TALENT PRACTICE
Evidence-based capability insight for every people decision that matters.
Most organisations make talent decisions based on tenure, visibility, and manager opinion. We replace that with structured behavioural assessment and 360 feedback that gives you a consistent, evidence-based view of capability across your workforce.
Trusted by organisations across industries
THE PROBLEM
Why talent decisions keep missing the mark
When assessment is inconsistent, subjective, or missing entirely, poor placement decisions, missed development opportunities, and succession gaps follow. Most organisations only see the damage after it is done.
Promotion, placement, and development decisions rely on manager opinion and tenure - not structured data. The same visible people keep getting selected.
Every manager uses different criteria. There is no shared language for capability, no benchmark, and no way to compare talent across teams or geographies.
Assessment data often remains in a report that nobody reads. It is not connected to development plans, succession decisions, or performance conversations.
HOW IT WORKS
Six steps from design to delivery
A fully managed engagement. We handle framework alignment, assessment deployment, 360 feedback, scoring, and reporting. Your team participates in the framework discussion and reviews the output.
What you get at the end
- A consistent capability profile for every assessed individual.
- Team-level and organisational-level talent data in a live dashboard.
- Individual development plans linked directly to assessment outcomes.
The assessment aligns to the Talent Genome competency framework - 60 behavioural competencies validated across industries and geographies. We run a co-design session with HR and line leadership to confirm which competencies are most relevant for the cohort and how they map to role requirements.
- Review existing competency framework or adopt the Talent Genome
- Map competencies to role families and seniority levels
- Confirm assessment depth: TalentPrint (18 clusters) or TalentPrint Plus (60 competencies)
TalentPrint gets configured for your specific role profiles, seniority levels, and business context. Participant lists are loaded, rater groups are defined for 360 feedback, and communication templates are prepared for your organisation.
- Configure role-specific assessment parameters in TalentPrint
- Set up rater groups for 360 feedback (peers, direct reports, line managers)
- Prepare participant communication and manager briefing materials
Assessments go live through TalentPrint with guided participant instructions. Completion rates average 95% across our client base. Our team monitors progress daily and follows up on non-completions to keep the engagement on schedule.
- Participant invitations sent through TalentPrint
- Daily completion tracking with proactive follow-up on non-completions
- Manager visibility into team completion status
Peers, direct reports, and line managers all provide structured feedback against the same competency framework. Rater selection is managed through the platform. Minimum rater thresholds are enforced to protect anonymity and data quality.
- Structured feedback against the same competency framework used in self-assessment
- Minimum rater thresholds enforced to protect anonymity
- Rater completion tracked and managed through TalentPrint
Individual scores are calibrated against role benchmarks and peer cohorts. Outliers are reviewed. Results are validated before reporting. This calibration step is what separates a meaningful capability profile from raw survey data.
- Scores calibrated against role-level benchmarks and cohort norms
- Outlier review to identify and address data quality issues
- Results validated by the Peopletree delivery team before release
Every individual gets a report showing their strengths, development areas, and a prioritised development plan linked to their role requirements. HR receives a consolidated DataWiz dashboard showing capability distributions across the full cohort. A debrief session with HR leadership walks through the key findings.
- Individual Talent Discovery Reports delivered through TalentPrint
- TAILA-generated coaching narrative for each participant
- DataWiz dashboard for HR showing cohort-level capability data
- HR leadership debrief session with key findings and recommendations
HOW IT IS DELIVERED
The platform behind the assessment
Three components of the Peopletree platform work together to deliver assessment at scale. Each one plays a specific role in the data collection, scoring, and reporting process.
Runs behavioural assessments and 360 feedback for any cohort size. Handles participant communication, completion tracking, and score aggregation in one place.
Shows individual, team, and organisational capability data in live dashboards. HR and leadership can filter by role, level, business unit, or competency cluster.
The behavioural framework that defines what good looks like at each level. Built from 98 peer-reviewed studies, it provides the scoring criteria and development language for every assessment.
