Talent Profile (NextGen)

Contents

• Overview
  • Experience
  • Talent System
  • Ways to Update
• Configuration
  • User Data Preparation
  • AI Performance Summary Settings
  • Skills Settings
  • AI for Skills Settings
  • Manage Languages
• Using the Talent Profile
  • Generating an AI Performance Summary
  • Adding Skills Manually
  • Verifying Skills
  • Adding Skills via AI
• Talent Profile Reports
• FAQs

Overview

The NextGen Talent Profile brings together performance history and skills into a single, trusted view. It transforms fragmented employee data into a living profile that reflects not only what someone has achieved, but what they can do today and where they can grow next.

Experience

• Managers: Gain crucial context to guide continuous performance and career growth conversations.
• HR & Talent Leaders: Access reliable visibility for comprehensive workforce planning, talent mobility, and succession planning.
• Executives: Gain organizational visibility into capability distributions and overall bench strength.
• Employees: Attain clarity regarding their skills and performance via personalized AI recommendations and summaries.

Talent System

The NextGen Talent Profile serves as the foundation of the Talent System. It powers and connects several modules that would otherwise operate in isolation.

• Skills Intelligence: Validated skills and organizational capabilities.
• Calibration: Consistent performance evaluations and talent insights.
• Succession Planning: Strategic readiness mapping and future leadership pipeline tracking.

Ways to Update

To maintain a dynamic and accurate single source of truth, user data flows into and updates the NextGen Talent Profile through multiple channels:

• User Management: Administrators update user profiles and position data by importing a structured CSV file via a manual upload or automated user management (e.g., the HRIS integration). Since fields can vary by organization, the required fields must be completely configured in Betterworks before executing the upload or scheduling the file feed so that field keys (column headers) register successfully.
• Conversations: Active employee conversation records act as an ongoing, live update stream for the profile. Completed conversation logs serve as a high-priority data source to generate the automated AI Performance Summary. Additionally, active conversation records provide critical contextual cues scanned by the underlying machine learning engine to dynamically generate and adjust skill recommendations under the "Recommended by AI" section.
• Calibration: Historical Classic calibration ratings data is migrated into the Talent Service to be stored alongside newly-defined profile fields, ensuring final results conform to organizational data insights. 

Configuration

Before users can leverage the NextGen Talent Profile, engage your organization's Program Architect, CSM, or SAM (if applicable) to enable the necessary settings on the backend. From there, as an administrator, you can activate corresponding modules, map user data fields, and establish organizational parameters.

User Data Preparation

The NextGen Talent Profile fields must be configured before importing user data. This sequence ensures that Betterworks registers the specific field keys (column headers) unique to your organization.

When upgrading from the Classic to the NextGen interface, administrators must identify and transition all existing Classic standard custom talent keys into newly defined NextGen Talent Profile fields to maintain continuity across analysys. For instance, Classic custom talent keys must be converted into new matching types.

To execute structured user profile and position data updates, use the following templates and field guides:

• Field guide - Talent Profile fields 
• Field guide - Position fields 
• Template - Talent Profile fields 
• Template - Position fields

AI Performance Summary Settings

The AI Performance Summary compiles aggregated narratives from goals, conversations, feedback, recognition, and calibration records. To enable this feature:

1. Go to Admin → Program Management → AI.
2. Toggle on Enable AI for your organization.
3. Toggle on Enable AI Performance Summary for your organization.
4. Select either Enable for all employees or Enable for employees from specific departments or groups.

5. Click Save.

   

Skills Settings

To control how skills are logged, categorized, and validated across the organization:

1. Go to Admin → Talent → Program Management → Talent Profile → Skills.
2. Toggle on Enable Skills for your organization. 
   • This option allows employees to manually input skills they possess or plan to cultivate.
3. To activate the validation workflow, check the Include Manager Verification checkbox. 
   • This allows employees to explicitly route skill evaluation requests to their managers.
4. Define capability scale increments by interacting with the Number of Labels dropdown list, selecting a baseline between a minimum of 2 levels and a maximum of 5 levels (e.g., 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, or 1-5).
5. Provide descriptive text fields for each step in your scale, ordering them sequentially from lowest to highest (e.g., Level 1: Average Potential, Level 2: Intermediate, Level 3: Advanced).

6. Click Save.

   

AI for Skills Settings

Betterworks' underlying Skills AI automatically constructs professional development recommendations by scanning contextual cues from feedback, conversation records, listed job positions, structural titles, and role descriptions.

1. Go to the Admin → Program Management → AI → Talent: AI Skills.
2. Toggle the feature on.
3. Select either Enable for all employees or Enable for employees from specific departments or groups.
4. Click Save.

Manage Languages

Organizations can configure translated Talent Profile content for supported languages, allowing employees to view Talent Profile information using their preferred language.

Administrators can configure translations for:

• Talent Field labels
• Custom Field labels
• Custom Field option values
• Skill Level labels

To configure translations:

1. Navigate to Admin > Talent Profile.
2. Open the Talent Fields, Custom Fields, or Skills administration page.
3. Select Manage Languages from the field’s Actions menu.
4. Select the language to translate.
5. Enter the translated values.
6. Click Save.

