What Is TalentPrint? How It Works and What It Tells You About Your People
TalentPrint maps employee strengths using forced-ranking methodology, compares them to role requirements, and generates development plans. Learn how it works and what it tells you about your people.
TL;DR: TalentPrint is a talent management platform that integrates assessment, feedback, development, and performance. It uses a forced-ranking system based on the Talent Genome competency framework to provide objective data. This helps HR leaders make informed decisions and empowers employees to manage their careers.
What is TalentPrint?
Most HR teams manage talent in fragments. Assessments happen in one system. Performance conversations happen in another. Development plans sit in a spreadsheet that nobody updates. The result is a workforce where HR has data but not insight, and employees have reviews but not direction.
A Bersin by Deloitte study found that organisations using integrated talent management platforms, where assessment, performance, development, and succession data share a common data model, are 26% more likely to achieve business goals and 40% less likely to experience unplanned leadership vacancies. (Deloitte)
TalentPrint is a talent management platform that connects assessment, feedback, development, and performance in one system. It gives employees the tools to manage their own careers and gives HR the data to make decisions about talent across the organisation.
The core design principle is self-direction. Rather than placing all responsibility on HR to identify, evaluate, and develop people, TalentPrint puts the process in the hands of employees, with HR and managers receiving the output as structured, comparable data.
What Research Supports the TalentPrint Framework?
TalentPrint is built on the Talent Genome competency framework, which was developed through a meta-analysis of 96 research papers. Those papers examined high-performing behaviour across different cultures, industries, and levels of seniority.
The result is a set of 18 behavioural characteristics that predict performance across most professional contexts. These are not generic competencies. They are specific, observable behaviours that can be measured, compared, and developed.
The 18 characteristics are grouped into clusters that cover how people think, how they engage with others, and how they execute. Each characteristic has a clear definition, a set of observable indicators, and a library of development actions.
TalentPrint Plus extends this to 60 competencies for organisations that need more granular measurement, typically for senior roles, succession decisions, or role-specific assessments.
How Does TalentPrint Work? The Four Steps
Step 1 - Identify strengths
The assessment asks employees to select their top strengths from the 18 characteristics. This is not a self-rating scale. TalentPrint uses forced ranking, which requires employees to make trade-offs between characteristics rather than rating everything highly.
Forced ranking reduces the social desirability bias that affects most self-assessment tools. When you cannot rate everything as a strength, you are forced to reflect on what actually differentiates you. The result is a more honest and useful profile.
Step 2 - Get feedback from others
After completing their own profile, employees identify people who can provide feedback on their strengths. These raters complete the same forced-ranking process, evaluating the employee against the same 18 characteristics.
The forced-ranking methodology applies to raters as well. This reduces rater bias, the tendency for managers and peers to inflate scores for people they like or to avoid difficult feedback. The output is a comparison between how employees see themselves and how others see them.
This gap between self-perception and external perception is often where the most useful development insight sits.
Step 3 - Compare strengths to role requirements
Employees can select a specific challenge or scenario, such as preparing for a promotion, improving performance in a current role, or setting a career direction, and see how their strength profile compares to what that challenge requires.
TalentPrint has a library of pre-defined scenarios covering hundreds of common workplace challenges. Organisations can also configure custom scenarios based on their own strategic priorities, role profiles, or capability frameworks.
This step answers a question that most performance systems never ask: not just "how good are you?" but "how well do your strengths match what this role or challenge actually needs?"
Step 4 - Build a development plan
Based on the comparison between the employee's strength profile and the requirements of their chosen challenge, TalentPrint identifies which characteristics to develop and in what order.
Employees receive specific, actionable development advice, not generic guidance. There are over 320 personalised development ideas in the system, each linked to a specific characteristic and designed to be practical enough to implement without external support.
The employee can build a development plan directly in the platform, set milestones, and track progress over time.
What HR Gets from TalentPrint
The individual experience is only one side of the platform. The organisational value comes from what happens when you aggregate the data across your workforce.
