Manage pipelines

The Pipelines area gives HR teams a structured way to manage succession planning for published jobs. Use Pipelines to identify potential successors, assess their readiness, understand the strength of your internal talent pool, and identify jobs where a future vacancy could pose a greater risk.

Access pipelines

Pipelines is available from Talent > Pipelines when the Pipelines module is installed in your site and the Manage pipelines permission is turned on in your permission set. If you don’t see Pipelines in the Talent menu, contact your Quinto administrator to confirm that the module is installed and that you have the required permission.

Understand the pipelines page

The Pipelines page shows succession information for your published jobs. For each job, you can see:

• Job name

• Job group

• Criticality

• Bench strength

• Succession risk

These measures work together to provide a picture of succession coverage:

• Criticality represents the potential organizational impact of a vacancy.

• Bench strength represents the depth of the internal succession bench for the job. Learn more

• Succession risk combines job criticality and bench strength to identify where the organization may be most exposed. Learn more

Search, sort, and filter pipelines

Use the search field to find a pipeline by job name.

You can also sort the table or filter it by:

• Job group

• Job level

• Criticality

• Succession risk

• Flagged status

Your sorting and filter selections are retained for your current session.

Prioritize important jobs

Set job criticality

Job criticality represents the potential organizational impact if a job becomes vacant. It’s independent of how easy or difficult the vacancy may be to fill. Jobs can have a criticality of:

• High: A vacancy would have a significant impact on organizational performance or continuity.

• Medium: A vacancy would have a moderate and manageable impact.

• Low: A vacancy would have a limited impact that could be managed through normal staffing processes.

• Undefined: Criticality hasn’t been assessed for the job.

Published jobs have an Undefined criticality until one is selected. You can update criticality from either the Pipelines table or the individual Pipeline details page. Criticality is one of the factors used to determine succession risk.

Flag a pipeline

Use flags to mark pipelines that you want to revisit or monitor. When you flag a pipeline, a flag appears beside the job name. You can remove the flag when it’s no longer needed or filter the Pipelines table to show only flagged pipelines.

View potential successors

Select a job from the table to open its details. The page shows the users in the pipeline and their:

• Readiness

• Job match

• Hire date

Incumbents remain visible in the pipeline and are identified as N/A – Incumbent rather than being assigned a readiness level. Use the available search and filters to focus on particular people, departments, readiness levels, or minimum job matches.

Review job match

Job match helps you understand how closely a person’s capabilities align with the job. Select a user’s match score to view more information about their match. You can also use the minimum match filter to focus the Pipeline details table on people who meet a particular match threshold.

Changing the minimum match filter while viewing a pipeline only changes the people displayed on the page. It doesn’t change the organization’s minimum match used to calculate bench strength.

Manage readiness

Readiness represents how prepared a potential successor is to move into the role. You can set, update, or reset a person’s readiness directly from Pipeline details. Your organization can customize the available readiness levels to reflect its own succession-planning process.

Readiness can also affect whether someone contributes to bench strength. For example, your organization may exclude employees marked Not interested or Unavailable from the calculation.

See How bench strength is calculated to understand how readiness affects the score. Administrators can learn how to customize the readiness scale in Configure pipelines.

Understand the pipeline summary

The summary on Pipeline details provides a quick view of the health of the pipeline. Depending on how the summary has been configured, it can include:

• Bench strength

• Succession risk

• Counts for your organization’s readiness levels

Bench strength and succession risk answer different questions:

• Bench strength: How much internal succession coverage do we have for this job?

• Succession risk: How exposed are we if this job becomes vacant?

You can choose up to four measures to display in the summary. At least one measure must be selected, and the configuration applies across pipelines and users. See How bench strength is calculated and How succession risk is calculated for a detailed explanation of these measures.

View pipeline history

Select a job from the table to open its details. Click Actions and select History to see changes to succession information over time. History records changes to:

• Job criticality

• Employee readiness

• Who made the change

• When the change was made

Use History when you need to understand how a pipeline’s succession picture has changed over time.

Export pipeline data

You can export the Pipelines table to Excel. Click Actions and select Download table.

When the export is ready, you’ll receive an in-app notification and an email with a link to download it. The download link is available for 48 hours.