A talent is a natural ability or behavioral tendency that influences how a person thinks, works, and interacts with others. Unlike skills or knowledge, which can be learned through education or training, talents describe patterns that come more naturally to someone.
Talents often shape how people solve problems, communicate, adapt to change, and collaborate with others. In the workplace, talents help explain why certain individuals thrive in particular roles or environments.
Examples of talents include adaptability, communication, persuasion, innovation, teamwork, and decision making.
Because talents reflect natural behavioral patterns, they are often used by organizations to understand a person’s potential and predict job performance.
How talents relate to work
In their book First, Break All the Rules, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman distinguish between talents, skills, and knowledge.
A talent is a natural pattern of thinking, feeling, or behaving that influences how someone approaches work. Skills refer to the practical "how-to" abilities required to perform a task, such as creating spreadsheets in Excel, coding in JavaScript, or welding. Knowledge refers to what someone has learned or is aware of, often represented through education, certifications, or degrees such as BA, PhD, or RN.
While skills and knowledge describe past learning and experience, talents often indicate future potential. In other words, talents are what come naturally to you.
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Talents might include innovation, adaptability, persuasion, communication, and teamwork. These capabilities shape how individuals respond to challenges, collaborate with others, and perform in different work environments.
Examples of talents
Organizations often evaluate talents that influence how people perform in teams, solve problems, and respond to change.
| Talent | Definition |
|---|---|
| Adaptation | Adjusting to changes in the workplace while maintaining a positive approach. |
| Communication | Conveying ideas clearly and understanding the messages others are trying to communicate. |
| Conflict Resolution | Bringing people together to resolve disagreements and reconcile differences. |
| Decision Making | Making sound decisions even when information is incomplete. |
| Embracing Diversity | Understanding different perspectives and working effectively with a variety of people. |
| Execution | Setting goals, tracking progress, and taking initiative to improve results. |
| Innovation | Generating creative ideas and novel solutions to problems. |
| Managing Others | Motivating and guiding a group toward shared objectives. |
| Persuasion | Influencing others and convincing them to support an idea or direction. |
| Teamwork | Working cooperatively with others to achieve common goals. |
Are talents the same as soft skills?
Many people use the term soft skills to describe traits like communication, teamwork, or adaptability. However, the phrase can be misleading.
As HR analyst Josh Bersin has pointed out, so-called hard skills often change quickly and can be learned relatively easily. Meanwhile, behavioral abilities like communication, collaboration, and leadership are difficult to develop and take years of experience to strengthen.
Because of this, many organizations prefer the term talents to describe these behavioral capabilities. Talents are not "soft" in the sense of being unimportant. In many roles, they are the capabilities that most strongly influence performance. Plum describes talents as durable skills versus hard skills that are known as perishable skills.
Typical talents like communication, teamwork, adaptability, and innovation are complex, valuable, and in high demand. Accurately quantifying someone’s talents is therefore a key component of a successful talent acquisition strategy.
Why talents matter in hiring
Talents are often strong predictors of how well someone will perform in a role. Skills and knowledge can show what a person has already learned, but talents can indicate how they are likely to behave in new situations.
For example, someone with strong adaptability may remain effective during periods of change. Someone with strong persuasion may influence decisions and align teams around a shared direction. These behavioral tendencies shape how individuals handle pressure, collaborate with colleagues, solve complex problems, respond to change, and make decisions with limited information.
Talents are 4X more accurate at predicting someone’s job performance than skills and knowledge alone. Yet for many employers, talents are still the last thing considered in a hiring decision, if they are considered at all.
The challenge is not that organizations do not value talents. The challenge is that talents can be difficult to assess through resumes or interviews alone. It is hard to know whether a candidate will remain positive under pressure, work well with others, or execute effectively under tight deadlines just by reviewing experience on paper.
A job tryout can help predict whether someone has the talents to succeed in a role, but it is rarely sustainable or efficient to place every applicant into a temporary role before making a hiring decision.
How employers measure talents
Industrial and organizational psychologists have spent decades studying how to measure talents in a reliable way. This field uses psychometrics, which involves measuring attributes such as knowledge, abilities, attitudes, and personality traits.
Traditionally, access to this kind of psychometric data required large consulting engagements, which made it costly and difficult to scale. As a result, many organizations either avoided collecting this data or used it only in limited ways.
Today, scientifically validated assessments can measure three important dimensions that contribute to workplace talent: personality, problem solving, and social intelligence.
Hundreds of research studies have demonstrated the relationship between personality and job performance. Problem-solving scores consistently predict how successful candidates are in training and in making effective decisions on the job. For many roles, socially intelligent employees also represent a strong competitive advantage.
Together, personality, problem solving, and social intelligence form the foundation of many workplace talents. For instance, if an assessment finds that someone is comfortable with ambiguity, effective in stressful situations, and able to adapt plans when circumstances change, that person may demonstrate the talent of adaptability. If the assessment finds empathy, perspective taking, and sound judgment in difficult situations, that person may demonstrate the talent of conflict resolution.
The growing importance of talents
Forming a strategy to measure the talents of job candidates is more than a nice to have. A talent assessment is one of the most predictive ways to place people into roles where they can thrive.
As workplaces evolve and technology continues to reshape job requirements, behavioral capabilities are becoming even more important. IBM reported that millions of professionals will need to be reskilled for AI and new digital business environments, and that the biggest gaps are often not digital skills but behavioral skills. In other words, talents.
Similarly, 45% of CHROs believe that graduates already have the digital skills they need, but are missing essential strengths in complex problem solving, teamwork, and leadership.
Organizations that are intentional about quantifying the talents of their candidates today can gain a significant competitive advantage as the behavioral skills gap continues to grow.
The bottom line
Skills and knowledge describe what people have learned. Talents describe how people naturally think, behave, and approach work.
Whereas skills and knowledge represent past performance, talents represent potential. With the right talent assessment in place, organizations can better identify potential, place people in roles where they thrive, and make more predictive hiring decisions.