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Matthew Wyatt, Global Solutions & Commercial Director, Enterprise Solutions from Michael Page
Deloitte’s 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report highlights something that should make all of us pause: 88% of leaders say orchestrating people, skills, and resources more effectively is “extremely important”, yet only 7% feel they’re making meaningful progress on this objective.
That disconnect is exactly why Total Talent keeps resurfacing, and why procurement leaders are in such a pivotal position. They sit at the intersection of risk, cost, and capability. When Total Talent works well, it strengthens all three. When it doesn’t, it becomes another initiative that looks great on paper but is quietly sidelined in the real world.
In this article, I unpack why that gap exists and what procurement leaders can do to close it.
Total Talent is often described as a fusion of HR and procurement objectives. In reality, it is a strategic response from the C-suite to a highly unpredictable environment. By providing a single, unified view of their permanent and contingent workforce, Total Talent gives executives and procurement a clear understanding of where capability sits, where gaps are emerging, and which levers they can pull to build a future-proof organisation.
Static demand planning exercises can’t keep up with the rappidly evolving skills landscape. Unpredictability is driven by a complex mix of transformation agendas, emerging AI, demographic forces, and shifting location strategies. Total Talent programmes single objective is to build a talent supply chain optimised to respond and adapt quickly.
Total Talent initiatives are often pitched at the executive level, implemented by functional leadership, and then handed to service users. With so much competing for their attention, users’ instinctive response is to see this as another policy, process, and technology change to be endured or circumnavigated. When a Total Talent programme pushes against user realities rather than working with them, adoption collapses almost immediately.
This is why user-centric design is critical: a talent strategy that places the needs and behaviours of every employee at the centre. This replaces rigid, siloed processes with intuitive, accessible experiences that support and empower people across the entire talent lifecycle.
The pyramid of pain.
After years spent designing and implementing these programmes, institutional debt has been the most common reason I’ve seen Total Talent initiatives fail to realise their potential. Outdated hiring processes, fragmented systems, and inconsistent policies all create structural friction. Without cross-functional sponsorship to unpick that debt, the original ambition gets watered down. We stop designing for the user and start designing around the status quo.
Here are just three examples of institutional debt:
1. The “front door” that becomes a waiting room
A procurement team introduced a guided‑buying tool to streamline decision‑making and deliver cost efficiencies. However, organisational siloes meant that when one business unit began offshoring part of its capability and required interim contingent support to land the transition, their requests were rejected. The result was a critical bottleneck that directly undermined business value.
2. Misaligned incentives
Talent decisions aren’t made in a perfect world. If a manager is measured on headcount rather than total cost, that’s going to drive their behaviour every single time. If rate cards and background screening policies aren’t applied consistently across different buying channels, that will also shape user behaviour.
3. Supplier relationships treated as risks instead of assets
In another organisation, a team delivering a major change programme turned to a trusted supplier to bring back a specialist they had worked with previously. Yet their internal processes required multiple layers of approval and competitive bidding despite meeting cost benchmarks. It meant that the specialist was unavailable by the time they were ready to engage. Over‑reliance on an incumbent supplier is a legitimate risk; so is failing to deliver a business-critical transformation by losing valuable experience. Total Talent programmes need the flexibility to accommodate different value judgements around cost, quality, and speed.
It’s important to note user-centric design does not mean allowing users to do what they want. It means shaping and influencing behaviour so individuals naturally make decisions that drive the best outcomes for the business. These principles should help focus the design of your Total Talent initiative:
1. Build for the nudge, and not the audit:
Talent guidance must appear at the critical moment of choice, not after the decision is made. Gatekeeping decisions later in the process simply creates user friction.
2. Look at incentives before you look at processes:
If users persistently default to certain behaviour, it is not stubbornness. It is logic. They are doing what their KPIs reward or what seems simplest. Fix the incentives first.
3. Make data genuinely helpful, not a reporting burden:
If data helps someone do their job, accurately forecast burn rate on a project budget, or compare the speed and capability of different suppliers, they will engage. If it only fuels beautiful dashboards for executives, they will not.
4. Solve one critical business need, and scale from there:
The most successful Total Talent programmes begin with a single high‑potential user group, demonstrate success at solving real problems, and scale from there.
AI is reshaping the entire workforce and Total Talent is no exception. While capabilities continue to evolve, the possibilities are already significant.
For example, instead of initiating a hire by completing forms, we are moving towards something far more intuitive. A manager might simply say: “I need someone like the analyst who supported our Q1 programme last year”. Agentic AI can then connect the dots, combining skill data, availability, supplier capability, cost expectations, and policy requirements to surface viable options quickly.
Importantly, many of these interactions can take place in existing interfaces, so there’s no need for users to master a new worklow or identify the correct system of record. While it’s no silver-bullet, agentic AI offers a more personalised and responsive environment to navigate complex business processes.
A core principle of user-centric design is accepting that you must respond to how people actually behave, not how you wish they would. For most stakeholders, talent processes are not the centre of their working lives. That is why empathy is essential: individuals do not see themselves as “users” of your programme, but as professionals navigating competing priorities. The most effective organisations observe these real behaviours and design around them.
