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People: Group Snapshots - Talent at a Point In Time

As your talent process matures you may find that you regularly perform talent reviews to keep the talent information for your people up to date, say once a year or every 6 months. What do you do if you want to keep a record of what somebody's review looked like at a given point in time?

As discussed in a previous topic, we allow you to take a snapshot of a person's talent review, a digital photo copy so to speak. This works well for taking ad-hoc copies on a per person basis but what do you do if you want to keep a copy of everybody's talent review?

Group Snapshots

Group snapshots are a quick and easy way to take a copy of the talent reviews for all of your people in one go. This copy is then available to view for each person and can be used to track how a person has developed over time or simply for historic record keeping.

In order to see the full picture we need to look across all of the people in your account, so use of this feature is restricted to Administrators only.

Taking a Group Snapshot

Group Snapshots can be found in the People and Talent area of your account, and is only available to administrators of the account, and of course the owner.

To take a group snapshot simply choose the date for the snapshot (this would normally be the date that you took the snapshot on) and optionally give it a name for your reference (e.g. Dec 2010 - Year end talent review). The web site will automatically take a copy of everybody's talent review and store it against the snapshot.

Viewing a Group Snapshot

Once you have taken a group snapshot it will be listed on the main page for group snapshots. Clicking on the snapshot will allow you to access the talent reviews for the people in the snapshot. You can also change the details of the snapshot on this page too.

Alternatively, you can view the reviews in a group snapshot on a per person basis. Opening the talent review page for a person will list all of their reviews; including their current review, reviews in group snapshots and any ad-hoc snapshots that may have been taken.

Retaking a Group Snapshot

There may be times when your information has changed after you have taken your snapshot. Examples could be:

  • New people have been added to the system
  • The talent reviews have been updated

In these cases you can retake the snapshot to add in this new information. When you retake a snapshot any reviews that didn't exist when the snapshot was first taken will automatically be added. For the reviews that did exist you can choose to either update them with the details of the current review for the person or leave as they were in the snapshot.

Whenever a snapshot is added to or updated in a group snapshot the details will always be taken from the current review for the person.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the difference between taking a group snapshot and an ad-hoc snapshot of a talent review?
A: Taking an ad-hoc snapshot of a talent review allows you to take a quick copy for whatever reason you wish, this can be done on a per person basis without impacting any other records. In certain situations this may be an entirely suitable approach.

Taking a group snapshot is more appropriate if you want to take a copy of everybody's review at the same time, say at year end for example. The reviews are also grouped together in the snapshot so it is easy to see what everybody's review looked like at that point in time. Individual snapshots cannot be grouped in this manner.

Q: How many group snapshots can I take?
A: We recommend that you only take group snapshots at planned intervals such as once a year or every six months.