Talent Optimization

Build a People Strategy That Drives Business Results

More Than Operational Efficiency Consulting—Create Sustainable Change and Lasting Value

You’ve invested in equipment, systems, and technology. You’ve refined your processes and optimized operations. But one of your biggest competitive advantages—your people—remains underutilized.

High performers leave for opportunities that challenge them. Mid-level employees coast rather than grow. Leadership development happens haphazardly, if at all. You know your team has more to give, but you lack the structure to unlock that potential systematically.

JACO Advisory Group provides talent optimization services that align your business strategy with your people strategy. We’re not HR professionals or leadership coaches—we’re experienced business advisors who understand that in commoditized markets, your employees are your last point of differentiation.

Whether you’re struggling with retention, trying to build leadership capability, or simply want to create a culture that attracts top talent, we help middle-market, closely-held, and family-owned businesses leverage people data to achieve measurable business results.

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Why Most Companies Struggle With Talent Strategy

The challenge isn’t that business leaders don’t value their people—it’s that they lack systematic approaches to develop them:

  • Gut feel replaces data. Most hiring, promotion, and team-building decisions rely on intuition rather than objective insights. This creates bias, limits scalability, and leads to inconsistent results.
  • Engagement goes unmeasured. Without systematic measurement, you don’t know what’s driving turnover until your best people announce they’re leaving. By then, it’s too late.
  • Leadership development is reactive. Companies promote their best individual contributors into management roles without assessing whether they have the behavioral traits to lead effectively—then wonder why they struggle.
  • Cultural misalignment creates friction. When your business strategy requires innovation and agility, but your culture rewards stability and process adherence, execution suffers.
  • Team dynamics remain invisible. You know some teams perform better than others, but you can’t articulate why—making it impossible to replicate success across your organization.
  • Sacred cows are getting in the way. Whether it’s long-term employees who are blockers or unwritten rules, JACO can have honest conversations about the benefits of taking on tough issues.

Most people strategy consulting focuses on implementing generic HR best practices. JACO takes a different approach—using objective data within the context of your specific business strategy. Most business leaders base their talent strategy on feelings and assumptions. This works until it doesn’t—usually revealed through regrettable turnover, team dysfunction, or missed strategic objectives.

The Benefits of Strategic Talent Optimization With JACO

Talent optimization creates measurable advantages for businesses that implement it systematically:

Attract and retain top talent by building a culture where high performers see clear paths for growth and feel genuinely engaged in meaningful work.
Reduce costly turnover by understanding what drives engagement in your organization and addressing issues before they become resignation letters.
Build leadership capability at every level through data-driven development that identifies natural strengths and addresses genuine gaps.
Improve team performance by understanding behavioral dynamics—assembling teams with complementary strengths rather than hoping chemistry develops naturally.
Align culture with strategy so your organizational behaviors support rather than undermine strategic objectives.
Make better hiring decisions by defining ideal candidate profiles based on data from your actual high performers—not generic job descriptions.
Accelerate onboarding and development by understanding how new hires naturally work and what they need to succeed in their specific roles.

According to the Predictive Index’s State of Talent Optimization Report, companies that align talent with business strategy outperform others by 16%, retain 30% more top performers, and see 34% higher employee performance.

Why Work With JACO for Talent Optimization

Data-Driven Advisors With Business Owner Experience

Business Owner Perspective

We’re not HR professionals implementing generic best practices. Every senior advisor at JACO has owned or operated businesses. We understand talent decisions through the lens of business outcomes—profitability, growth, and competitive advantage.

Objective People Data

We leverage the Predictive Index platform to bring objectivity to talent decisions. Behavioral assessments, cognitive ability measurements, and engagement surveys replace gut feel with data—making your talent strategy scalable and repeatable.

Holistic Integration

We don’t treat talent optimization as separate from business strategy. We integrate people strategy with your strategic planning, operational improvement, and growth initiatives—ensuring alignment across all dimensions of your business.

Implementation Focus

We don’t just recommend assessments and leave. We work alongside you to interpret data, make decisions, address team dynamics, and build the capability within your organization to sustain improvements.

Leader at Every Level Methodology

We develop accountability and ownership throughout your organization, not just at the executive level. This creates resilience and distributes leadership capability across teams.

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Why Talent Optimization Transforms Business Performance

Your competitors can copy your equipment. They can replicate your processes. They can match your technology investments. But they can’t duplicate the capability, engagement, and culture you’ve built within your team. Talent optimization systematically unlocks that advantage, using data and behavioral science to align how your people work with what your business needs to achieve. It’s not theory–it’s a proven discipline that helps organizations attract better talent, develop leaders at every level, and build teams that execute strategy rather than talk about it. In commoditized markets, your people are your last point of differentiation. Talent optimization makes that differentiation measurable, repeatable, and sustainable.

