Talent management initiatives often struggle to show how important they are for the success of their company as measured by stock value. The simple reason is that they impact so many intangibles that it is difficult to show an incontestable causation. And we are not going to claim this here either.

However, we came up with a simple idea. As acknowledged in the industry, Taleo customers are as the most progressive in talent management. So we had to see if there was an impact overall in their stock performance when compared to a benchmark.

So we compiled an index comparing the companies using Taleo versus the Standard & Poor’s 500 to see if the obvious would be revealed. Here we see a widening gap between the performance of large companies that invest in people through talent management and those that do not. Therefore, we can say that talent drives superior performance.

This approach is barely new as some investment firms put it a step further and invest only in companies that invest in their people!

Here is what Lisa Rowan, Analyst and Program Manager at IDC had to say about our last study when we found Taleo client stock prices outperformed the S&P 500 by 49 percent in 2004:
“Large organizations have tremendous opportunities to increase performance through talent management initiatives. It is interesting to see the results as those in the S&P 500 – Taleo customer comparison. These findings support IDC’s research indicating that talent is emerging as a key differentiator in today’s knowledge economy.”