Every leader wants to know what is the “next big thing” in talent management? Well in my book, it is the forward-looking talent management approach known as predictive analytics. If you are unfamiliar with the term, predictive analytics are simply a set of decision-making metrics or statistics that alert or warn decision-makers about upcoming problems and opportunities in talent areas like recruiting and retention. Predictive analytics are clearly superior to traditional HR metrics, which simply tell you what happened last year.