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The Four Phases of Talent Optimization

Talent optimization consists of four interconnected phases that work together to align your people strategy with business results:

Design: Building Teams That Execute Strategy

The Design phase maps your business strategy to organizational structure and team composition. We help you understand whether you have the talent needed to execute strategy internally or need to recruit externally, identify team behavioral dynamics and potential blind spots, and ensure your culture supports strategic objectives.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DESIGN PHASE

Hire: Attracting and Selecting the Right Talent

The Hire phase transforms hiring from subjective to systematic. Using data-driven Job Targets based on your actual high performers, we help you apply behavioral and cognitive assessments to objectively evaluate candidates, create structured interview processes, and measure both job fit and culture fit separately.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE HIRE PHASE

Inspire: Developing Leaders Who Drive Performance

The Inspire phase develops leadership capability throughout your organization through a structured leadership development program. We help you create leader self-awareness, develop personalized coaching approaches based on how each team member naturally works, build career paths that demonstrate commitment to growth, and reinforce culture through recognition and communication.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE INSPIRE PHASE

Diagnose: Measuring and Improving Engagement

The Diagnose phase provides the foundation for an effective employee engagement strategy through systematic feedback and anonymous surveys. We help you measure engagement across five key areas, analyze patterns to identify root causes, prioritize improvements based on impact, and create action plans that address genuine issues rather than implementing generic initiatives. JACO works with clients to implement a sustainable process that clients can repeat annually to assess and improve their teams.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE DIAGNOSE PHASE

How We Work With You: From Assessment to Implementation

Our talent optimization engagements are structured but flexible—adapting to where you are in your talent strategy maturity:

Initial Assessment

We start by understanding your business strategy, current organizational structure, and talent challenges. This typically includes behavioral assessments of your leadership team to establish baseline data and identify immediate opportunities.

Phase Selection and Prioritization

Not every organization needs all four phases immediately. We help you determine whether to focus on Design (team composition issues), Hire (recurring turnover or mis-hires), Inspire (leadership development gaps), or Diagnose (engagement challenges).

Implementation and Capability Building

We work alongside you to implement solutions—whether that’s restructuring teams, refining hiring processes, developing leadership development programs, or establishing engagement measurement systems. Throughout, we’re building your internal capability to sustain improvements.

Ongoing Advisory Support

Many clients maintain ongoing relationships where we provide periodic assessments, support major people decisions (key hires, promotions, restructuring), and help navigate organizational changes as business strategy evolves.

The length and depth of engagement depends on your needs—from focused projects addressing specific challenges to comprehensive partnerships that integrate talent optimization across your organization.

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Beyond Talent: Comprehensive Business Advisory Services

Talent optimization often connects to other strategic initiatives:

  • Strategic Planning: Aligning people strategy with business strategy from the beginning ensures you have the leadership capability to execute.
  • Succession Planning: Understanding behavioral requirements for key roles makes leadership transitions more successful.
  • Operational Performance: Building a “Leader at Every Level” culture supports continuous improvement initiatives.
  • Business Development: Assessing whether your sales team has the behavioral traits to win new business—or whether you need different capabilities.

We don’t just optimize talent in isolation—we help you build businesses where people strategy and business strategy work together to create competitive advantage.

Frequently Asked Questions About Talent Optimization

How is talent optimization different from traditional HR consulting?

Talent optimization is data-driven and directly tied to business outcomes. Traditional HR consulting often focuses on compliance, benefits administration, and implementing generic best practices. We use behavioral science and people data to make objective decisions about team composition, hiring, development, and engagement—always within the context of your specific business strategy. We’re not HR professionals; we’re business advisors who use talent optimization to drive measurable results.

Do we need to implement all four phases?

No. One of the advantages of the Predictive Index platform is that you can implement phases as needed—all within a single system. Most organizations start with one or two phases based on their most pressing challenges. If you’re experiencing turnover in key roles, the Hire phase might be your priority. If you have leadership capability gaps, Inspire makes sense. If team dynamics are creating friction, the Design phase addresses that. You can add additional phases over time as your needs evolve, without managing multiple platforms or assessment tools. We help you determine where to focus based on your specific challenges and strategic priorities.

How long does it take to see results from talent optimization?

Results don’t happen overnight, but most organizations see meaningful progress as they implement their talent optimization strategy. The timeline depends on which phase you’re addressing and the scope of your challenges. Some improvements—like better hiring decisions—can show impact relatively quickly, while others—like building leadership capability or shifting culture—require sustained effort over time. We structure engagements so you see progress throughout the process.

Can talent optimization work for small teams?

Absolutely. While talent optimization is often associated with larger organizations, the principles apply at any scale. In fact, small teams often benefit more dramatically because individual contributions have greater impact. Understanding behavioral dynamics, making better hiring decisions, and developing leadership capability matters just as much—perhaps more—when you have limited resources and every hire counts.

What’s the ROI of optimizing my team’s talent?

ROI comes through multiple channels: reduced turnover costs (recruiting, training, lost productivity), improved hiring outcomes (fewer mis-hires, faster time-to-productivity), increased employee engagement (higher productivity, better customer satisfaction), and stronger leadership capability (better execution of strategy). Consider that a single bad hire can cost 30% or more of that person’s salary—making better hiring decisions alone often delivers significant ROI within the first year.

Do you only work with companies already using Predictive Index?

No. We’re Certified Partners of the Predictive Index, which means we can introduce the platform to new clients. If you’re already using PI but not leveraging it effectively, we can help you get more value from your existing investment. If you’re using different assessment tools, we can discuss whether PI makes sense or whether we can work within your existing systems.

Ready to Unlock Your Team's Potential?

Most business leaders know their people matter. But without systematic approaches to develop talent, hire strategically, and measure engagement, potential remains locked. High performers leave. Leadership gaps persist. Team dynamics create friction rather than momentum.

The difference between people strategy consulting and what JACO provides: we don’t implement generic HR best practices. We use objective people data to make talent decisions that drive business results—hiring, team composition, leadership development, and engagement—all within the context of your specific business strategy.

We start with a straightforward assessment of your current state to identify where talent challenges might be holding your business back. No obligation—just clarity about your people strategy gaps and realistic pathways forward.

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