BusinessWeek’s Innovation Predictions 2008 slideshow featuring Shape-Shifting Enterprises and the power of innovative on demand software made us think about looping back to see how many predictions actually come true.

Predictive research papers carry the inherent risk of launching extrapolated trends into a stormy sea of unknowns. However, they usually carry a little more weight than the gut-feeling predictions you see published near the end of every calendar year.

As we look forward to 2008, let's first take a look back. In 2004, Deloitte published a seminal study called: It’s 2008: Do You Know Where Your Talent Is?

With 20/20 hindsight we’ll see if they got their foresight right:

The Rise of Talent Markets
HR executives often define their efforts in terms of policies and programs. Instead, they must provide analytical insights and support to help leaders improve their talent decisions, not just implement them.

Better talent decisions are based on better information. With a robust enterprise talent system of record, you can consistently make better decisions. But the importance of analyzing and reporting on the talent process itself cannot be overstressed.

The Sad Statistics of the Global Labor Pool
By 2008, a wealth of skills and experience will begin to disappear from the job market. The first members of the Baby Boom generation will turn 62, the average retirement age in the large, developed economies of North America, Europe and Asia.

Baby boomers are indeed retiring but maybe a little later than predicted. Unified recruiting + performance requires advanced succession planning tools. But as we know, many organizations are late to this party even after four years of advance notice.

The Power of Connection and Collaboration
..brand identity is clear to employees, and it helps shape their behavior…By taking care of critical talent and stoking a highly collaborative culture, the airline demonstrates the power and profits achievable by investing in people.

Brand identity clearly extends to the employment brand. And the war for talent starts at the career site where the candidate experience begins. Collaborative culture also extends into the goals, performance, career, and succession processes where you can now deliver a superior user experience.

To work best, critical employees must initiate and drive their own paths to performance.

Self-service is more than just administrative convenience. It’s the transformational gateway to empowering all the people in the organization to own the performance process and achieve a higher level of business performance.

Holiday bargains, sales, and decorations attract legions of shoppers this time of year. With those kinds of numbers out and about, you could take advantage of the opportunity to increase your employment brand visibility while doing some actual recruiting and hiring.

That’s what our customer Starwood Hotels & Resorts is doing successfully. As the HR manager comments in Need Hires? Try the Mall:

“This is the time of year people are out shopping. There’s high traffic and they’re curious. You wouldn’t believe the number of people we get who stop in because they’re curious.”

And while they’re there, make sure to sell the whole employment package, the total compensation package—benefits, healthcare coverage, retirement programs and more—to your candidates.

Effective recruiting and retention strategies should include creative sourcing techniques that also showcase your employment brand regardless of the season.

Getting the advantage in attracting and retaining what bestselling author Dan Tapscott calls the Net Generation (N-Gen) born between the 1970s and 1990s means looking hard at the behavioral demographics.

Tapscott’s books include Growing Up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. He is also the founder and CEO of New Paradigm which published Rethinking Information Technology and Competitive Advantage Part II: Strategy in the Age of Collaboration.

These changes have implications for recruiting, training and engaging employees. Initiating the relationship with N-Gen requires that companies brand differentiate themselves in the talent marketplace, use personal networks to recruit candidates, and create a mutual selection model. New idea: Rethinking the résumé

A recent study by the Association of Technology Staffing Companies confirmed that social networking sites have become top sources of candidates in terms of quantity but not necessarily quality. IT recruitment firms responses are cited in Tech Recruiters Turn to Facebook:

• 58% consider social sites more useful than print ads.
• 49% found them more effective than Internet banner ads.
• 70% preferred job boards in terms of candidate quality.

That’s a mixed message. But one thing remains very clear. If you want N-Gen’s innovative talents, you have to update your hiring processes and career sites to meet their expectations. You must differentiate your employment brand and make it green. And you need to be connected with social networks and social utilities.

The Slacker Manager blog starts a post on annual performance reviews and then connects on some important performance management ideas in 5 Habits of Highly Successful Slacker Managers.

Three of the five habits are listed below:

• Link your firm’s goals, to your department’s goals, to your team’s goals, to your goals, to your associate’s goals, and share the links with your team.

• Focus on your, and your team’s, strengths, and find ways to partner with those who can fill in the gaps.

Note that these habits demonstrate how organizations can achieve greater success by shifting responsibility from top down management to empowering people with the collaborative tools they need to take charge of goal, career, performance, and succession management.

Empower Employees. Deploy tools that employees can use to take charge of their careers so they can build collaborative networks with their peers, see dynamic career paths, and have new internal employment opportunities pushed to them on a regular basis.

Empower Managers. Offer a single, unified view of talent management information and processes on a single screen with easy-to-use collaboration and communication tools.

Empower Executives. Establish real-time succes¬sion plans for top managers and high potential em¬ployees with immediate visibility into key talent information to drive better business decisions.

Empower HR. Transform talent management practices and build a new mindset throughout the organization with the executive decision sup¬port, manager operational tools, and employee personalized self-management tools everyone needs.

We all know the annual ritual of performance evaluation is not working. We need tools with a superior user experience that deliver real business impact. The new high performance workforce and workplace require business goals aligned with people, real career mobility and development, agile succession plans, and holistic performance views. In other words, Performance 2.0: Empowering the Next Level of Business Results.

SMBs have had to settle for simple career sites, want ads, and limited access to job boards for sourcing tools. They could fill positions but missed relationship building with passive candidates, lacked sophisticated job board tools, and had to manually troll the social networks. But now technology and targeted marketing have leveled the playing field.

Read Grabbing Talent’s Attention to learn how you can take advantage of new concepts in sourcing talent, regardless of your business size.

Tips on how you can use technology to gain big advantages at a low cost are provided in Entrepreneur.com’s article Recruiting Employees 2.0.

