Building a Transformative Talent Model for HR in 2025
Beginning in 2025, We have been talking to several customers to understand their priorities. Â From what we could gather, many HR leaders are focused on several transformational talent journeys. Â In this email, we want to collect all the focus areas and provide a framework.
Summary of Key Focus Areas
- Organizational Design: Transitioning from a standard operating model to a functional operating model for improved efficiency, collaboration, and optimization.
- Strategic Workforce Planning: Effectively apply data-driven forecasting to meet talent demand in the AI era.
- AI Capabilities: Establishing an AI Center of Excellence and/or upskilling technical talent to future-proof the workforce.
- Elevating Talent Strategies: Raising the standards on talent acquisition, leadership development, and differentiating compensation for critical technical roles.
The key action items around these focus areas are as follows.
- Accelerate Job Architecture and define Talent Personas to create clear role expectations and career paths. (What kind of talent do we need, and what should they do?)
- Apply Strategic Workforce Planning to forecast talent demands accurately.
- Enhancing hiring standards and leadership development
- Implement a Strategic Talent Acquisition Strategy that efficiently fills leadership and critical technical roles. (Insource all or majority of the Modern capabilities required to grow the Enterprise)
- Upskill and Reskill Technical Talent to build AI and emerging capabilities.
- Design a Compensation Structure to attract, retain, and motivate critical technical talent.
- Job architecture should be designed around a cluster of related roles rather than approached on a role-by-role or job family-by-job family basis.
Please take a look at the following example. Â We have shown the skills progression of modern skill clusters as they move from left to right. Â (Application Engineer to AI Engineer). Â The advantage of viewing it this way is that it provides a skill continuum perspective, allowing us to see how skills evolve and overlap across different roles. This approach helps identify common capabilities, emerging skill gaps, and opportunities for cross-functional development, making talent management more dynamic and adaptable to future needs.

Summary: Â HR has kicked off 2025 with strong momentum, focusing on establishing a transformative talent model.