I was on a panel yesterday with many vendors in the talent management space and we were asked to explain: “What is Talent Management?”

I was surprised by the number of people who limited their definition to what they were doing: “Talent management is performance management, incentive compensation, or talent acquisition.”

If you look at what the analysts are saying, talent management is often much broader than that and includes training and development, succession and workforce planning, and even sometimes knowledge management.

Maybe a better definition than saying what talent management does it is to look at what it impacts. Talent management impacts labor related skills and competencies and they impact business performance. In order to do this, all true talent management systems MUST have a talent repository. At Taleo, we call it a Talent Master file and it is the true core of any functionality that would evolve into any suite of products.