"Help Wanted" Meets "Buy it Now" from Inc.com has some great examples of using marketing techniques to boost recruiting efforts while establishing a strong employment brand.

And Harvard Business explains how you can Showcase Your Company's Employee Experience to communicate your company’s signature experience and employment value proposition.

The bottom line is that small and midsize companies can now get the same talent recruiting and sourcing advantages that large organizations enjoy. SMBs can recruit faster from a wider network of qualified candidates, build stronger relationships with active and passive jobseekers, and earn a higher return on their sourcing investments.

As an extension of Taleo Business Edition, the new Taleo Smart Sourcing solution gives SMBs email integration with our Outlook Plug-In, the job board advantages of eQuest Prophesy, FreeBug, and Advantage, and our Facebook Platform application called Now Hiring!

Now SMBs can effectively manage their candidate sourcing relationships using a quicker, wider, and more efficient sourcing process with all the technology advantages of much larger organizations with greater resources.

With the war for talent raging, HR is doing what it can to recruit and retain top talent by managing candidate relationships. Meanwhile, your sales and support staff are focused on managing customer relationships. Depending on who in the organization you ask, you may get the same response as Charles Dickens’ opener in A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

There are now two CRMs: customer relationship management (CRM) on the sales side and candidate relationship management (CRM) on the HR side. If you are a recruiter, your candidates are your customers. For them, the recruiting relationship begins at your career site.

Your career site says a lot about your business. It’s the front line in the war for talent. Candidates are shopping for a career; first impressions can make or break recruiting success.

Register now for a webcast sponsored by Taleo and Pinstripe to find out about THE TEN DEMANDMENTS: Rules to Live by in the Age of the Demanding Candidate.

Take a closer look at the recruiters' CRM and you may be saying: “"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done…”

Turnover rates, retention strategies, tenure – different terms circling the same issue. How long do people stay in their jobs?

A global view discussed in Welcome to the world of job-hopping, finds:

According to research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, while Greeks workers tend to stay put for 13 years, French employees for 12 and Germans for a decade, workers in Britain and Ireland have a devil-may-care approach to job mobility. Yet neither is as mobile as Americans, who move jobs on average every four years.

Among senior executives, the expectations are more traditional, according to an Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) study.

Of the European executives surveyed, 39% had worked for their current organisation for between two and five years, with 51% estimating they will have worked for between four and seven organisations by the end of their career. Forty percent of Europeans stated that a quarter of the senior management staff at their current organisation had been with the company for less than five years.

Conversely, the College Student Career Confidence Survey of recent college graduates and college students throughout the U.S found:

• 61% of college students expect to remain with their first employers for less than three years.
• Only 16% anticipate continuing to change jobs as quickly throughout their careers.
• Instead, 34% said they plan to change jobs every 3 to 4 years, and 50% expect to switch employers every 5 years or longer.

And consider the lightning speed job changes of “Generation Sean” striving for 52 jobs in 52 weeks!

The risk for losing employees is ever present according to The Walker Loyalty Report for Loyalty in the Workplace, 2007, which found:

Although the percentage of truly loyal employees – 34 percent – is unchanged from 2005, the percentage of high-risk employees (36 percent) now outnumbers those who are truly loyal. (High-risk employees plan to leave their current employer within the next two years.)

So you should be focusing on retention strategies at all levels of your workplace or your employees may be the ones singing Hello, I Must Be Going.

I don’t know that I’d go as far as the Perth Leadership Institute’s release saying the [credit] crisis was due at least in part to a lack of business acumen on the part of managers and executives in the industry and that this has been perpetuated by the lack of leadership development programs that identify and develop business acumen.

But I do agree with study results tying leadership training and development to business success.

Source: Human Resource Executive® and ERC Dataplus

And also with the subhead of the Fortune article, How top companies breed stars: The world's best companies realize that no matter what business they're in, their real business is building leaders.

Leadership development is a vital component of talent management. Concerns about leadership vacuums are highlighting its importance. Although leadership development may not be at the core of today’s economic catastrophe, it plays a key role in driving business success and deserves increased attention.

The Ipsos Public Affairs survey of US workers commissioned by the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority (FCEDA) found:
• 88% consider themselves to be creative.
• 75% thought their employer valued creativity.
• 63% said their positions were creative.
• 61% thought their companies were creative.

Fairfax County sees these results pointing to a creativity gap in the workplace; and it may be that employee creativity is being stifled at work. The book The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida ties economic success to creative people in creative settings.

And Larry Huston’s interview recorded in Innovation Networks: Looking for Ideas Outside the Company posits that future competitive advantage will depend on "innovation networks" -- individuals and organizations outside a company that can help it solve problems and find new ideas for creating growth.

We think talent drives business performance because top people are passionate about innovation and creativity. The numbers in the Ipsos study show a steady decline from how people feel about their own creativity down to the organization as an entity.

What if everyone knew how their personal goals tied directly to the organization’s goals? What if performance was part of the culture instead of an annual compliance event? What if everyone could see a clear career path based on personal growth?

What if nearly everyone in your organization considered themselves to be creative? What if everyone felt they were in a creative position in a creative company…

The eWeek blog entry Wither the Resume? reminds us how quickly we have evolved in how people apply for jobs. Capturing information has advanced rapidly from manual scanning and sorting, resume parsing, and email resume attachments to a full automated online application process. The unstructured options for gathering information on candidates have also grown as fast as the Internet.

Social networking profiles are getting more popular for everyone, a staple for Generation Y—a certainty for Generation V—and are good for referrals. Facebook offers new recruiting opportunities. Second Life avatars are virtual recruiting targets where you can sell to the persona and hire the person. Video resumes attract attention but expose new issues. And Googling candidates may have more risks than rewards.

We agree that career sites featuring Web 2.0 recruiting features may have eliminated the need for a traditional resume other than as a form of marketing collateral that’s left behind at the personal interview.

