Business 2.0 is running an interesting series of short pieces by business figures. The one that caught our attention: “Make Hiring a Top Priority” the rule of Steve Ballmer.

“…I did all the hiring myself for a long time. No one joined Microsoft without my interviewing them and liking them. I made every offer, decided how much to pay them, and closed the deals. I can't do that anymore, but I still invest a significant amount of time in ensuring that we're recruiting the best people.”

That’s a pretty impressive attitude and commitment. Too often, I hear hiring managers complain about doing the job themselves. They should change their tune and follow the lead of a leader!

By the way did I tell you that Taleo is recruiting? If you’re a believer in the power of talent management to drive higher business performance, visit us online at: www.taleo.com/careers

Wherever you read today, you hear about the aging population, the need to get twice as many technical degrees by 2015, or the fact that turnover will increase more than you think.

According to a recent Spherion study, employers expect that 14% of their employees will leave next year. And if you ask the employees, 40% say they are planning to move on.

Many organizations are also dealing poorly with technology and the Internet for bringing in new qualified people. The volume of applications has been growing across the board in many companies as described in a Wall Street Journal article – often bringing only 2 hires for close to 200 applications.

So what is the solution? How can we compete better in a world where quality talent is getting scarcer and harder to identify?

I believe the key for any organization to succeed above the macro trends is to be able to respond fast and compete for talent. At Taleo, we have been pushing a simple solution for many years, and we believe now is the time for your organization to negotiate the turn if you have not done it yet.

In short: make sure you leverage a true competency platform.

Refer to our latest article on ERE to understand the path that led there.

Just when you thought you were receiving too many unqualified applications from Eastern Europe, get ready to accept the volume from many more developing countries.

The MIT Media lab is pushing a new prototype device at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis yesterday.

The device is a simplified PC, with an electricity-generating crank giving 10 minutes of autonomy for each one minute of sweat, no hard drive just flash memory, a WIFI to connect to the web, and open standard software.

In short, be ready to use talent management tools that offer at least some disqualification questions. But my bet is that you will soon need more than disqualification functionality. You will need true skills based screening. Why? Because many candidates will quickly figure out how to get a Skype telephone number in your country and you may waste a lot of time before you realize that your final candidates are 10,000 miles away and that you don’t sponsor immigration visas!

“Peter Drucker's Legacy: It's All About the People” is the title the Wall Street Journal gave to the obituary of the most influential business guru on the past century.

We at Taleo and in this industry are in the “business of people” and can’t agree more!
He was the person who created the phrase “knowledge worker” and the core of Mr. Drucker's advice according to people who dealt with him was: "Successful enterprises create the conditions to allow their employees to do their best work."

The Washington Post noted: “Central to his philosophy was the belief that highly skilled people are an organization's most valuable resource…”

But aside from the lessons you can find in his books, the most important legacy he will leave is to look at the example Mr. Drucker gave to us through his life. He wrote 39 books and worked for over 60 years.

This is maybe a key lesson to understand today as we foresee the 77 million baby boomers starting to retire next year. As Yale professor Jeffrey Garten says clearly in BusinessWeek: “Keep Boomers on the Job”.

So maybe the inspiration of Peter Drucker’s long and fruitful career is part of the solution to the closing remark of the BusinessWeek article: “In just a few years, the aging workforce … will become a central societal problem.”

This week I am in Australia to meet customers, conduct roundtables and release our new Taleo Research report on ROI of Talent Acquisition and Mobility. Because of its Commonwealth heritage and its immigration policy and history, Australia is an interesting blend between Europe and the US. But because of its proximity to the emerging markets – China and India – some organizations have operations in Sydney that are deeply involved in the growth of this part of the world.

We were lucky to have HP’s Asia Pacific manager share how they have been using Taleo, especially describing the challenges that Japan represented and the hyper growth in China, where HP is hiring as many as 1,100 graduates at a time.

The recurring theme that I observed is the labor shortage. It is often more acute than anywhere else, probably due to the truly isolated and controlled population flow. The source often quoted for that is Business Work & Ageing .

Many similarities to organizations all over the world are noticeable such as the growing imperative to control contingent labor as well as agency’s candidates, usage of blog and increased emphasis on the internal labor market. To this point, one of our local customers (one of the largest financial institutions in Sydney) even had the CEO acknowledge the importance of this initiative.

Yet the most important aspect is the fact that Australians are very open to strategies to bring skilled people to Australia, and explore many tactics to either make Australians come back or other foreign nationals come. As I’ve witnessed here, we are really getting into a global labor market and with the internet as a tool the competition is only starting!

The Wall Street Journal reported on a briefing held on November 1st by Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie, where they showed how they were planning to offer Microsoft Office and Windows products as on demand services. They also described a way to compete with Google by targeting the online advertising market.

Ray Ozzie has a long software innovation track record behind him with VisiCalc, Lotus Notes, and Groove Networks. So it will be hard to bet against Microsoft’s latest effort with what they are calling Windows Live and Office Live services by subscription.

When Microsoft announces a major move into software as a service (SaaS), it is always a good sign for companies like Taleo because on demand delivery has always been our core model. But switching to on demand could be a rude awakening and major cultural shift for some public companies who try to convert big license fee revenue into a recurring subscription model. How fast can you make the transition? Will the street adapt its valuation models of market capitalization?

We predict that unless the street adapts its valuation models to reflect the coming shift from upfront license purchases to recurring subscription revenue, billions of market capitalization could fall through the cracks!

HR often complains that they are not perceived to be strategic and don’t represent much of the overall budget of a company. We have to acknowledge that indeed, as shown on the chart below, HR and certainly talent management as a percentage of revenue is often below 1%.

But for all of us that believe that business performance is driven by talent, it is at the center!

More importantly, this chart shows the huge leverage that superior Talent Management practices have. From a productivity standpoint to turnover impact, organizations with sub-optimal talent management practices are doomed to mediocrity.

If you want more details, please attend our webinar next week that will describe our latest research on this topic.

Today we released a report about contingent labor. The results show a huge potential. Consider this:

• 92 percent cite inconsistent costs and a lack of price control a primary “pain point” with their current contingent labor workforce.
• 69 percent are highly concerned about their organization’s compliance with industry regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC, FDIC, etc.
• 66 percent are highly concerned about employee misclassification and co-employment risk.
• 50 percent do not know if their company has ever defended itself against a lawsuit associated with contingent labor.
• 33 percent could not report which, if any, department holds primary responsibility for minimizing their company’s risk and liability as it relates to contingent workforce management.
• 21 percent could not estimate their company’s current annual spending for contingent labor in the U.S.
• 18 percent could not estimate the number of suppliers currently providing contingent labor to their company

The report Contingent Workforce Management: Market Trend Survey Key Findings can be downloaded here you will also be able to access the report Contingent Workforce Management: A Recipe for Success.
The trend report is based on in depth interviews with 25 Fortune 500 companies.