What Is Total Talent Management?

Understanding Total Talent Management

Total talent management (TTM) is a workforce strategy that breaks down the traditional silos between permanent and contingent workforce management. In most organizations, full-time employees are managed by HR through an HRIS, while contingent workers are managed by procurement through a VMS or MSP. TTM aims to unify these functions, providing a single view of all talent—regardless of employment type—to enable better workforce planning, cost optimization, and strategic decision-making.

The concept has gained urgency as the contingent workforce grows to represent 30–40% or more of total labor spend at many enterprises. Managing permanent and non-permanent talent in separate systems with separate processes creates blind spots that lead to duplicated efforts, compliance gaps, inconsistent quality, and suboptimal workforce composition.

Core Principles of Total Talent Management

• Role-agnostic workforce planning: When a business need arises, TTM evaluates all possible fulfillment options—full-time hire, contractor, freelancer, outsourced service, automation—and selects the best fit based on cost, speed, quality, and strategic importance.
• Unified data and analytics: TTM requires integrating data from HRIS, VMS, ATS, payroll, and procurement systems to create a comprehensive picture of workforce composition, spend, and performance across all worker types.
• Consistent experience: Whether engaging a permanent employee or a contractor, TTM aims to deliver a consistent onboarding, collaboration, and management experience that reflects the organization's culture and values.
• Strategic talent supply chains: TTM treats talent acquisition like a supply chain, diversifying sourcing channels (direct hire, staffing agencies, talent platforms, direct sourcing, alumni networks) and optimizing the mix based on performance data.

Why TTM Is Difficult

Despite its strategic appeal, total talent management remains aspirational for most organizations. Common barriers include:

• Organizational silos: HR and procurement often have different leadership, budgets, metrics, and incentives. Aligning them requires executive sponsorship and change management.
• Technology fragmentation: HRIS, VMS, ATS, and procurement platforms rarely integrate seamlessly, making unified reporting and workflows challenging.
• Regulatory complexity: Different worker types are subject to different legal frameworks for classification, benefits, data privacy, and labor protections—making truly uniform management impractical in some areas.
• Data gaps: Many organizations lack clean, consistent data across worker types, making unified analytics unreliable.
• Cultural resistance: Managers may be accustomed to separate processes for permanent and contingent hiring and resist changes to established workflows.

Steps Toward Total Talent Management

1. Gain visibility: Start by mapping all sources of talent and spend across the organization, creating a complete inventory of permanent and contingent workers.
2. Align stakeholders: Bring HR, procurement, finance, and business leaders together around a shared workforce strategy with unified KPIs.
3. Integrate technology: Invest in platforms and integrations that enable data sharing across HRIS, VMS, and sourcing systems.
4. Pilot and expand: Start with a single business unit or function to demonstrate TTM value before scaling across the enterprise.
5. Optimize the mix: Use data to continuously evaluate whether roles are being filled with the optimal worker type based on cost, quality, and strategic fit.

Total Talent Management and Human Cloud

Human Cloud supports TTM by serving as the evaluation and comparison layer for the supply side of the talent equation. By scoring and benchmarking 5,000+ workforce solution providers across staffing, EOR, talent marketplaces, and consulting categories, Human Cloud gives organizations the data they need to optimize their talent supply chain—a critical enabler of any total talent management strategy.