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Last updated: 14th October, 2025

TL;DR

• A talent review is not a performance review; it pairs current performance with potential to plan for succession and development.
• Treat it as an always-on discipline that feeds workforce planning, not an annual event.
• Use structured criteria, talent review meetings, and the nine-box matrix to calibrate performance and potential.
• Turn insights into development plans, action plans, and clear succession pipelines for key positions.
• Reduce bias with consistent questions, shared scoring, and objective data from multiple sources.
• Start upstream: hire for performance, values and behaviours so reviews reflect a stronger talent pool.
• Sapia’s text-based chat interview and insights help identify high-potential candidates, speed up decision-making, and track outcomes.

Start with the end in mind – always hire for performance first.

Most people are familiar with performance reviews. Performance reviews are typically focused on evaluating an employee’s past performance, setting future goals, and providing feedback based on defined criteria. It’s the annual anxiety fest when every employee has their performance assessed and rated, perhaps against benchmarks agreed at last year’s review or defined by their job description.

Why talent review matters beyond performance reviews

Is a talent review essentially the same thing? Yes and no. While a talent review will still see employees rated and ranked, the focus extends beyond current performance to consider their potential as future leaders in senior or key roles. In this process, both an employee’s performance and their past performance are data points, but the emphasis shifts toward identifying high-potential employees for future growth. It’s about mapping business needs to the capabilities and growth potential of your people and making more informed decisions.

Talent review plays a crucial role in business planning, identifying skill gaps and helping organisations develop and retain their top talent. Succession planning is often a direct outcome of the talent review process, ensuring leadership continuity and readiness for key positions.

Forward-thinking organisations treat talent review as bigger than an annual event. Instead, it’s an always-on discipline within talent management that fosters high performance from the first engagement with candidates and new talent.

Sapia’s AI-enabled chat interview platform helps businesses plan for future success by identifying and engaging with candidates who have the very best potential upfront. This approach builds bench strength from the outset, giving leaders confidence that potential successors are ready to step into leadership roles as needed.

Values, behaviours and the traits behind high performance

It’s no secret that high performers and team leaders share certain personality traits and behaviours. In fact, it’s a science that organisations have long embraced in their pursuit of excellence and competitive advantage. Identifying candidates with the right skills and technical skills is also crucial to ensure they can excel in their roles and contribute to team success.

Since its first publication in 1962, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which classifies 16 personality types, has been at the heart of most personality assessments and recruitment science. Much of the appeal of Myers-Briggs was its simplicity in reducing complexity to concise descriptors. These descriptors may have been sufficient when only human intelligence was involved in the processing and decision-making.

But in an age of data, it’s a significant compromise – a compromise in accuracy, nuance, and the real diversity of personality types that exist in our population. It’s also a compromise we no longer need to make. Today, key performance indicators can be used in conjunction with personality assessments to evaluate candidates’ suitability and ensure alignment with organisational goals.

Hiring for values and behaviours not only drives high performance but also supports the identification and onboarding of new talent, as well as the setting of development goals for future growth.

Moving beyond the limitations of Myers-Briggs

Sapia.ai is a leading innovator and advocate of leveraging data and technology to enhance the recruitment process. In developing our award-winning automated chat interview platform, our data science team explored ways to surpass the limitations of Myers-Briggs personality testing. As part of this process, we assess learning agility to identify candidates who can quickly adapt, acquire new skills, and thrive in dynamic environments.

Our data team fed text responses to interview questions from 85,000 job applicants into our personality classifier. Spread across two regions, the UK and Australia, 47% of applicants were identified as male, while 53% were identified as female. When grouping and assessing candidates, we also establish potential criteria to evaluate their future growth and readiness, ensuring a more comprehensive talent review.

Instead of the standard 16 personality types, we directed the machine to group the data into 400 unique personality groupings.

Identifying 400 unique personality groupings and how they could be usefully applied to decision-making is beyond the ability of the human brain… but not beyond technology. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning, our artificial intelligence-enabled platform got to work, yielding findings that were both surprising and not surprising at all.

The ‘not surprising’ part of our research is that, even at 400 groupings, distinct differences in personality profiles are evident. It’s not surprising when you consider that humans are not linear beings and that our personalities are highly complex and nuanced.

The most surprising thing we discovered was that personality types by role were distinct. The personality profiles attracted to sales roles, for example, were noticeably different from those associated with a carer role. These insights can be applied across different business units, helping organisations understand and compare talent needs in various segments. This analysis provides a comprehensive view of the workforce, allowing organisations to evaluate abilities and skills holistically.

