TalentDesk Docs

Overview

TalentDesk is a client and talent management application built for consulting and staffing firms. It tracks clients, open hiring needs, employee deployments, and the ongoing feedback loops between your firm, your engineers, and your clients.

What is TalentDesk?

TalentDesk answers a specific operational question: where are my people, how are the placements going, and what needs attention right now? Consulting firms typically manage this across spreadsheets, email threads, and Slack channels. TalentDesk brings it into a structured application where every piece of the operation has a home.

The application is built around three core feedback loops:

  • The placement loop — matching engineers to client needs through a structured hiring pipeline and a mandatory quality gate before deputation
  • The employee pulse loop — regular structured 1-on-1s that track whether deployed engineers feel stretched, supported, and growing
  • The client health loop — weekly Green/Amber/Red signals per placement and monthly retrospectives that keep account managers informed of relationship health

Key modules

Global Dashboard

Active clients, open positions, bench vs. deployed headcount, and flagged placements — all in a single view. The dashboard is the operational pulse of the firm.

Clients & Hiring Needs

Each client has a profile and a set of open positions. Positions carry role title, required skills, experience range, target start date, compensation, and current status. A 3-phase hiring pipeline tracks every opening from sourcing through offer. TalentDesk also supports structured solutioning projects for client delivery work, including project-level dates, release phases, and client-associated resources.

Talent Roster

The full list of engineers, with their deployment status (bench, deployed, on notice), skills, and experience. Each engineer has a Talent Profile with a pulse-score timeline chart built from their review history.

Deployments

Assignments linking an engineer to a client, with manager, start/end dates, and allocation percentage. TalentDesk supports ending a deployment, transferring an engineer to a new client, and logging the offboarding checklist.

Placement Quality Gate

A 4-point checklist — pre-screen, technical bar, background check, client alignment — that must be completed before an engineer can be marked Deputed. See Deployments & Placement Gate.

Employee Pulse & Growth Reviews

Structured 1-on-1s with 1–5 sliders on stretched, supported, and growing, plus fields for blockers, skill alignment, operations, and delivery. The review history feeds the pulse-score timeline on the Talent Profile. See Pulse Reviews.

Client Account Health

Per-placement weekly health signals (Green, Amber, Red) with mandatory notes for non-green statuses. Monthly Retrospective logger for structured account reviews. See Health Signals.

Analytics

Client-level stats, employee experience distribution, average pulse scores, skills supply vs. demand, and skills deployed per client. Useful for capacity planning and business reviews.

Action Center

A single view of everything that needs attention: hiring deadlines approaching, incomplete placement gates, onboarding/offboarding in progress, and placements with pending weekly health updates.

RBAC

Four scoped roles — Master Admin, Account Manager (assigned clients only), Recruiter, and Viewer. See Roles & Access.

Audit Log

Per-entity activity trails with timestamp, actor, and action. Exportable as CSV.

Stack. TalentDesk is built with Next.js 14 (App Router), React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. It uses SQLite (better-sqlite3) for all data and cookie-session auth with bcrypt. It is designed to be self-hosted — no external database or managed service required.

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