A fifth purpose of performance management systems is to provide information to be used in workforce planning. Workforce planning is a set of systems that allows organizations to anticipate and respond to needs emerging within and outside the organization, to determine priorities, and to allocate human resources where they can do the most good. An important component of any workforce planning effort is understanding the talent inventory, which is information on current resources (e.g., skills, abilities, promotional potential of current employees).

Buying talent is extremely expensive and top performers know their worth in the market through social media and career sites. In the case of executives, the stock market is a good metric of perceived worth. Other organizational maintenance purposes served by performance management systems include assessing future training needs, evaluating performance achievements, and evaluating the effectiveness of HR interventions. These activities aimed at assessing the effects of HR and other interventions on performance cannot be conducted effectively in the absence of a good performance management system.