HR and senior leaders can see:
- Which characteristics are strong across the organisation and which are underrepresented
- How individual profiles compare to the requirements of specific roles or functions
- Who is ready for promotion or deployment, based on strength fit rather than tenure or opinion
- Where development investment will have the highest return
This is the shift from talent management as an administrative function to talent management as a data-driven discipline. Instead of relying on manager opinion or annual review scores, decisions about who to promote, where to deploy people, and how to build capability are grounded in structured, comparable data.
TalentPrint and the Broader Talent System
TalentPrint is a standalone product, but it is also the assessment and development layer of the TalentPrint Suite, Peopletree Group's integrated talent management platform.
Within the suite, TalentPrint connects to:
- TalentProfile, which uses the assessment data to build visible talent profiles across the organisation, supporting mobility and career development
- DataHub, which centralises workforce data and makes it available across all talent processes
- DataWiz, which turns workforce data into analytics and decision support
For organisations running talent management as a service (TMaaS), TalentPrint is the engine that generates the behavioural data that feeds every other process, from succession planning to performance management to leadership development.
Who Uses TalentPrint
TalentPrint is used by organisations that need to manage talent at scale without building a large internal HR capability. The typical profile is a company between 200 and 2,000 employees that has outgrown spreadsheets and annual reviews but does not need the complexity or cost of an enterprise HR platform.
It is also used by HR teams in larger organisations that want a structured, research-based approach to assessment and development, particularly in markets where behavioural assessment is a core part of the talent process.
TalentPrint can be deployed for a single cohort, a leadership team, a graduate intake, or a succession pool, or rolled out across the full organisation. The forced-ranking methodology scales without losing accuracy, which is why adoption rates remain high even in large deployments.
The Difference Forced Ranking Makes
Most talent assessments produce data that is hard to act on. When everyone rates themselves as above average on every competency, the output is noise. Managers cannot differentiate between people. HR cannot identify development priorities. The data does not drive decisions.
Forced ranking changes this. By requiring trade-offs, it produces profiles that are genuinely differentiated. Two people with similar job titles and similar performance ratings will have different strength profiles, and those differences are meaningful for decisions about role fit, development investment, and succession readiness.
This is why TalentPrint data is used not just for individual development but for organisational decisions. When the data is reliable, it can be trusted.
Getting Started with TalentPrint
TalentPrint can be implemented in six to eight weeks for most organisations. The implementation includes configuration of the platform, setup of role scenarios relevant to the organisation, and a guided rollout to employees and managers.
Peopletree Group provides the technology, the methodology, and the team to run the process, which means the internal HR resource required is minimal. This is the TMaaS model: not just software, but a complete service that delivers outcomes without requiring the organisation to build capability it does not yet have.
If you are evaluating talent assessment tools, or looking for a way to make your existing talent data more useful, a discovery session is the right starting point.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is TalentPrint and how does it help HR leaders?
TalentPrint is a unified talent management platform that connects all aspects of talent development. It provides HR leaders with structured, comparable data on employee strengths and development needs, enabling better decision-making for talent allocation, succession planning, and overall workforce strategy.
How does TalentPrint's forced ranking improve talent assessment accuracy?
TalentPrint uses forced ranking to reduce common biases found in traditional self-assessment tools. By requiring employees and raters to prioritize strengths, it encourages more honest self-reflection and provides a clearer, more objective picture of an individual's capabilities compared to simply rating everything highly.
What is the Talent Genome framework?
The Talent Genome is a competency framework built on extensive research, identifying 18 core behavioral characteristics that predict performance across professional contexts. These characteristics are specific, measurable behaviors grouped into clusters covering thinking, engaging, and executing, providing a robust foundation for the TalentPrint assessment.
Can TalentPrint be customized for specific organizational needs?
Yes, while the core TalentPrint uses 18 characteristics, TalentPrint Plus extends this to 60 competencies. This allows organizations to achieve more granular measurement, which is particularly useful for senior roles, critical succession decisions, or highly specialized role-specific assessments.