However, we feel the consistent methodology of a structured profile in a single system of record still delivers the most advantages and rewards for candidates and companies.

Online applications get recruiters closer to the person’s true abilities, certifications, and experience faster and more efficiently than intermediary online personas. Capturing data with an online form enables automated pre-screening and proactive internal talent pool recruitment – in the real world.

The Veritude study titled Working Together, Working Apart: When It Comes To Workforce Planning, HR and Business Leaders Agree Their Working Relationship Needs Work sounds like the marriage counseling conundrum, “He said, she said.”

There’s no question that the focus of HR and business leaders differs operationally – that’s why they have different jobs! But to drive effectiveness, it is instructive to understand the view from the other side.

There’s long been concern about HR not measuring up, yet we also see opportunities in HR’s evolving role. The Veritude study found alignment between the two groups in identifying talent acquisition and recruitment as the top strategic business challenges and provides these top line recommendations for HR:

1. Be Strategic
2. Develop Strong Working Relationships by Setting Goals
3. Keep Your Eye on Operations

Current business challenges such as cost cutting, rapid growth, increased competition, and entering emerging markets all have talent dimensions. Success requires strategic talent management practiced as a partnership by HR professionals and business leaders.

Listening to The Beatles song When I’m 64 from Cirque du Soleil’s LOVE soundtrack brings to mind one of the most sobering demographic details in the war for talent: the huge wave of baby boomers heading for retirement.

The facts have been out there for a long time. Large US companies may lose 40 percent or more of their top-level talent by 2010; nearly 77 million workers will soon be eligible for retirement. Yet it seems the business community’s focus remains on the travails of replacing CEOs, as evident in articles such as No More Bench Strength. The reality is the baby boomer leadership vacuum extends much deeper in organizations.

Ernst & Young’s 2007 Aging U.S. Workforce Survey of Fortune 1000 HR executives offers these contradictory statistics:

• 62% say retirements would cause talent gaps or brain drain.
• 41% are concerned about middle management brain drain.
• 75% of those using succession planning monitor only senior management.

The lack of comprehensive succession planning in companies is one of the most concerning talent issues today. Succession planning should be a pervasive practice throughout organizations, not reserved for senior management.

The rash of recent CEO departures elevates a high profile subset of succession situations. But the issue of organizational bench strength is not all about the team manager on the field. Winning organizations develop succession plans for the whole team from the pitching staff to the reserve outfielders based on performance metrics.

Notably, Watson Wyatt’s 2007 HR Technology Trends study of 182 large companies found that a third of them plan to adopt new technology solutions for succession planning in the next two years. Maybe that’s a hint of Good Day Sunshine.

We’ve all used Google to search for people. These can include colleagues, friends, and even old flames. More specifically, you can search and connect with friends and groups using social networking sites.

Consequently, there’s been no lack of discussion about employers checking out candidates online—especially on sites such as Facebook and MySpace—to do some amateur “background checking” on potential employees. For example, a solid one-half of advertising and marketing executives admitted to it.

So here’s a turn of the tables. The article, Cyber-vetting managers face backlash, cites:

A study by UK recruitment firm Manpower has found nearly half of workers would feel outraged if they discovered an employer had used social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo or Friends Reunited to look up information about them. And more than half – 56 per cent – said they would consider such actions unethical.

Where’s the moral high ground? The right answer is to treat all candidates respectfully which includes providing a good candidate experience from the first point of contact all the way through. Good communication (from both sides) and disclosure about the process will garner admiration, not condemnation.

More importantly, don’t choose to peep into the social persona or avatar of an individual and cut corners on real background checking. That could expose your company to avoidable risks.

How many times have you seen the phrase “getting a seat at the executive table” associated with the aspirations of HR business recognition? Maybe it’s time to realize that HR can do more than just sit there, especially considering the Top Trends Changing the Face of HR. HR can set the table by fostering a talent mindset that aligns human capital with business goals.

Two of the new roles described in the Role of HR Executive is Undergoing Big Changes had resonating bullets that hit the mark for us because together they combine talent management and on demand delivery:

1. The talent manager.
Talent management is a complex collection of connected HR processes that delivers a simple fundamental benefit for any organization: higher business performance.

We all know that teams with the best people perform at a higher level. Leading organizations know that exceptional business performance is driven by superior talent. People are the difference. Talent management is the strategy.

2. The self-service leader.
With software as a service (SaaS) delivered on demand, HR can now provide new processes directly to executives, managers, and employees without IT intervention. HR has succeeded in self-service benefits, employee information, and payroll stubs to cut costs and add convenience. We say: the more browser, the better. Enterprise recruiting and performance management offer the same great opportunities for quick self-service wins.

Of course, as Gary Salton shows in Human Resources VP’s “Seat at the Table”, the skills of HR executives must be up to the task…

Preliminary findings are out from Staffing.org’s 2007 Job Seeker’s and Employee’s Report. Among them:

50% of the respondents visit [company job sites] regularly or occasionally to look for opportunities. However, familiarity and experience has also fostered discrimination. 75% of all respondents are now consciously ranking the user experience on these sites and “red carding” sites that don’t measure up. 21% say that a poor website would “definitely” affect their decision to apply for a job.

A legacy career site can not only chase away jobseekers, but also customers. As we found in research published in our paper, Career Site 2.0: Taking the Lead in the War for Talent, the perception of your employment brand works both ways:

Candidates, commonly dissatisfied with their jobseeking experience, are also consumers. They transfer their jobseeking experience to the corporate brand, and they draw on their consumer web experiences to set their expectations for their online jobseeking experience.

Implementing a next generation candidate experience will attract and engage higher quality candidates and ultimately help win the war for talent.

