[Excerpt] Talent management organizations are increasingly deriving insights from data to make better decisions. Their use of data analytics is advancing from descriptive to predictive and prescriptive analytics. Descriptive analytics is the most basic form, providing the hindsight view of what happened and laying the foundation for turning data into information. More advanced uses are predictive (advanced forecasts and the ability to model future results) and prescriptive (“the top-tier of analytics that leverage machine learning techniques … to both interpret data and recommend actions”) analytics (1). Appendix A illustrates these differences. This report summarizes our most relevant findings about how both academic researchers and HR practitioners are successfully using data analytics to inform decision-making in workforce issues, with a focus on executive assessment and selection.