Talent calibration
Talent calibration is the practice of aligning assessment standards across raters — leaders compare and challenge each other's ratings so a score means the same thing in every team.
Talent calibration puts raters in one room to compare, challenge, and align their assessments, so that a 3 from a tough grader and a 3 from a generous one end up meaning the same thing. Without it, cross-team comparisons are noise wearing the costume of data.
Calibration is the working heart of a talent review: the disagreements it surfaces are not friction, they are the standards being negotiated into consistency.
Effective calibration needs evidence on the table. Sessions where leaders defend placements with examples ('ran the recall response, kept the team shipping') converge on shared standards; sessions trading adjectives converge on whoever argues longest. Requiring a sentence of evidence per score before the meeting is the cheapest quality upgrade available.
Calibration also has a memory requirement. Standards drift between cycles unless the previous session's decisions — and the reasoning behind contested calls — are recorded somewhere the next session can consult. Provenance turns calibration from an annual argument into an accumulating asset.
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