For the past two years, CedarCrestone has researched and published an independent customer value and satisfaction study. The results of this year’s study reveal once again that organizations that employ talent management processes get significant value in return.

Value highlights in the study include dramatic results in these areas:

Efficiency Gains. Weyerhaeuser saves from 10% to 12% by replacing the manual scanning of resumes, as reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Process Standardization. AREVA Group established consistent global processes for 58,000 people speaking 20 languages across 100 countries.

Increased Process Visibility. Hewlett-Packard increased quality of hire and manager satisfaction while reducing cost and time to hire.

Metrics for Management. Dell measures quality of hire using new hire and hiring manager surveys to gauge success in the recruiting process.

Faster Time to Hire. On average, customers report an average time to hire reduction of 17 days to 35 days, one day below the Saratoga best practice metric.

Lower Cost Per Hire. Direct Energy cut time to hire nearly in half and cost per hire from $10,000 to approximately $5,000.

Talent management delivers business value.

Nice coverage by Human Resource Executive Online of the JPMorgan Chase Takes U.S. Recruiting Global presentation by Judy Lannin Panagakos, the VP of HR Operations at JPMorgan Chase at the HR Technology conference.

Take a scroll down to the Global Recruiting subhead to read the details on how JPMorgan Chase will soon have all 172,000 global positions covered in more than 50 countries with consistent processes and global flexibility.

What listeners seemed most intrigued by was how a company with assets of $1.3 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries could so successfully and seamlessly implement transitions from individual, paper-based systems to a central HR system in so many different cultures.

A new study from DDI and HCI titled Talent Management in Motion: Keeping Up with an Evolving Workforce queried hundreds of HR executives in North America on the evolving workplace. Here are the findings on workplace trends:

Factors Expected to Increase in Organizations Over the Next Three Years

These are indications that organizations expect to increase their focus on talent management activities – especially investment in employee development, and even more importantly, improving each employee’s view of their contribution to strategic business goals.

That’s good news. As noted in the related article, organizations must “…ensure that employees—at all levels—see the clear connection between their day-to-day activities and the success of the organization.” That’s the vision baked into our performance solution.

In the manufacturing and industrial ages, organizations were measured by physical asset value. In the talent age, higher value is placed on knowledge and innovation – a shift from bricks to brains. If knowledge is king, then the risks a company faces are primarily talent related. You can call the symptoms brain drain, knowledge loss, or revolving door syndrome due to the nomadic career hunting of Generation Y. But they are all conditions that can be treated with a sharper focus on talent management.

The Boston Consulting Group’s Opportunities for Action article Hidden Talent discusses the impact of transitions on an organization’s collective knowledge pool. These mass talent transitions can be driven by business events that happen in a month or demographic trends that take years to run their course. They include downsizings, mergers, and baby boomer retirements.

In any case, you need to be ready in advance with a clear strategy, workforce mobility tools, and a system of record to build your world-class talent factory for a higher level of business performance.

We are probably all aware of the impact of the book What Color is Your Parachute? on the career process. But have you thought about the color applicants see when they consider your organization? You better hope they see a green employment brand or you may be seeing red.

Here is a roundup of recent articles on the power of green recruiting:

• Environmentally conscious candidates representing Generations X and Y are looking to work for green employment brands.

• According to Harris, more than 33% of Americans are more inclined to work for a green company.

• A survey by Sun Microsystems said 73% percent of workers believe it’s important that their employer is environmentally and socially responsible.

• GE and others are gaining competitive advantage in the hunt for top talent with green programs.

• The Brown-Wilson Group’s Black Book of Outsourcing: 2007 Green Outsourcer Report says more than 88% of executives see environmental commitment as influencing their outsourcing selection process.

• Human Resource Executive Online outlines how companies like Dow Chemical successfully emphasize their green employment brand in the recruiting process.

The green perception of your employment brand starts at your career site. If the process is completely automated without the use of paper, then candidates can tell your company has taken the steps to enable green recruiting.

Providing flexible work arrangements to attract, accommodate, and retain workers is an emerging strategy in tight talent markets—including in Singapore where turnover rates range between 15 to 25 percent.

The HR Trends Survey Singapore found flexi-work arrangements earn good feedback from employees.

Tight talent markets call for superior talent acquisition combined with ongoing talent management practices that drive retention of top performers. That enables your organization to meet its goals instead of experiencing poor performance resulting from having a revolving door for employees.

A survey of 1,350 European executives from 27 countries conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the European Association for Personnel Management (EAPM) concluded that managing talent is the most critical challenge today. This quote from Hans Böhm, general secretary of EAPM, stood out for us:

"Human resources has never played a more important role in business than it does today…HR executives must face these challenges to draw on human capital as a major source of competitive advantage."

The Future of HR: Key Challenges Through 2015 lists talent management as their primary concern with this foreboding statement in the Executive Summary:

Talent shortages loom, both in Europe and in new markets abroad, and companies must take steps now if they hope to address these shortages—and avert disaster.

Based on our own research in careers site recruiting in the UK, and in France—where 75 percent of SBF 120 companies have a careers section on their corporate website, yet only a slim majority (55 percent) allow candidates to apply online through a structured application form that can support a fully automated end to end recruitment process—we believe there are unprecedented opportunities for European companies to use automated recruiting methods and establish competitive advantage.

SAP, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe have all recently announced new forays into the on demand application space where software as a service rules. Notably absent is Oracle, but that’s no joke and also our punch line.

Software-as-a-Service and Web 2.0 advantages are well known. Lower costs, greater flexibility, and higher user adoption are just a few of the benefits to organizations of all sizes from Fortune 100 leaders to growing businesses.

Two articles caught our eye on the topic. Forrester Says 'Design for People, Build for Change' describes four important design factors that SaaS and Web 2.0 applications are uniquely positioned to deliver:

1. Business processes adapt to changing business conditions.
2. Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity.
3. Processes, tasks and the associated information always maintain context.
4. Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the business.