Note: Users automatically see translated content based on their profile language preference. If a translation has not been configured for a user’s language, Betterworks displays the default language instead.

Using the Talent Profile

Generating an AI Performance Summary

The AI Performance Summary resides directly on the user's My Profile page.

1. Go to the My Profile page.
2. Locate the AI Performance Summary block and select the Time Period of Fiscal Year to Date or Previous Fiscal Year.
3. Click Summarize.

4. The modal displays the initial three lines of text by default, but you can click Show more to reveal the full narrative summary.

   

5. Review the structured tabs included in every compiled entry:
   • Key Achievements
   • Strengths
   • Areas for Development

6. Select individual tabs to see targeted bullets along with source labels highlighting where the underlying data was pulled (e.g., Feedback, Goals, Recognition).

   

7. Click Copy to extract this text for copy-pasting into an external file.

Note: Whenever fresh goal updates or feedback entries are entered, an alert header updates with the message: "New data is available. Summarize it to generate an updated summary." When this occurs, you must manually click the Summarize again to capture the new information.

Adding Skills Manually

Employees can self-report their existing capabilities and explicit learning paths through manual profile updates.

1. Open your Talent Profile view and locate the skill subsections: Recommended by AI, Skills I have, and Skills I want to develop.

   

2. Click the Add + attached to either the Skills I have or Skills I want to develop item lines.
3. Type keyword details into the Find a Skill search bar. 
   • You must input a minimum of three characters before the modal can begin searching and return matching database terms.

4. Click your chosen skill entry from the results list to generate a description.

   

5. Choose your expertise scale level using the Level dropdown options.
6. If your organization requires administrative proof, select the Request Verification checkbox to route the selection to your manager.
7. Click Save. 
   • The skill item updates directly on your Talent Profile page. 
   • Items awaiting review display a clear Pending Verification status label.

8. To modify any existing item, click the active skill tile to prompt a sliding right-side editor panel. 

   • From this panel, you can adjust your listed skill tier level, edit the verification flag, or update your professional intent settings.

   

Verifying Skills

Managers can formally validate self-reported capabilities directly within an employee's record.

Note: Betterworks does not currently trigger automated alerts or notifications when verification requests are submitted. Managers must check open entries by looking at user profiles manually.

1. Go to the user's Talent Profile.
2. Locate the Requested For Verification section.
3. Click Verify Skills.

4. Confirm the entry or keep it in a pending state. 

   • Once confirmed, the display card updates to show a verified status icon. 
   • Managers can execute actions individually or apply choices to entries in bulk.

   

Adding Skills via AI

To view the suggestions compiled by Betterworks' machine learning engine:

1. Locate the Recommended by AI block on your profile.
2. Select the Time Period of Fiscal Year to Date or Previous Fiscal Year.

3. Click the Generate or Regenerate to compile fresh suggestions.

   

4. Click an individual skill suggestion card to launch a comprehensive modal details window. 

   • Here, you can review the specific reasoning data points used by the AI engine (such as precise peer evaluation quotes).

   

5. To adopt the recommendation, select your desired Intent option, specify your current Skill Level expertise tier, check the manager verification box if desired, and click Add Skill to move the entry directly onto your profile.

   

6. If the suggestion does not fit your role, click Dismiss. 
   • The entry shifts immediately into a distinct Dismissed Skills bucket. 
   • To reverse a dismissal, open the panel layout, highlight the term, and click Remove to restore it to the active AI recommendations list.

Talent Profile Reports

Administrators can generate Talent Profile reports to analyze current talent information or review historical changes.

Two report types are available:

Talent Profile Export

Exports the current values for standard and custom Talent Profile fields for employees in selected departments or groups.

Talent Field History Report

Provides an audit history of Talent Profile field changes, including:

• What changed
• Previous and new values
• When the change occurred
• How the change was made (for example, through calibration, conversations, or imports)

To generate a report:

1. Navigate to Admin > Program Management > Reports.
2. Select the Talent Profile tab.
3. Choose either Talent Profile Export or Talent Field History.
4. Configure the desired filters.
5. Select Email Report.

FAQs

What happens if a Talent Profile doesn't contain enough data to run the AI features?

If a section lacks relevant data during performance generation, Betterworks will return the message: "You don't have enough data to generate. Engage more with Betterworks modules to improve insights." If the selected time period completely lacks activities, compilation halts entirely and shows the message: "Due to a lack of relevant data, a comprehensive summary of the user's performance cannot be generated at this time." For missing skill history, the recommendations panel defaults to show: "There are no skills to recommend at this time. There is not enough data to generate recommended skills. Please try again later."

How does the AI Performance Summary function if an employee's language is unsupported?

When processing text inputs configured in an unsupported dialect, the AI engine defaults its output response and returns the completed summary narrative in English.

How does data migration impact historical information pulled from Classic calibration?

Classic calibration database records remain safely preserved and accessible should administrators need to extract legacy information during the transition period.