Strategic Talent: A Recruitment Competency Handbook

Strategic Talent - A Recruitment Competency Handbook

Format: Paperback
First Edition 2017
Second Edition 2026

ISBN 978-0-9953051-8-2

Strategic talent decides what an organization becomes. Strategic Talent : A Recruitment Competency Handbook, the second edition has been reinvigorated with extensive coverage of agentic and algorithmic recruitment practices, agentic competency dictionary, algorithms in hiring practices, agentic assessment methods, leadership centers. It introduces new forms of simulations, games and gamifications, argues that recruiting was never simply about filling vacancies, and that point of view has never mattered more than it does now. As artificial intelligence and agentic recruitment systems rewrite how organizations find, assess, and develop the people who will carry their future the world of recruitment has changed.

Screening agents parse candidate pools no human team could review in the same week. Algorithms build and update competency dictionaries as fast as the work itself changes. Simulations once confined to a room full of trained assessors now run for hundreds of candidates at once, scored first by a machine and reviewed second by a person who still carries the final responsibility for the decision. Strategic Talent : A Recruitment Competency Handbook, walks through every part of this shift, from workforce planning and Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scales to management games, psychometric testing, and Behavioral Event Interviews, showing where algorithms now do the heavy lifting and where human judgment still has to hold the line.

Drawing on decades of experience administering psychometric tests, competency mapping, Assessment and Development Centers, and Leadership Development Centers across banking, insurance, technology, manufacturing, and public sector organizations, Strategic Talent : A Recruitment Competency Handbook, gives HR leaders, talent managers, and assessors a working toolkit rather than a theory of change. Competency dictionaries, BARS instruments, simulations, role plays, in basket exercises, observer evaluation sheets, succession templates, and culture audits sit alongside a clear account of how each one is being reshaped by algorithmic scoring and agentic simulation.

The proposition at the center of the book is simple. Organizations do not become more capable by employing more people. They become more capable by understanding the talent their strategy actually requires, finding and developing the individuals who can deliver it, and building an agentic recruitment system for an organization now working alongside its own algorithms rather than in spite of them. For anyone responsible for building that system, Strategic Talent : A Recruitment Competency Handbook, is the field manual for doing it.

Dr. Ganesh Shermon is an author, consultant and academic operating through Psychometric Testing Canada Inc. across Dallas, Toronto and Mumbai. His career/education spans Andersen, KPMG, XLRI, MIT Sloan, and MSU. He has authored several books across Competency Based HRM, Digital Cultures, Competency Based Assessments, Digital Organizations - Disruptive HR and, most recently, the Agentic Human Resources, Agentic Recruitment, Algorithmic People Management, Measuring Capability - From Assessments to Algorithms. For Tests Link - www.PsychometricTesting.Org