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A Full Breakdown of Total Talent Management

by YOSS Community Writer, on November 6, 2019 at 1:04 PM

Total talent management (TTM) is an approach to managing your workforce as a single system. In most business environments, this means using a hybrid workforce combining traditional employees and various kinds of contingent workers.

The future belongs even more to the hybrid workforce. More than 80 percent of large corporations are planning to increase their use of contingent workers, according to the Intuit 2020 Report: Twenty Trends That Will Shape the Next Decade. With all this in mind, it’s clear that TTM is only going to become more useful.


Problems With the Traditional Approach

When a company develops a hybrid workforce, they often divide management duties. HR usually maintains control over traditional employees while another department, usually procurement, is put in charge of contingent workers.

Based on a company's history, this approach makes sense. Companies have historically allowed HR to manage their employee workforce and the relatively small pool of contingent workers were managed elsewhere.

Operationally, this traditional approach begins to weaken. In most hybrid environments, contingent workers are not small groups brought in for special projects. They are more often well-integrated with permanent employees. When these two groups are hired by different departments, it will be a matter of luck whether they make an effective team.

Advantages of Total Talent Management

Using TTM, you treat your workforce as a single system. This allows more than simply developing a holistic approach to workforce management. It also allows you to make better, more flexible decisions when building your team.

There are lots of ways this is true:

  • By taking your entire workforce into account, you can hire people that will work best together regardless of their status.
  • You can use contingent workers to fill gaps when you struggle to find permanent employees.
  • You can then more easily change a contingent worker into a traditional employee if that makes sense.

How Total Talent Management Operates

TTM is just a special kind of workforce management. It isn't fundamentally different from traditional or contingent management. What is different—and powerful—is applying the methods of workforce management to your workers. That goes for everyone, from a temporary who may come in for just a day, to an IT manager who has been with you for decades.

There are five major parts of total talent management:

  1. Hiring: find both contingent and traditional workers based on your needs.
  2. Forecasting and planning: know what your staffing needs will be in the future because of growth as well as workforce changes.
  3. Scheduling: use your existing workforce in the most efficient way possible.
  4. Worker management: motivate and utilize traditional and contingent workers.
  5. Analytics and reporting: analyze and improve your workforce.

Resistance to Total Talent Management

Given all the advantages of TTM, it's strange that it isn't more often implemented. The reason for this is almost always due to company structure and culture, with some questioning if total talent management is legitimate.

The people in HR are used to working with employees, and the people in procurement are used to working with contractors. Even when the business changes by greatly increasing its use of contractors, for example, both these departments are resistant to changing how they do things.

What's more, people may be skeptical of changes already happening, like the move to a more hybrid workforce. Another common deterrent to investing in TTM is a concern about the resources that may be necessary and the disruption that it may cause.

Implementing Total Talent Management

Given the power of TTM to make a business more efficient, it’s possible to overcome these obstacles and implement it by doing the following:

  • Create a pitch: assess your current workforce management system. Make the argument for how TTM would increase efficiency and productivity. At this stage, you will want to counter common concerns we mentioned above.
  • Get stakeholder buy-in: find the key people and convince them. These will be managers, of course, but also those whose positions may be disturbed. Make the case for this change and get them involved.
  • Create the proposal: make a detailed plan for moving from your current system to TTM. Be sure to get input from stakeholders.
  • Implement and improve: use your plan to implement TTM and report on its effectiveness.


As businesses turn more and more to hybrid workforces with employees and contingent workers, it becomes obvious that they all should be treated as a single group. Total talent management allows you to do that, and it helps to create a more efficient and flexible workforce.

Established businesses are often reticent to move toward total talent management because it generally does require fundamental changes to the company structure. But by addressing stakeholder concerns and showing its advantages, it can be embraced and implemented.

If you are looking to increase your contingent workforce or better manage your talent, YOSS can help by providing access to the very best tech flexible talent. At YOSS, we represent the very best pre-vetted freelancers in the world. We only engage with the top 1 percent of talent. So whether you are looking to fill a particular position or to shore up your talent pool, we can help.


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Topics:Future of WorkHire FreelancersFlexible TalentIndependent ProfessionalsIndependent Contractors