy

Create goals

Team members aren’t the only ones who should be setting development goals—your talent management system can be improved by setting talent-focused business goals, too.

Try setting SMART goals to support your hiring and business strategy. This type of goal uses a five-part framework to support your success:

• Specific. The goal clearly states what needs to be accomplished, and who is responsible.
• Measurable. Each goal in a SMART plan is able to be clearly measured and assessed for progress. Be sure to define the measurement metrics, too!
• Attainable. Goals should be realistically achievable given the resources and time available to you and your company.
• Relevant. A SMART goal must be relevant to your business.
• Time-bound. Your goals should have a time frame in which they will be achieved—this helps with measurement.

Find the right talent on Upwork

Developing a good talent management process requires care, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Upwork is your source for finding skilled independent talent and full-time hires in any industry—and nearly every country.

Whether you want to find and select independent talent yourself through Talent Marketplace™, get help from a Talent Specialist™, or work with our Enterprise team, Upwork is where you can find the world’s best talent. We’ll even help you classify and onboard your new team members—making talent management easier than ever.

Get started today by creating or logging into your Upwork account and connecting with top talent.