OK – I know that talent and talent management are the (not so) new buzzwords in HR. Truthfully, talent is incredibly strategic and requires a great deal of focus and energy. However, ATS vendors these days are calling themselves Talent Management Solutions. This is just wrong. An ATS is not talent management – it is a very, very small subset of talent.
Talent Management consists of many functional areas, bridged together to define a broader strategy. It really starts with workforce planning (itself a broad topic with subsets like succession and position management), before flowing to areas of recruiting, performance, learning management and career planning and then touching areas within comp and benefits. Managing talent through the employee lifecycle, organization strategy, and individual economic cycles is a thorough investigation of how talent affects the organization, and how talent is attracted, rewarded and retained.
So I know I’m mostly preaching to the choir, but as we see TMS popping up, we need to understand that many or most of these are really old ATS systems that have not changed. Very few or none are actually real TMS solutions. It will be difficult to create a full solution outside of the ERP’s and major HRMS vendors that covers many above mentioned aspects of TM. It will be even more difficult to find a TM vendor that does a good portion of the many activities well.