3 Guiding Principles to Technology Acceptance outlines the keys to manager and employee user adoption in an interview with Bob Otto, the former CIO and CTO of the USPS:

I have three guiding principles—principles I've used since I was young. First, standardize everything. If you find a process you like, standardize it. Second, centralize everything you can. If you have services in five different places and you can centralize them, you will have reliability, predictability. Third, simplify. The computer has taken over your life, so I want it to be intuitive.

At Taleo, we’ve seen the advantages that Web 2.0 technologies offer and incorporated them into our continuously evolving recruiting and performance management SaaS applications to make them more personalized, intuitive, and socially and contextually connected. Why? Because our customers benefit by being able to drive a higher level of business performance at less cost.

Now let’s look at the other side. Information Week reported that when queried on Oracle’s SaaS strategy, Larry Ellison provided our punch line:

Larry Ellison told financial analysts in a quarterly earnings call yesterday that Oracle hasn't participated in the software-as-a-service trend because there's no money to be made there.

In the same article, Mary Hayes Weier delivers the bottom line:

“If a traditional software vendor tries to convince you that SaaS is no good for your specific need, don't take it as gospel. Do the research and find out if what you want really does need to be on premise. After all, it's your money.”

Dave Ulrich, professor in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and co-founder of the RBL Group, boldly headlines on his website:

“HR must give value or give notice.”

Ulrich has some fun with the alphabet in his Workforce Management article: The Talent Trifecta. First he cites a 3 Cs formula:

Competence x Commitment x Contribution = Talent

Then he moves to the Bs when describing the options for investing in talent improvement:

Buying: recruiting, sourcing and securing new talent into the organization.
Building: helping people grow through training, job assignments or life experiences.
Borrowing: bringing knowledge into the organization through advisors or partners.
Bounding: promoting the right people into key jobs.
Bouncing: removing poor performers from their jobs and/or the organization.
Binding: retaining top talent.

Next, he creates an acronym—VOI2C2E—to articulate what drives employee commitment:

Vision
Opportunity
Incentives
Impact
Community
Communication
Entrepreneurship or flexibility

He writes: Hoping for talent won’t make it happen. Ultimately, talent measures should be derived to track how well individuals are developing their skills and how well the organization develops its talent bench.

There has been a lot written about the definition of “it”: talent. Besides the alliterative devices, this article is worth a read. Then explore the solutions that make “it” happen.

HR process delivery has worked wonders using web technology in the areas of self-service benefits enrollment, employee information updates, and online payroll stubs. They dramatically cut costs while providing improved convenience for employees.

Watson Wyatt’s Changing Strategies in HR Technology and Outsourcing - 2007 HR Technology Trends Survey reveals that many companies still rely on legacy desktop systems or paper transactions to support their talent and performance management processes. Here are two of the key findings:

• Most companies are satisfied with HR delivery in the retirement and health and welfare areas but are not as satisfied with HR delivery in the talent management area.

• Many companies are looking to implement technology solutions for their talent management programs.

People who connect to these key HR processes are now very comfortable with web browsers in their consumer lives. If they can order books on Amazon.com, they may wonder why they can’t perform recruiting or performance management transactions on a browser, anytime and anywhere. And they are right.

Organizations can meet their employee and candidate expectations while they also take advantage of the value opportunity in ROI. Now you can cut costs and enable a higher level of business performance.

You can easily figure out the premise from the title of the study, The Gap Between Needing and Doing: A Survey on Why Some Companies Don’t Act on Strategic Workforce Planning Needs, and How Successful Companies Do.

The report focuses on another disconnect—again between business challenges and business practices. Survey says:

Eighty-one percent identify talent competition and 53 percent the aging workforce as critical factors affecting their workforce, yet only 46 percent are doing workforce planning of any kind – a clear gap between those who know they need workforce planning and those who are doing it.

The top three barriers to workforce planning?

#1 - Clear accountability (59%)
#2 - Lack of resources (54%)
#3 - Analysis paralysis (50%).

My favorite is #3. It’s clear that identifying the problem does not solve it. You’ve got to do something about it! Talent management solutions are a good place to start.

According to a recent study, in addition to books, card catalogs, and a quiet place to read, nearly 100 percent of public libraries also offer free Internet access. This means the local public library has become a key starting point in the hiring process for potential job seekers with no online access at home.

The Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2006-2007 conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University (FSU) lists this as one of three main themes:

Providing education resources and services for job seekers are the Internet services most critical to the role of public libraries. Seventy-three percent of libraries report they are the only source of free public access to computers and the Internet in their communities.

Especially for retailers, the library channel is where many job seekers will naturally connect to your open positions, especially as the trend towards accepting online applications for hourly positions continues.

Douglas Ready and Jay Conger, visiting professors in organizational behavior at the London Business School, recently published an article titled How to Fill the Talent Gap in The Wall Street Journal. Based on research with dozens of companies, they identified the main talent problems and solutions.
Here is a quick summary:

THE PROBLEMS

1. EMERGING MARKETS
2. NARROW THINKING
3. DEMOGRAPHICS AND ECONOMICS
4. THE EXPECTATIONS GAP
5. BLIND SPOTS

THE SOLUTIONS

1. MAKE YOUR TALENT PLAN MATCH YOUR BUSINESS PLAN
2. TALENT MANAGEMENT IS EVERYONE'S JOB
3. GLOBAL EXCELLENCE NEEDS LOCAL EFFECTIVENESS
4. SUPPORT MATTERS
5. MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

Our key learning from this article is summarized in this quote:

Companies are racing to find solutions, but most of them are making a crucial error: They're treating these problems as separate issues… companies must rethink how they hire, train and reward their employees, placing those tasks at the heart of their business plans. In doing so, they have an opportunity to address all these separate problems with a unified plan, rather than waste time and resources attacking each of the issues individually.

