No longer will your ascent up the career ladder be left in the hands of mere mortals.
A new wave of "talent management software" promises to put more oomph into performance reviews, allowing companies to identify stars and slackers with the ease of a Google search.
While they will never completely take the human out of human resources, silicon talent scouts are becoming more popular as businesses seek an edge in an increasingly tight labour market.
"It's all about demographics," says Christina Hlusko, vice-president of human resources and information technology for the Canadian Automobile Association's north and east Ontario region. Many of her valued baby-boom generation employees will retire in the next few years, and she says she'd like to promote from within to replace them. Talent management software lets her search easily through performance reviews to find the candidates with the skills and traits she wants.
"I can pull up the reports on everyone who scored a 4 or higher on these certain criteria," she says, adding that the data-driven software has the potential to make hiring and promotion decisions more fair. "It's not who knows who, or who has a champion in the organization."
Ms. Hlusko uses a Web-based system from Halogen Software Inc., an Ottawa-based company with more than 1,000 customers worldwide. Halogen's sales grew 60 per cent in 2007, growth that's not unusual in the industry.
Workstream Inc., another Ottawa-based firm that was recently bought by a Florida human resources company, saw its revenues nearly double between 2002 and 2007.
Over all, the talent-management industry will be worth about $2.8-billion (U.S.) this year, according to a recent study from research firm Bersin & Associates.
This growth is fuelled in part by the realization that traditional human resource management just isn't cutting it.
"Ninety per cent of people are still using paper - spreadsheets and Word documents," says Donna Ronayne, Halogen vice-president of marketing and business development. Most performance reviews get filed away somewhere to collect dust. "They can't do anything with the data, they can't run statistics. There's no intelligence in what you're gathering."
Talent management software may not change the substance of performance reviews, but it definitely changes how those reviews are used. If you have 10 employees, you probably have a pretty good idea of who's doing what and who should be next in line for a promotion or a raise. If you have 10,000 employees, keeping track gets more complicated.
The software puts information about employees' goals and performance in one easily accessible online database. At the executive level, talent management software can provide a reality check.
"If we're not meeting our corporate goals, why is everyone's performance rating above average? You start to ask these questions," says Gary Damiano, senior vice-president of marketing for Workstream.
Software can also help executives and department heads analyze turnover and hiring patterns, and figure out which departments are heading for a brain drain.
For the employee being reviewed, talent management software may be a mixed blessing. Users say they become much more aware of how their daily job relates to their company's overall aim - which could be a good or bad thing, depending on what you think of your company's objectives.
It also makes goal-setting more of a weekly exercise than a once-a-year scramble, which again could be an advantage or a drawback depending on whether you break into a cold sweat when your boss mentions goals.
"It helps you prioritize things," says Dana Carter, an information technology manager at CAA who reviews staff and is evaluated by his own boss.
"In the past, and I was as guilty of this as anyone, people would come in three weeks before their review and say, 'What were my goals again?' Here you don't have to do that, because they're available online all the time. There's a constant feedback mechanism."
Some employees may feel a bit nervous at the prospect of their career advancement being in the hands of a computer algorithm. But software can only do so much - mainly, storing and organizing data. The worth of talent management systems relies on the information that managers and employees enter into them, and the ultimate decision to hire, fire or promote still rests with human bosses.
"Companies are trying to find the right talent, and you can be so much more sophisticated with this technology," says John Challenger, chief executive officer of job placement consulting firm Challenger Gray & Christmas. "But if you use it to do selection rather than sorting, then you're crossing a boundary."
Employers believe that more sophisticated talent management software will help them retain their best workers, especially Generation Y-ers, who expect companies to take their personal development seriously.
"The younger groups don't want to be ignored," Ms. Ronayne says. "They want to know, what are you going to do for me? What are you going to do for my success?"
There's hope that talent management software could help correct for biases in the workplace, perhaps creating opportunities for previously overlooked employees to gain notice and helping women and minorities break through the glass ceiling.
"You do away with some of that favouritism," Ms. Ronayne says. "It becomes more objective, and less based on your gut."
Mr. Carter agrees: "It takes the personal feelings out of the whole review process."
The rise of talent management software also signals a larger shift happening in the human resources world. Companies are looking for hard data that will help them compete for the best employees.
"There's an increasing use of analytics in business intelligence," Mr. Damiano says. "Talent management is becoming a science rather than an art."
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