Most tenants turn on Workday Talent & Performance but never turn it into a real talent engine. Performance reviews are treated as a compliance exercise, goals live in slides instead of Workday Goals, and Succession Plans exist for a handful of senior roles only. A true talent engine uses Performance, Goals and Succession Planning to drive internal mobility: moving people into new roles, closing skill gaps and filling critical positions from within.
This guide walks through how to design Workday so those three pieces actually work together.
Start with an internal mobility strategy
Before configuring anything, be clear about your internal mobility goals:
- What percentage of roles should be filled internally vs externally?
- Which roles are “critical” and must always have at least one ready successor?
- How do you want employees to discover internal opportunities: Internal Job Board, Talent Marketplace, manager nominations?
Workday can support this with Talent Management, Succession Plans, Talent Pools and Internal Job Postings, but the configuration should follow your strategy, not the other way around.
Goals: turning strategy into worker-level commitments
In Workday, Goals (sometimes called Performance Goals or Development Goals) connect company strategy to individual work. If goals are vague or never updated, your talent engine has nothing to run on.
Key design practices for Goals:
- Use Organization Goals at the top level and cascade them down to teams and workers using tasks like Manage Organization Goals and Add Goal to Employee.
- Encourage a small set of meaningful goals per worker (3–5) rather than long checklists no one reads.
- Distinguish between Performance Goals (what to deliver this year) and Development Goals (skills and experiences to build over time).
Strong goals enable:
- Clear conversations in Check-Ins and Performance Reviews.
- Better calibration discussions in Talent Reviews.
- A more accurate view of who is ready for bigger roles because goals track stretch assignments and development outcomes.
Performance: continuous, not just annual
Workday Performance Management supports continuous feedback as well as formal review cycles. A static, once-a-year review is not enough to power internal mobility.
Good performance design typically includes:
- Check-Ins: informal but trackable conversations where managers and employees align on priorities, progress on goals and development needs.
- Formal Review Templates: standardized review forms per population (e.g., Professional, Manager, Executive) with a mix of ratings, comments and goal assessments.
- Feedback: peer or cross-functional feedback requests to capture performance beyond the direct manager view.
Configuration tips:
- Keep rating scales simple and well-defined; too many rating options reduce calibration quality.
- Align competencies and behaviors with your leadership model or career framework.
- Make sure reviews link directly to Goals so managers see goals in-context during evaluations.
When performance is managed continuously and consistently, you get reliable data on who consistently delivers, not just who writes good self-reviews.
Succession: building real internal pipelines
Workday Succession Planning lets you build Succession Plans for key roles and Succession Pools for broader pipelines. This is where your talent engine turns into a visible internal pipeline.
Design principles for Succession:
- Identify critical roles first: positions where vacancy risk is high or impact is severe (e.g., key leaders, scarce technical experts).
- For each critical role, create a Succession Plan tied to the Job Profile rather than just the current incumbent so plans survive turnover.
- Use Succession Pools when you want a bench for a set of roles (e.g., “Future Plant Managers”, “Future Finance Controllers”).
Within each plan, track:
- Ready Now / Ready in X Years status.
- Risk of loss and impact of loss, where your framework supports it.
- Development actions needed for each successor (assignments, training, mentoring).
Succession should not be a secret spreadsheet. When it lives in Workday, HR and leaders can see where pipelines are strong or thin and act before vacancies hit.
Connecting Performance, Goals and Succession
The real power comes when Goals, Performance and Succession are connected rather than treated as separate modules.
Examples of integration:
- Use Performance Ratings and Goal achievement as inputs to your Talent Review or Succession Readiness assessments.
- Pull in Career Interests, Skills and Development Goals from worker profiles when evaluating potential successors.
- Use succession discussions to feed back into Development Goals: if someone is “Ready in 2 years”, capture the experiences they need and actively track them.
From a configuration standpoint, this means:
- Ensuring your Performance Review templates capture ratings and qualitative data that can be reused in Talent Reviews.
- Making Succession Plans easily accessible in Talent Review dashboards and in leader views.
- Confirming security so that HR and leaders have the right access to succession data without exposing it to everyone.
When these modules share data and are used in a single talent review rhythm, leadership starts to trust Workday as the source of truth for talent decisions.
Making internal mobility visible and easy
A talent engine is only real if people actually move. Workday supports Internal Job Postings, talent marketplaces and internal search to make opportunities visible.
Key ideas:
- Always post roles internally on your Internal Career Site unless there is a legal or strategic reason not to.
- Encourage managers to search for internal candidates using skills, experience and performance history in Workday before going to external channels.
- Use Talent Reviews to proactively identify people who should be approached for upcoming roles rather than waiting for them to apply.
Internal mobility also depends on culture, not just configuration. But when Workday makes internal roles easy to find and leaders see clear data on internal talent, the system nudges behavior in the right direction.
Governance, cadence and adoption
Finally, treat your talent engine like a recurring cycle, not a one-off project.
Governance practices:
- Define a talent calendar: when goals are set and refreshed, when performance reviews run, when Talent Reviews happen, when Succession Plans are updated.
- Maintain design documentation: how Goals, Performance, Succession and Internal Mobility are configured in Workday and which reports leaders should use.
- Track key metrics: internal fill rate, time-to-fill for critical roles, bench strength per critical role, promotion rates of ready successors.
Adoption tips:
- Make manager training concrete: show them how to update goals, run check-ins, complete reviews and nominate successors in the UI.
- Keep configurations as simple as possible while still meeting needs; complexity kills adoption.
- Get HR Business Partners comfortable with Talent Review dashboards so they coach leaders using data from Workday, not offline trackers.
When Performance, Goals and Succession are designed to work together in Workday, internal mobility stops being a slogan and becomes the default way your organization fills roles. You end up with a living, data-backed view of your talent pipeline – and Workday becomes the engine that keeps it moving.