If you need justification to establish or extend your talent management strategies, attach this article and The Hackett Group’s report to your business case. They provide a nice one-two punch to get you started on building your own world class talent factory.

They also align well with many of the themes and presentations at Taleo WORLD: Performance 2.0 last week. Hundreds of conference attendees had the opportunity to view our new Taleo Performance products that run natively integrated on our Taleo Enterprise Edition platform for an end-to-end talent solution. Now large global organizations that are already using Taleo—such as P&G cited in the article—have the opportunity to directly address these issues and build their world class talent factories using a holistic talent process for a higher level of business performance.

Bloggers Jason Corsello, Phil Wainewright, Zach Thomas, Josh Bersin, and Mike Potter have all weighed in on Taleo Performance. Their observations support how a next generation of talent management that’s focused on usability can be the engine that truly powers the talent factory and business performance.

Serving 77 of the Fortune 100 and 50 percent of the FTSE 100, The Hackett Group is well positioned to do a study on the economic payback of talent management practices. So the results in their new Book of Numbers research volume Talent Management: Buzzword or Holy Grail? should ring loud and clear from the HR suite to the board room.

Based on more than 125 HR benchmarks over three years, the companies using talent management outperformed their peers in four key financial categories. The results point to nearly $400 million in returns for a typical Fortune 500 enterprise:

• Earnings improvement of nearly 15%.
• 22% improvement in net profit margin.
• 49% improvement in return on assets.
• 27% improvement in return on equity.

We’ve documented similarly dramatic results with our studies over the years in the Hidden ROI of Talent Acquisition & Mobility and other papers. We’ve also seen the connection between our customers using talent management practices and their overall performance in our Taleo Stock Index.

Thanks to Jim Holincheck, Jason Averbook, and Forbes for the linkage to this important study. As we say at Taleo: Talent Drives Performance.

A next generation performance management solution is clearly needed by employees and employers alike, according to the results of a new Taleo study conducted online by Harris Interactive® of 2,416 adult Americans.

Here are just a few of the key findings:

• Only 12% of full and part-time workers say that their employers give them a career path plan.

• 43% of respondents employed full/part-time said opportunities for advancement are a key motivator.

• The top reasons currently employed respondents cited as having voluntarily left jobs were pay that wasn’t competitive (35%) and a lack of growth opportunities (34%).

• 57% of those employed full/part-time say that they have never had a performance review or said it was neutral to not useful.

• Only 27% of employees who have ever had a performance review considered their most recent one to be extremely useful.

As has been the theme of many blog postings, successful talent management requires a unified, integrated approach encompassing internal mobility, talent acquisition, onboarding, performance management, career planning, succession planning, goals management, and insightful talent management reporting.

Today, Taleo released a new performance management solution called Taleo Performance that runs on our leading talent management platform. What makes it different? It’s uniquely designed to transform the way you align, develop, and motivate talent. It delivers intuitive usability for viral adoption, productivity and social networking tool integration, and a common talent acquisition and performance database. That powerful combination makes it a timely and important solution to achieve a new level of business performance: Performance 2.0.

Check out Taleo’s approach to driving your organization’s business performance instead of tolerating employee dissatisfaction, and get more information on the survey results and methodology.

One of our partners has revealed another opportunity for HR to choose a more strategic road in the journey to business performance. IBM Global Services conducted a survey about HR transformation and reveals their findings in the report, A New Approach, A New Capability: The strategic side of Human Resources. It opens with this warning from former SHRM president and CEO, Helen Drinan:

“If HR does not force its way into the heart of strategic planning in organizations, it will default to a technical and transactional dead end.”

Because of the familiar talent management/workforce issues—talent shortages, workforce demographics, increased global competition, and more—organizations are now looking to the human resources (HR) function to go beyond the delivery of cost-effective administrative services and provide expertise on how to leverage human capital to create true marketplace differentiation.

Facing these challenges, many HR organizations have been actively revamping to more effectively deliver the strategic insights the business requires. According to the report, organizations should focus on three areas to improve their strategic HR capability:

1. Enable HR professionals to apply human capital data and information – on par with what the CFO would expect in Finance – to drive business decisions.

3. Build a roadmap for HR transformation that builds momentum and embeds strategic changes into the DNA of the business.

The demand for HR transformation is growing. Join us at Taleo WORLD to learn more about Performance 2.0 and how your organization can benefit. On Tuesday, Tim Ringo, the Global Leader for IBM's Human Capital Management practice, will give his insights into what leading edge organizations are doing to transform their workforce and develop a strategic HR capability.

Mergers and acquisitions are a regular occurrence in business. Traditionally motivated by the expectations of cost savings, multiplied revenue generation, market dominance, and more, many mergers and acquisitions can run full steam ahead into trouble.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: The Distinct Leadership Capabilities for Organic, Alliance and M&A Growth, a study of more than 300 executives from companies across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, focuses on firms looking to grow their organization either organically through strategic alliances or via merger and acquisition (M&A). The conclusion?

The biggest challenge in M&A deals is not generating synergies or proving the value of the deal but retaining staff at the acquired company…

So, M&A success is all about talent. That’s another reinforcement of the importance of business-driven talent management platforms and practices in successfully conducting the business of business.

If you are going to Taleo WORLD in San Francisco, you’re in luck. You’ll learn firsthand how important the talent equation is to merger success. Todd Luckasavitch, Manager of Global Staffing and Sue Paquette, Global HRIS Project Manager from Alcatel-Lucent will present on: A Global M&A Staffing Strategy Based on Taleo Enterprise Edition. Hear how Taleo served as a core element of the staffing strategy during Alcatel and Lucent’s massive 2006 merger.

