Understanding Talent Density And Ditching Integrated Talent Management

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Nov 28, 2025

Dive into the revolution of talent management in the AI era, highlighting the monumental paychecks for hyperperformers like Elon Musk. Explore how traditional performance ratings are outdated and why fitting a company culture greatly amplifies productivity. Discover the contrast between rigid job structures and the need for dynamic talent mobility. Lastly, learn about the concept of talent density—prioritizing continuous development, coaching, and treating employees as invaluable assets.

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INSIGHT

Integrated Talent Management Missed The Point

Integrated talent management bundled HR processes but missed key realities about dynamic skills and mobility.
Josh Bersin argues this old model treats humans as interchangeable variables rather than adaptable assets.

INSIGHT

Hyperperformers Deliver Disproportionate Value

Hyper-performers can deliver orders-of-magnitude more value than average employees and are being paid accordingly.
Bersin shows the bell-curve assumption commoditizes talent and hides extreme value creators like top AI hires.

ADVICE

Move People To Roles That Fit

Assess people's skills and move them into roles where they can excel instead of firing for a poor fit.
Josh Bersin recommends mobility and development over static job architectures and forced rankings.

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Everyone: one of the big existential changes in management and leadership is a whole new model for talent.

Today, for the first time in human history, we’ve agreed to pay one person a $Trillion dollars for his skills (Elon Musk). And this trend is growing.

Google paid $2.7 Billion to hire Noam Shazeer, the co-founder of Character AI. Mark Zuckerberg paid around $100 Million to hire Jiahui You, a top OpenAI researcher. And others, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov & Xiaohua Zhai, were rumored to receive $100 M signing bonuses to join Meta.

What’s going on? What happened to our belief in the “bell curve” of performance, forced rankings, salary bands, and all the traditional ideas of talent management?

Well it’s time to throw that stuff out the window and think differently. As many researchers have pointed out, including Boris Groyberg from Harvard, these “hyperperformers” can deliver 100 to 1000 times higher outcomes than an “average” employee and their utility and value is very hard to reproduce.

Groyberg’s studies show that hyper-performers in one company turn into middling performers in another. And this is borne out by our research, which shows that individuals who fit the culture and behaviors of a company well can absolutely deliver 10-fold higher performance than those who “grind the gears.”

All this said, the traditional talent management model has not worked out well, and I want to encourage you to ditch it. Even the job market itself bears this out: some “10x engineers” make 5 times as much money as engineers sitting next to them, and the same is true for sales people, consultants, politicians, and athletes. (The top ten NBA players make 7X more pay than the “average” NBA player.)

So why do we try to “commoditize” this into a bell-curve based talent system?

Integrated Talent Management, as defined by HR, leads to over-hiring, layoffs, and all sorts of “performance commoditizing” effects. If you use the Talent Density philosophy, by contrast, you wind up with a smaller company which performs at a much higher level.

Listen to this podcast and I’ll explain all that needs to be addressed. Suffice it to say that in a world of AI-powered Superworkers, it’s your talent system (as a whole) that’s going to drive extraordinary growth and competitive advantage, not fitting people into the bell curve.

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Additional Information

The Myth Of The Bell Curve: Look For The Hyper-Performers

How To Create Talent Density

We Wasted Ten Years Talking About Performance Ratings. Seven Things We’ve Learned.

Galileo: The World’s Trusted Agent for Everything HR