Friday, August 15, 2008

Bios are not Talent Profiles!

In the latest Human Capitalist post (http://humancapitalist.com/?p=611) Jason Corsello links to Michael Phelps' "Talent Profile." Well, if a short bio is a Talent Profile, than so are baseball cards, IMDB bios, and any number of things. For these things to be useful in Talent Management, you actually have to use them as a starting point to do something useful. This is easier said than done. Organizations should demand real utility out of Talent Profiles.

Similarly, the mere presence of loosely correlated, but highly incomplete and unvalidated, information does not make it necessarily useful. LinkedIn is the king of faux value in my opinion.

Actually, baseball cards contain a lot of useful information. It's a pity that the vast majority of jobs do not have unfied measurement methodologies like athletes do. Talent management would be a lot easier if nearly everyone had the same job functions.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sphinx - keep 'em coming. We need more anti Cool Aid out there, but be sure to provide some solutions, not just critiques.