Measuring quality of hire is a perennially important—and somewhat problematic—issue. We covered it in our Quality of Hire: The Next Edge in Corporate Performance paper and HCI webcast Measuring Quality of Hire: You Can't Improve What You Can't Measure.

Now, there’s some buzz about a BusinessWeek podcast and column by Jack Welch: The Hiring Batting Average: Improving your chances of hiring right. Read, for example, The HR Capitalist blog posting, Do You Measure Your Manager's Effectiveness at Hiring? and Dr. John Sullivan’s article What Is Your Hiring Batting Average?.

The Hiring Batting Average (HBA) concept extends a quality of hire measurement out to more stakeholders—especially to the actions and recommendations of hiring managers. Of course it’s hard to hit a home run if your hiring manager behaviors are turning off your top candidates.

Two-thirds of jobseekers reported that the interviewer influences their decision to accept a position, according to DDI/Monster’s Selection Forecast 2006-2007: Slugging Through the War for Talent.

The most annoying interviewer behaviors?

Learning to hit hiring home runs requires a process that is optimized — from spring training conditioning all the way through consistent contact at the point of impact.

We were happy to get a note from Josh Bersin, CEO at Bersin & Associates, who wanted to highlight some of his firm's recent research on talent management: High Impact Talent Management®. The focus of the research was to identify:

• Business drivers and specific industry solutions that organizations are implementing.
• Level of maturity and adoption of different processes and systems.
• The highest impact talent management solutions.

Bersin analyzed more than 1 million data elements from 750+ corporations to develop these findings. Here are some of Josh’s comments about that report:

The best way to develop a focused strategy is to consider talent management a business strategy not an HR strategy. For example, many retail organizations need to develop talent acquisition, management, training, and succession programs. If they focus in a critical job area, their entire talent management strategy can be easy to define and actionable.

1. The biggest impact area is performance management.
2. The second highest process area was competency management.
3. The third major area which is becoming urgently critical is sourcing and recruiting.
4. The whole area of workforce planning needs tremendous focus.

We’ve always agreed that HR can add more value by better aligning talent with business objectives using the right solutions. And the best place to start is by developing talent management strategies that provide focused and immediate impact to the business. That’s how talent turns business goals into business performance.

The challenge of aligning the workforce with the organization’s goals is clearly not confined to large, complex, global businesses. In fact, it’s the focus of a study aptly titled, 2007 SMB Owner Trends: Aligning People with Business Goals.

What’s not surprising is that the Achilles Group study found that Finding and retaining talent is by far the biggest SMB challenge. We know eRecruiting is no longer limited to large organizations.

Recruiting talent was identified as the biggest HR challenge–although HR respondents didn’t equally emphasize the challenges of talent management initiatives such as performance management or retaining talent.

Although this is a study specific to small and medium businesses, remarks in the study’s introduction easily apply to businesses of all sizes:

People matter — success is linked to people, because labor costs represent the largest ongoing cash disbursement and because financial performance is typically tied to the people capacity of an organization.

In contrast to the hiring processes implied in the survey results we covered in Insights Into Making Hiring Decisions, Dana Green, talent acquisition and relocation manager for Taleo customer Toyota Motor Sales USA, Inc., provides a great description of Toyota’s approach and process for talent acquisition and talent management.

The Kaizen of Toyota Recruiting describes the effects of Toyota’s place on Fortune's most admired companies list, explains recruiting at Toyota, and outlines the practices they use to make Toyota an employer of choice for jobseekers.

Notably, the recruiting process at Toyota is not a silo. It extends into the organization’s work around the employee value proposition. The article is worth a read to learn about good talent practices in action.

For all the effort and resources being used to evolve the hiring process from art to science, here are some disappointing results from two studies:

Hiring managers often know whether they might hire someone soon after the opening handshake and small talk, a new survey suggests. Executives polled said it takes them just 10 minutes to form an opinion of job seekers, despite meeting with staff-level applicants for 55 minutes and management-level candidates for 86 minutes, on average.

That’s what Robert Half Finance & Accounting says.

Eighty-eight percent of executives said they consider a post-interview thank-you note influential when evaluating candidates, a slight increase from when executives were asked this same question five years ago (86 percent in 2002).

Executives also were asked, “How do you prefer to receive thank-you messages from candidates following interviews?”
Their responses:
Handwritten note: 52%
E-mail: 44%
Prefer to receive both: 3%
Don't know: 1%

Those findings come from an Accountemps survey.

10 minute decisions by one-minute managers? Handwritten notes? Relying on your gut? Beware. You can make either a good or bad decision in the blink of an eye. First impressions, a cordial attitude, and thank-you notes have a ceremonial place in determining cultural fit during the interview process. But they surely shouldn’t replace or override scientific hiring decisions made on the basis of validated pre-assessments, candidate skills, experience, and interests.

Turnover for financial officers—CFOs, controllers, treasurers—is decreasing (albeit still high in the range of 13%), according to Russell Reynold’s Financial Officers’ Turnover, 2007 Study. But, as outlined in the article, CFOs need to rise above the financials, they are struggling to assert their influence in business decisions.

Chief financial officers (CFOs) and finance executives need to improve the quality of their organisations’ management information if they are to fulfil their ambition of updating their role and influencing senior decision-makers, according to a survey by CFO Europe Research Services for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Substitute Human Resource executives for CFOs in that finding and it sure sounds familiar!

Here are four different takes on the ongoing debate about baby boomer retirement, potential for turnover, and the associated perceptions and actions.

Preparing for an Aging Workforce: A Focus on New York Businesses from AARP found:

• 62 percent believe their business is likely to face a shortage of qualified workers within the next five years, but only 23 percent say they have taken steps to prepare for potential worker shortages due to baby boomer retirements.

Steps taken?