Even more surprising were the imperceptible differences in personality distribution across the 400 types between men and women – a sign of how conscious or unconscious biases can influence our decision-making processes.

From potential to leadership: designing a modern talent review process

Every organisation is unique in terms of size, sector, and structure, so each talent review will also be unique. In general, the talent review process combines performance management, learning and development, and succession planning.

Differentiated by size, sector, structure and history, every organisation is unique. So, every talent review will be unique as well. Talent reviews should be designed around the specific needs of the business, typically bringing together performance management, learning and development, and succession planning.

Talent review meetings: the conversations that drive decisions

When senior leaders meet for talent review meetings, the objective is to discuss employee performance, potential, risks and talent data, and to calibrate decisions for workforce planning. Through this process, key positions — roles where the business would stall if no one could step in immediately — are identified. It’s essential to identify potential successors for these key positions to ensure a smooth transition when changes occur.

Keep in mind that these critical roles may not necessarily be management roles and may depend on the nature of the business. In a manufacturing business, for example, the chief engineer may be solely responsible for maintaining a production line. Talent reviews should consider every employee to surface the high-potential employee who can be developed for future leadership roles.

Talent review improves business focus. 

An ongoing talent review process not only matches your talent to existing roles; it also highlights new roles needed for future growth. It can reveal development opportunities and address skill gaps. As a company evolves, some key roles may change or become redundant — the most successful businesses are dynamic and flexible.

A structured review assesses employees on strengths, career ambitions, development needs and readiness for promotion. By identifying development needs, organisations can create development plans and action plans that address performance gap areas and support employee development. This forum enables critical questions:

• What matters most to our organisation?
• What are our business objectives and performance metrics?
• Do our existing talent pool and policy align with business strategy?
• Are our managers reviewing performance and potential without favour or bias?
• Are we doing enough to support learning, development and growth?
• Do we have the proper continuous performance management process in place?
• Are we identifying high-potential employees early in their career stage?
• Is any part of the business at retention risk without appropriate successors?
• What needs to be done to mitigate risk?
• Do we need to embed new values and improve culture?
• Are we assessing skill gaps and making informed decisions to retain top talent?

Planning a talent review

Organisations use a range of methods to assess employees for talent reviews. Some arrive at a ranking or score, while others employ a more nuanced approach. The HR team and HR professionals play a critical role in facilitating assessments, ensuring the talent review process is fair, comprehensive and aligned with organisational goals. Human resources should facilitate discussions among leaders and other stakeholders to ensure calibration.

Talent reviews can reveal disparities and biases in the expectations of team leaders and how they rate their direct reports. A standardised approach across the organisation is essential. By aligning employee expectations among leaders and socialising cultural values, potential friction around accountability can be reduced. Managers must also assess their direct reports objectively to create a clear and accurate picture of the team’s capabilities.

Rank and yank – what not to do in a talent review process

Though their ranking process has long been dropped, Jack Welch, the celebrated or controversial (pick your own path!) The CEO of General Electric once insisted on an evaluation that reduced every employee’s performance to a single numerical score. Following the annual assessment, the 10% with the lowest ranking were fired across the business. In contemporary business, this ‘rank and yank’ approach would not be considered best-practice HR.

The 9 box talent review explained (with practical tips)

A less controversial ranking for employees is the 9-box matrix. This commonly used assessment tool assigns employees to one of nine boxes on a grid, where one axis rates their performance (underperformance, effective performance, outstanding performance) and the other rates their potential (low, medium, high). Employees ranked in the box where exceptional performance and high potential meet are those assessed most likely to be future leaders.

The 9-box matrix helps organisations evaluate employees’ performance, identify any performance gaps, and address low performance through targeted interventions such as coaching or mentoring. This process is often supported by formal performance evaluation documentation, which provides a structured record of employee progress and informs future talent decisions.

Using the matrix as a visual representation of performance and potential

Treat the matrix as a guide, not a verdict. Combine it with current performance evidence, potential criteria, constructive feedback and objective data from multiple sources to evaluate potential fairly. Revisit placements regularly as development goals are met and growth opportunities emerge.

What matters most – agreeing on your assessment criteria for hiring

Taking a step back from the talent review process, Sapia.ai has worked to solve and improve the frontier problem that every recruiter and employer faces – how to get the right talent on board sooner.

With policies and processes in place to ensure the best candidates are selected every time, ongoing talent management and talent reviews can be more streamlined and rewarding for both employers and employees.

