Will we adapt to talent management or will talent management be thrust upon us?

That remains to be seen, but I remain deeply skeptical about many employment assessment practices- both pre-employment and performance management.

When I was young and idealistic, I thought that ignorance arose from a lack of education and opportunity.  As I have moved through life, I have come to believe that ignorance most often is a symptom of Magical Thinking, which though affllicting us all to a degree, now seems acendnant in our complex society.    

I have written what must be hundreds of comments on threads over the years relating to pre-employment testing- most often to discuss the rather obvious point that most people work in groups, and that testing individuals (but not group dynamics) is bound to present problems with any predicitive model. 

I dont always fully qualify for space reasons, but it would be good to be able to.  Some assessment some of the time is very useful- which is one reason why so much more assessment appears to be counter-productive.   In high-volume, high-turnover hiring situations with standard skill sets (e.g. Starbucks and similar) assessment can be predictive, and the business cost of not hiring what could otherwise be high-performers is not material.  

If you are running an organization that depends on key creative or symbolic content to succeed, you may be asking for trouble if you don't assess whole teams at once, you base hiring decsions on individual assessment methods, or you fail to realize that there are often multiple routes to a goal.      

I decided to blog on this topic when I saw a story on CNN that blew my mind.....read it and ask yourself if you think it will work....