Revealing Invisible Talent: Learning from Sports to Transform Potential Management

In today’s environment of ongoing transformation within companies over many years, the need for organizations to have high-level leaders who are well prepared to face these challenges is fundamental. Today, existing processes are reaching their limits, and most of the future leaders needed from 2030 onward have not yet been identified. Yet preparing, securing, and engaging emerging talents to help them become leaders takes time… hence the need to identify emerging talents early!

The current model: a well-oiled machine, but insufficient

Today, companies generally identify a talent pool of 50 to 300 people depending on the size of the organization. These individuals are the successors of current senior executives and are considered top-tier high potentials. This pool forms the foundation of the company’s talent management: it feeds succession plans and ensures the continuity of the leadership team over the next five years.

This approach is inherently very artisanal, as it relies on internal talent scouts who must know each profile in depth in order to understand their strengths and development areas to create personalized development paths. The model works, but it has two major limitations:

It remains highly dependent on HR teams and the resources available to them;
It captures only a small portion of the organization’s true potential.

In increasingly global organizations, the top-tier talent pool must also be drawn from around the world in order to enrich future strategic decisions through a diversity of perspectives and cultures. The challenge, however, is this: because these individuals are less visible to corporate teams, they need to be identified at an earlier stage. Otherwise, they risk slipping off the radar and never gaining access to “springboard” roles — positions that enable them to grow and further develop their potential.

When it comes to identifying international talent, best practices can often be found in the sports industry, which has been applying sophisticated scouting and evaluation methods for several decades — particularly in the United States. In this regard, the movie Moneyball provides a compelling illustration of this approach, and I highly recommend watching it!

What sports understood before others: the power of data

When a sports team wants to identify talent earlier, an artisanal approach no longer works. It is impossible to send a scout to every city in the world.

American clubs therefore innovated: they compiled massive amounts of data on players worldwide—height, weight, vertical jump, 100‑meter sprint time, points scored, assists, fouls, ejections… and above all, how sustainable each player’s performance is over time. They are even able to model how the presence of a player on the field impacts the performance of opposing team players! Thanks to algorithms and artificial intelligence, this allows for an initial filtering of players and limits human decision-making to profiles that truly require it.

One example perfectly illustrates this concept. For decades, NBA teams relied on the “Draft Combine” to select players. The Draft Combine is a scouting day during which players from all over the world gather to participate in physical tests. Until the 2010s, teams used the results of this day to select the most athletic, fastest, and tallest players. This is why Tony Parker was not initially viewed as a high-potential player when he entered the NBA in 2001, because he was “only” 1.88 meters tall.

Today, teams have access to far more data points on young players, allowing them to synthesize performance over several years, and the Draft Combine has become a relic of the past, scarcely used by teams. Thanks to this strategy, clubs have fundamentally improved their scouting capabilities, particularly when it comes to international talent. In 1990, there were around twenty non-American players on NBA courts, compared to approximately 150 today.

Despite all this, it is not a silver bullet, and mistakes can still happen: the best basketball player in the world today, Nikola Jokić, was completely overlooked by teams due to mediocre natural physical attributes. Good data reduces errors, but it will never fully eliminate individual biases.

Using talent data to scale

Identifying early potential in a global organization is an impossible task if done solely through intuition or networks—especially since subsidiaries are rarely enthusiastic about letting their talents go. HR teams need new levers, based on the structured use of existing data, to challenge local teams and act as catalysts for the organization.

Some talent-related information is already available:

Performance over three years,
Pace of progression and grade evolution,
Geographic and functional mobility,
Annual performance review reports,
Participation in strategic projects…

And many others can be collected or better structured depending on how the company defines its talents.

Beyond the available data, it is also a mindset that must be deployed throughout the organization: to find and develop different and early profiles, one must go beyond current knowledge, be willing to create regular mobility, and not be afraid to lose one’s own talents for the collective good. HR teams are now responsible for spreading this way of thinking about talent management.

Conclusion

Relying on data to identify talent is not a miracle recipe. But today, it is the most pragmatic method for revealing invisible potential within current organizations. The key is not to collect more data, but to use existing data better.

The companies that will succeed tomorrow will be those able to combine:

the subtlety of human intuition,
the power of data,
and the insight of AI to save time.

This is how Talent Management will become not only more effective, but also… more human.