As many of you know, HCI has used a Talent Lifecycle model as an organizing principle for its educational courses, communities and research. The talent pratices included in this cycle are: workforce planning, talent acquisition, engagement, development, deployment, managing and leading talent, retaining key performers and metrics/evaluation. These eight practices cover the landscape from an employee perspective, and they also form the basis for human capital plans that have been developed by many of HCI's members. This model also enables key processes--such as performance mangement, leadership development and competency deployment--to have homes within an employee framework that makes sense.

Furthermore, the life cycle preents the idea that a talent culture is not comprised of distinct and siloed activities, but rather an integraed and seamless set of practices that relate to each other. Integrted talent managment is the goal of organizations in the new global, interconnected economy. Just as Gary Hamel has argued that managmgnet needs to be redefined in this new era, so do talent mindsets and practices.

One of our international partenrs asked the question: how is talent acquisition different from recruiting? It's a simple but telling question, and one that I hadn't duely considered before. Recruiting can be defined as profiling, sourcing, assessing and hiring candidates. Talent acquisition is defined as profiling, sourcing, assessing, hiring and optimizing this process so that candidates add value to the organization. This may seem like a subtle difference but I think it is not. What counts is the resulting talent and value of the candidate, not the internal process or machinations of the organization. While time to hire and cost to hire are recruiting metrics; quality of hire is the talent acquisition metric.