Top Talent Management Systems — July 2020

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.