Leaders make high-stakes talent decisions every day—about who to hire, who to promote, how to pay, and where to invest in development. And with so much talent data available, you’d think they’d have all the insights they need to inform those decisions.
But new Korn Ferry research shows that only 34 percent are confident that those insights are reliable.
The rest are operating with talent data that’s split across platforms and frameworks, making insights difficult to rely on for workforce planning.
This fragmentation is creating real financial drag for organizations. In our survey, 99 percent said disconnected data is having a negative financial impact on their business, and more than 80 percent estimate it costs at least three percent of total payroll.
This talent data problem, say Korn Ferry experts, is likely responsible for a quiet profit leak at many organizations.
Drowning in Data
The crucial numbers are all over the place.
Across most organizations, the data needed to make better talent decisions already exists, but it is spread across multiple systems that were never designed to work together. Each platform provides a partial view—performance in one system, skills in another, pay and job structure elsewhere.
In our survey, 84 percent of leaders said they operate 3–10 different platforms.
Originally, those platforms were implemented to solve specific needs. But today, they’ve left leaders stitching together answers from systems that don’t speak the same language—and often, aren’t meaningfully integrated:
- 68% operate with only partial or minimal talent data integration
- Just 5% report having fully connected talent data systems
- 26% said it can take weeks to access connected talent insights
Leaders can access reports and dashboards across platforms. What they struggle with is bringing those data points into a single, reliable view that makes sense of the data and supports talent decisions.
Without that shared definition, even connected data can produce conflicting answers.
The Impact
When systems don’t meaningfully connect, true insight doesn’t exist.
Answering simple questions, like who’s ready to step up or how pay aligns with performance, often requires pulling information from multiple platforms and reconciling it manually. Even then, leaders are left reconciling not just numbers but competing definitions of what “great” actually means in a role.
“As an executive, if you don’t have a clear picture of your own workforce, that should keep you up at night. It might be too late to do something about it when decisions need to be made,” says Jan Machtelinckx of Korn Ferry EMEA. Without that clarity, even the most fundamental talent decisions become guesswork.
Risky Instincts
Leaders rely on intuition every day, but it only works when informed by data-led insights.
When talent insight is incomplete or hard to access, leaders go with their gut. That’s why 71 percent of leaders told us that they rely on instincts, instead of insights, when making talent decisions.
Instincts have real value, of course. They’re hard to quantify but typically are based on years of experience.
The risk emerges when intuition becomes the default because the data needed to support it is unreliable or too slow to assemble.
In many organizations, different tools surface different answers about performance, potential, and value. When the picture doesn’t come together cleanly, leaders default to the one thing they trust most—their own judgment.
Ironically, the more talent data systems organizations add, the more this pattern grows. Leaders in organizations with 10 or more talent systems are almost twice as likely to rely on intuition. This is particularly true when it comes to promotions and succession.
The best talent decisions happen when they’re informed by a mix of data-led insights and experience-led intuition.
Connected data doesn’t replace judgment—it strengthens it.
Organizations with the most HR data are 2x more likely to rely on intuition.
The Impact
Decisions driven primarily by instinct are difficult to audit, difficult to defend, and difficult to replicate.
When a promotion goes wrong or a succession plan falls apart, the follow-up question is predictable. What evidence informed this decision? For leaders, that question carries weight.
“The goal isn’t to replace judgment,” says Roger Philby of Korn Ferry UK. “On their own, neither data nor human judgment tells the whole story. But used together, they’re much stronger.”
The Credibility Problem
When talent data isn’t trusted, HR’s expertise gets ignored.
The same scenario plays out frequently in businesses with talent data siloed across multiple systems.
HR brings insights to the table. Leaders acknowledge them but hesitate to act because they don’t trust the insights. Over time, HR is consulted less frequently.
In our survey, 55 percent of leaders admitted that they rely less on HR for decisions when they don’t trust the talent data.
“It’s unfortunate because the function that should serve as a strategic partner ends up on the fringes of some crucial talent decisions,” says Philby.
When talent data is siloed, no one wins—especially HR.
The Impact
At its core, this is a credibility issue.
When workforce insights feel incomplete or inconsistent, HR’s voice carries less weight. Leaders default to instinct because the evidence presented doesn’t feel reliable.
“The business doesn’t believe HR because they don’t believe the data can be trusted. And that’s because HR isn’t always great at being data practitioners and communicators—pulling everything together and translating it into a story the business can act on,” says Philby.
Unless that gap is closed, HR’s strategic influence is diminished at precisely the moment it’s most needed.