WHY IT WORKS
Why we use forced ranking, not rating scales
Most assessment tools ask raters to score people on a 1-to-5 scale. The problem is well-documented: raters consistently score their teams above average. Leniency bias and halo effects mean the data looks good but tells you nothing useful. When everyone is a 4 out of 5, you cannot identify who is genuinely strong, who needs development, or who is ready for the next role.
TalentPrint uses forced ranking instead. Raters are presented with pairs or groups of competency statements and asked to choose which best describes the person. This removes the option to rate everyone highly. It requires the rater to make relative judgements, which produces data that is genuinely differentiated and comparable across individuals, teams, and geographies.
The result is a capability profile that reflects real behavioural patterns, not rater generosity. That distinction matters when you are using assessment data to make succession nominations, development investments, or placement decisions.
ASSESSMENT DEPTH
Choosing the right assessment depth
We offer two assessment configurations. The right choice depends on the purpose of the assessment, the seniority of the cohort, and how the data will be used downstream.
TalentPrint
18-cluster forced-ranking assessment. Rapid and scalable.
- Covers all 18 behavioural clusters from the Talent Genome
- Completion time: 9 to 14 minutes per participant
- Designed for high-volume cohorts across all levels
- Produces a cluster-level capability profile
- Suitable for annual talent reviews, skills audits, and baseline assessments
TalentPrint Plus
Full-depth 60-competency assessment for senior roles.
- All 60 competencies across the full Talent Genome
- Completion time: 45 to 90 minutes per participant
- Designed for senior leadership, succession, and high-potential programmes
- Produces a competency-level profile with development priorities
- Includes TAILA-generated coaching narrative and career fit analysis
BUSINESS VALUE
What you have at the end
Assessment data that is consistent, useful, and connected to the decisions that matter: development, succession, and performance.
Every assessed individual has a capability profile built on the same framework - comparable across roles, teams, and geographies.
A DataWiz dashboard showing capability distributions, team-level gaps, and cohort comparisons - updated in real time as assessments complete.
Each participant receives a development plan linked to their assessment results and role requirements. Plans are tracked in TalentPrint.
Assessment data feeds directly into succession planning and internal mobility decisions - so the right people are visible when opportunities arise.
CASE STUDY
Assessing 400 managers across a multi-country retail group
Context
Retail - 400 managers - 6 weeks - Africa and Middle East
Challenge
The group had no consistent view of management capability across its 12 operating countries. Promotion decisions were made locally with no shared criteria. The CHRO needed a baseline capability picture before designing a group-wide development programme.
Approach
TalentPrint was deployed across all 400 managers in six weeks. Behavioural assessments and 360 feedback ran simultaneously. Individual reports included development priorities, and a group-level DataWiz dashboard gave the CHRO and regional HR leads a consolidated view.
Result
For the first time, the group had a consistent capability baseline across all 12 countries. Three high-potential cohorts were identified for accelerated development. The CHRO presented a talent investment case to the board within eight weeks of kickoff, using the dashboard as the evidence base.
CONNECTED DATA
Where assessment data goes next
Assessment data only has value if it connects to decisions. In the Peopletree platform, every assessment result flows automatically into the processes that depend on it. No result is left in a report that nobody reads.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Talent Assessment | Behavioural Insight at Scale
RELATED INSIGHTS
Further reading
A Review of 360 Feedback Methodologies: Why Most Interventions Fail
The structural problems with standard 360 processes - rating inflation, poor calibration, and the absence of forced ranking - and what a rigorous methodology looks like instead.
Challenges of 360 Performance Feedback
The five most common failure points in 360 feedback programmes and the design decisions that determine whether the data is trustworthy enough to act on.
How to Identify Growth Potential in Employees
The difference between performance and potential, why most organisations conflate them, and the assessment inputs that reliably distinguish one from the other.
Which challenge does this practice address?
See the business questions that talent assessment is designed to answer.
NEXT STEP
See what a talent assessment looks like for your organisation
Tell us what you are working through, and we will help you understand the options and decide what to do next.