If you like historical data charts, read on. In the right column at the bottom of our blog under Links of Interest, we have posted historical data charts from our past research. On the Taleo Research Trend Watch page, you will find talent management data going back to 1998. Recent stats are not included, but can be found in our latest reports.

Looking back, we see how little the core issues have changed. For instance, 80% of candidates found it important or very important to have salary range information posted on a career website in 2001.

If you take a look back at the trends, you may find that the keys to successful talent initiatives today are sometimes the same. In other words, don’t forget the basics!

Enjoy the reading.

We commissioned CedarCrestone to undertake an independent survey of our customers. First the good news: 97% of our customers are satisfied with Taleo.

But this survey uncovered many more interesting results. The top five Taleo functional areas most frequently used are: Staffing Metrics Reporter, Workforce Mobility, ACE screening for top candidates, integration, and Taleo Agency.

Most of those solutions solve key business issues such as providing consistency by replacing costly and inefficient paper or email based processes. The most interesting elements are the three key values achieved: process standardization, process efficiency, and visibility into performance through metrics.

These were exactly the same value enablers highlighted in IBM’s CFO study that we covered in our 01/05/06 blog entry – Finance and HR On the Same Roadmap Going Forward – only a couple of days ago.

When we asked our customers what were the most important elements of their future talent management strategies, 59% said workforce planning, 27% succession planning, and only 23% mentioned performance management.

More details on the survey at www.taleo.com

The superiority of traditional best of breed or point solutions versus integrated ERP suites has been an everlasting debate in the industry. CIOs have heard conflicting messages from our industry for years—sometimes from the same software CEO!

At the AMR conference recently we heard SAP saying that “best of breed is dead” and Microsoft arguing that “the future will be best of breed”. But what is emerging on the horizon is a new platform concept for enterprise applications. That is service oriented architecture (SOA).

The selection of a SOA is likely going to be a big technology decision.

So what is SOA? SOA is not a product, although several vendors offer products which can form the basis of a SOA. Examples of such products include SAP NetWeaver, IBM WebSphere, or BEA AquaLogic.

A service oriented architecture is essentially a collection of services. These services communicate with each other using web services technologies such as XML, SOAP, and WSDL. We are seeing many application vendors realize the integration pain among their customers as an opportunity to have a SOA infrastructure in place to align those issues.

In fact by default you have vendors launching a SOA initiative to acknowledge the fact that point solutions must coexist. Nobody has a lead in delivering SOA and as AMR puts it: “the next four years will be marked by fierce platform wars as enterprise application and infrastructure vendors jockey to control and own the SOA platform”.

But again, as this IT shift around middleware and standards is taking place, it does answer our original question of what will prevail: best of breed.

As you are reading a blog right now, you probably know what it is. A blog is a weblog or web page where individuals express opinions and point of view on a specific topic using a diary or a journal.

Here on the Taleo Blog, we express our views on the talent management industry and the latest research. The tone on blogs is always less formal than traditional controlled marketing jargon. So a question could be: Are Fortune 500 companies using this new method of communicating?

We all know that companies like Sun Microsystems or Boeing use blogs as a general PR tool. Honeywell and Microsoft also sponsor blogs specifically for talent related issues.

But what about the rest of the Fortune 500? Are these mentioned companies the exceptions? Today you can in fact monitor how many are blogging at the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki.

So if your company is reluctant to blog today, send them to this website!

# 5: The battlefield for talent will shift.

"Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries. The shift to knowledge-intensive industries highlights the importance and scarcity of well-trained talent. The increasing integration of global labor markets, however, is opening up vast new talent sources. The 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones. For many companies and governments, global labor and talent strategies will become as important as global sourcing and manufacturing strategies."

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More details on other trends see www.mckinseyquarterly.com

Now and then we receive this question which is one variation of the statement:

“My managers don’t believe the people we are looking for are on the Internet. Is it smart for us to use that channel exclusively?”

Most of the time, those managers are wrong. Indeed, the latest Pew survey shows for the US that 83% of the people below 50 years old are using the Internet. But it gets better.

Internet use goes to 92% if you are looking for people with a college degree in any age group. And 94% of people making $75,000 a year are online.

What if you pay your people less than $30,000 a year? You still have 54% reach across all ages. Is Internet use universal? Not yet. But if you are betting on this trend and using the Internet as the main and recommended way to interact with your future employees, the answer is yes.

