The latest report from AMR Research, “The Talent Acquisition Landscape” brings up a couple of interesting points for any organization’s talent strategy. The report looks at the issues of talent acquisition, and the solutions and vendors available today to solve them, but also comments on a big fear in this market.

First, as we know, talent acquisition solves a true business problem: ready availability of work capability – or in other terms, the labor force, and most important, quality of the new labor force. Indeed, every single manager in response to this growing need always says, “give me the best individual now!”

This simple need benefited in the last couple of years from the fluidity that the Internet provided and the many solutions created, such as the job board (for example, Monster to address the speed aspect) and the talent management system (for instance, Taleo), to integrate it all and mainly to solve the quality aspect.

AMR observes, “every company that we spoke with found significant positive results from implementing this software” going from reduced cost per hire by 40% to hiring cycle by 50%. In short their first point: the value is there and has been proven.

The second part of the report focuses on vendor comparisons and gives recommendations about how to look at solutions and the question many organizations struggle with: Shall I go with my HRIS platform extensions or with best of breed? My read here is that the only benefit AMR sees from SAP and Oracle is for existing “senior level support.” If you have that regardless of the platform, AMR underlines the significant ROI you can gain without any integration by best of breed. In short they recommend, “Don’t delay because of integration fears”, and use the success built by the first implementation to build the momentum to do more.

I agree with AMR here. We have observed that many organizations drove significant results on their talent acquisition best of breed implementation—good ROI, highly visible up to the CEO, even winning internal prizes—while integration work commonly happens in subsequent phases. Yes, integration is often built up into too much of a case. Let’s look at the numbers: 1,000 hires to be re-keyed in at 5 minutes each will take 83 hours for a data entry clerk. It will cost you less than $2,000, which in many cases is less than 5% of ONE agency placement. Would you be better off avoiding that agency placement by having better data mining capability or better recruiter adoption or have it all integrated?

I guess it is a paradox of organizations that want to be rational by forcing integrated processes, yet don’t want to save hundreds of thousands – if not millions – for fear of spending a couple of thousand to solve the small integration need. We definitely agree with AMR “Don’t delay because of integration fears”.