Janice McCormack, Professor at Harvard Business School, aptly describes top-notch talent today as someone;

'Having the vision of an architect, the theoretical mindset of a physicist, the attention to detail of an engineer and the financial acumen of an investment banker'.

Talent management is a means of identifying, releasing, and guiding untapped potential in employees by keeping "the end in mind": performance management, competency development, leadership development, and career planning. Talent Management is the process of ensuring an organization's desires are mapped and aligned with an individual's desires to achieve the potential of both.

Talent management describes the process through which organizations - private, government, non-profit organization - anticipate their human capital needs and set about meeting them. Getting the right people with the right skills into the right jobs, a common definition of talent management, is the basic people management challenge in organizations.

Effective Talent Management means developing processes and behaviors that bring together an organization's and individual's aspirations so that the potential of both is realized.

In short, it is "Putting the Right People in the Right Jobs".

Talent Management is that stage of employee participation where an employee has gone beyond mere physical presence (attendance) and satisfaction to a state of "Contribution" to the company.