If your managers are still not convinced, a humorous response might be to look for the most unusual job descriptions online. These responses came over the Internet and were collected by a CareerBuilder.Com survey.

Here’s a sample of what they found:

Window washer for skyscrapers
Ocean scuba guide
Karate instructor
Lifeguard at nude beach
X-mas tree decorator

We all have a Hidden Head-Hunter (H3) in us. That is the premise of H3, a new employee referral service company.

This online referral concept is simple. You are hiring and ready to pay a referral bonus. You send me the position information using H3’s social networking technology that works like LinkedIn. If I refer you a candidate that you hire, you owe me the bonus. If I refer it to a friend in my network that finds the person, we share the amount! And H3 gets 10% on top.

What is a simple idea for this new startup that’s still in beta can possibly save a fair amount of agency costs. What are the other benefits for a small company to use H3? You are not bothered to pay each person individually. They do all the accounting for you and you pay only one bill.

Their success rate so far has been filling 10% of the positions that were posted through their network and they are targeting 33%. They targeted the SME market and with 150 customers, they seem to have made good progress. If you are a larger company and use already an employee referral system, this is a reminder that referrals are a great source of candidates.

The quote I like best (adapted from the famous JFK inauguration speech) comes from their CEO, Hans Geiskes an ex-Monster executive, and can be applied to all talent management departments when speaking to hiring managers: “Don’t ask what HR can do for you, ask what you can do for HR.”

And the answer is of course: keep those referrals coming!

Every one of us that surfs the Internet probably knows all about the small contextual paid search ads that are displayed on the right hand side of Google search results. Very few companies have been using them for talent sourcing, but Google actually posted some for their own internal needs.

As shown on the image below, this simple technique could be used by all companies and could radically change the talent sourcing industry without any acquisition for Google!

The latest IBM CFO survey that covered 889 CFOs and senior finance professionals in 74 countries disclosed an interesting roadmap for the future.

In order to transition from simply reporting historical financial data and assuring compliance to becoming more predictive and actively partnering with the business in decision making, several changes are needed.

This establishment of an agile finance organization, to a great extent, can be applied by HR leaders to building an Agile Talent Management Organization.

Agility is more than just being responsive to change. Three key actions must be delivered simultaneously: mitigate risk, improve performance, and enable growth.

Lately the HR focus in the US on the new OFCCP ruling on Internet applicant compliance – or co-employment for instance – may have made some HR leaders lean too much towards risk mitigation.

A strategic Talent Management organization sees OFCCP as only one aspect of the full spectrum. Looking only at risk will inevitably reduce you to a compliance department. Talent Management is way more and requires a holistic view. Finance faced this as well. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance put immense pressure on them.

Just like in finance, building an agile talent management model starts with a simplification and standardization of processes and technology to establish a single talent system of record with a talent master file for each individual. The second goal is a strong yet flexible analytics platform to provide immediate insight into your operations.

We believe that the on demand, software as a service (SaaS), configurable platform is uniquely designed to enable this model. A high level of configuration – as opposed to customization with the associated heavy upgrades – makes it the perfect technology infrastructure for the agile talent management model of the future.

In a recent Hudson survey of 10,000 US workers titled Why Employees Walk: 2005 Retention Initiatives Report, we found an interesting distinction that we have not seen before.

Most companies and good managers employ good people practices for increased productivity and retention. The traditional factors covered are salary, benefits, relationship with manager, work-life balance, opportunity for advancement, and training.
They ran the traditional gap analysis and the top opportunities to satisfy workers are in order within benefits, salary, and opportunities for advancement.

But like in all surveys, each individual is specific. Every successful manager must know those differences and selectively apply them individually to each employee.

The best first level distinction was the consistent higher expectation from women. Salary was ranked as very important by 87% of women versus 80% of men. Benefits 83% vs. 77%, relationship with manager 70% vs. 59%, work-life balance 77% vs. 68%, and training 57% vs. 49%.

The only exception is the opportunity for advancement. Men were more demanding with 58% vs. 51%.

This study shows the need for a high touch, specific approach to retention. To succeed at retaining your best employees, you need a flexible technology solution so you can tailor any talent management process you put in place. Why? Because we are dealing with a unique individual every time!