The first step to creating a step-change in the process is ensuring that everyone is assessing talent on the same criteria. These criteria should include leadership qualities and readiness for leadership roles, in addition to technical skills and experience. These should align with your organisation’s specific needs and values, which are ideally defined and documented as part of your business, brand, and employer brand plans.

When aligning criteria with business needs, it is essential to assess growth potential and identify high-potential employees who can contribute to future success. Assessment outcomes should also inform the creation of development plans for employees to support their ongoing growth and readiness for future opportunities.

How Sapia.ai helps you get to the best talent (much faster) 

While Sapia.ai’s early data breakthroughs were based on 85,000 interview responses, machine learning and artificial intelligence enable our platform to continue learning and improving. Today, our AI-powered platform has analysed more than 165 million words in text-based interviews from more than 700,000 candidates.

Continuous learning enables Sapia.ai to assist recruiters and employers in making smarter, evidence-based employment decisions at the early stages of a career. The platform enables organisations to identify top talent and address talent shortages by providing insights that support effective talent management strategies throughout the entire talent management life cycle.

Within our science-based approach, behavioural interview questions are tailored around the agreed assessment criteria for the role. These questions are related to past behaviour to assess personality traits reliably. They can be customised to the specific role family – such as sales, retail, or customer service– and aligned with the organisation’s agreed-upon values and characteristics that will define their leaders of tomorrow. Sapia.ai also supports frameworks such as the 9-box talent review, a visual HR tool that evaluates employees based on performance and potential to inform succession planning and development strategies.

Sapia.ai’s bespoke AI platform analyses candidates’ responses across a range of criteria, including readability, text structure, semantic alignment, sentiment and personality, to identify candidates with the best future potential. Ensuring follow-through on talent decisions is critical, and Sapia’s platform supports the execution of post-assessment actions to maximise impact.

Nurturing your talent culture

Making the wrong choices for future leaders can put your business at risk. During talent reviews, careers can be derailed, and employees can become demotivated. Providing feedback during the talent review process is crucial for communicating valuable insights, identifying areas for development, and promoting employee engagement and improvement. A properly executed talent management process, which begins with smarter recruitment choices, is one of the best investments in your business’s future.

The insights delivered through a disciplined, standardised and ongoing process of talent assessment can be used at both organisational and managerial levels to drive your business forward. Creating a culture of high performance begins with best practice in early career candidate assessment. With Sapia.ai’s platform as a key element, a robust talent review and management process will work to:

• support continuous performance management
• deliver robust succession planning
• optimise talent performance
• support skills assessments and gaps analysis
• lift employee retention
• support talent development and career pathways
• drive employee engagement through career conversations
• inform talent planning and decisions with better data, including developing action plans to support employee growth
• embed culture and values throughout your organisation
• support goal attainment for employees

Why you should use Sapia.ai for talent review

This article is presented by Sapia.ai as part of our mission to promote best practices in contemporary recruiting and HR. Our AI-enabled text chat interview platform can help any organisation identify future leaders while providing candidates with an efficient, empowering and enjoyable experience.

The user satisfaction rate for our award-winning platform is 99%. For practical tips on optimising your talent review process, consider establishing clear criteria, encouraging open communication, and regularly reviewing outcomes.

To keep up to date on all things “Hiring with AI”, subscribe to our blog! You can also book a personalised demo with us today.

FAQs

What is a talent review?
A structured process to assess performance and potential, identify high-potential employees, and plan succession and development.

How is it different from a performance review?
Performance reviews look back at past performance; talent reviews add potential and readiness to inform future moves.

How often should we run it?
Quarterly light-touch calibrations, combined with an annual deep dive, work well for most organisations.

Who should attend talent review meetings?
Business leaders, HR professionals, and relevant stakeholders who can calibrate, decide, and fund development.

What inputs do we need?
Agreed competencies and values, performance metrics, potential criteria, risk/retention indicators, and objective data.

What is the 9-box talent review?
A visual grid with a horizontal axis representing performance and a vertical axis representing potential to guide development and succession.

How do we reduce bias?
Standardised interview questions, shared scoring criteria, multiple raters, and regular calibration using objective evidence.

What outcomes should we expect?
Succession plans, development plans, mobility moves, action plans to close skill gaps, and measurable progress.

Where do development plans fit?
They translate review insights into specific goals, experiences, and timelines for each person.

How does Sapia help?
By running structured text interviews, surfacing objective insights, and supporting fair, consistent shortlisting that strengthens the talent pipeline.

About Author

Laura Belfield