Buck Consulting’s report, The Real Talent Debate: Will Aging Boomers Deplete the Workforce?, found:

Only 42 percent of employers believe that the aging workforce issue is significant, while 29 percent believe the issue has little or no significance. Differences in opinion vary by industry and seem to be related to perceptions regarding the relative age of employees in each industry group. For example, respondents from high technology companies, with a younger workforce, generally assign less significance to the issue than do representatives of health care organizations, which typically employ a more mature workforce. This is reinforced when learning that the primary reason (53 percent) respondents indicated that this is not an issue is that their workforces will not be eligible for retirement within the next five to ten years.

Meanwhile, employees who were asked “How long do you plan to stay with your current employer?” in a What Workers Want survey, said:

And another contrary view is presented in The Talent-Shortage Myth, by Workforce Management editor John Hollon…

Does your organization have—or need—a baby boomer exit strategy?

UK companies that employ successful talent management practices have an immediate opportunity to gain the talent advantage over their competitors. Here’s why:

A study by KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) showed that “Recruitment is now the top problem for more than half of all UK companies ahead of business strategy or management.”

Onrec.com reports in War for Talent worsens with further tightening of Labour Market that more than 80% percent of UK companies see hiring problems ahead, according to the Recruitment Confidence Index (RCI).

A study of more than 42,000 managers by the Chartered Management Institute and Remuneration Economics has found that eight out of 10 British firms are facing chronic problems when it comes to attracting managers, and are being forced to offer an ever greater range of incentives to lure them in. A third are now offering “golden hellos”, compared with just 16 per cent in 2006.

The UK Talent Report from Capital Consulting and Cranfield School of Management reveals that while 60% think talent management is important, only about 40% are doing something about it. About half cite financial investment as an obstacle.

Their findings are consistent with the Taleo Research report, Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies: A Missed Opportunity, that describes how only half (51%) of all FTSE 100 companies allow candidates to apply online through a structured application form to support an automated process.

In addition to confirming that the business environment has changed, the UK Talent Report states these reasons for focusing on talent:

• mounting global competition for increasingly itinerant talent;
• a shrinking pipeline of new talent due to an ageing workforce; and
• a burgeoning knowledge economy requiring highly skilled managers and technicians.

The challenge—and opportunity—is there now for UK companies.

The recent All-Around HR Players: Knowing It All article discusses a trend towards filling HR executive positions with professionals experienced in other disciplines and departments. This could go a long way towards promoting more of an HR business-based view because these executives bring their broad corporate knowledge to developing HR strategies.

And it may be a good personal move for the executives as well. An ExecuNet survey found HR execs have the highest job satisfaction levels across professions.

Increased internal corporate mobility, a sophisticated business approach, high job satisfaction…maybe this way more VPs of HR will go on to become CEOs!

The pressure on talent is increasing in Asia Pacific countries. Many are experiencing double-digit increases in difficulty filling positions.

New Zealand and Australia lead the list of countries where workforce skill shortages is seen to be the biggest constraint on expansion (60% and 59% respectively), according to the Grant Thornton International Business Report 2007.

And corporate career websites could do better to support both employer branding and talent acquisition. A study by Collective Learning Australia analyzed the top 150 Australian company career websites against best practice elements such as talent relationship management, access, content, online recruitment process and usability…and found them lacking.

Our study, Career Site Recruiting in Asia Pacific: Gains to Be Made, found:

• 8 percent of Australia’s S&P/ASX 50 Index companies still have no careers page on their website. 28 percent of S&P/ASX 50 companies do not accept applications on their website via an online application form.
• 28 percent of Singapore’s Straits Times Index (STI) companies have no careers page on their website. 62 percent of STI companies do not accept applications on their website via an online application form.
• 33 percent of Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index (HSI) companies have no careers page on their website. 81 percent of HSI companies do not accept applications on their website via an online application form.

As we titled the report, there are gains to be made and opportunities to leapfrog the competition with the right talent management solutions.

…But if you try sometime you just might find you get what you need!

We think these Rolling Stones lyrics sum up the spirit of the Aberdeen Group’s latest paper: The Global War for Talent: Getting What You Want Won't Be Easy.

Responses from more than 600 organizations contributed to establishing best in class performance criteria for talent acquisition. As defined by Aberdeen, these high performance recruiters increased quality of hire, decreased cost per hire, and hired their top choice more than 50% of the time.

Here is what they found to be the required actions for organizations who want to get there:

• Implement processes and tools to define and use skills and competencies.
• Use tools to analyze sourcing strategy effectiveness.
• Communicate more effectively with candidates.

We agree. Taleo’s Talent Master system of record captures competencies, knowledge, and skills so customers can identify top candidates using our ACE methodology. Our customers employ comprehensive sourcing analytics to improve effectiveness by identifying the sourcing strategies that deliver the best results. And are using our candidate portal with Web 2.0 features to greatly enhance the candidate experience and improve communication.

We all know that winning the war for talent won’t be easy. But the proven solutions you can use to elevate your organization to best in class recruiting performance are just a click away. Start today, because - as the song goes - time waits for no one.

A recent article in eWeek.com called Workers Rarely Jump Ship Over Pay Alone focuses on IT workers but has insights for all on the causes of attrition and the remedies of retention strategies.

Outlining some findings in The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave: How To Recognize The Subtle Signs And Act Before It's Too Late, the author Leigh Branham was quoted and pointed out this disconnect: “Almost 90 percent had left for reasons other than pay, yet nine out of 10 managers believe that money was the reason people left." Why? The real reasons for leaving were not identified in exit interviews and then only rarely communicated to managers.

This is alarming because of the high costs associated with turnover. The PricewaterhouseCoopers / Saratoga Institute paper Improving Retention explains that when you measure the loss of high performance talent and establish meaningful benchmarks, you can truly see how it affects the bottom line.

Samuel Bright’s comment from Forrester: “Compensation plays a role, but cultural alignment plays a bigger one.” is in line with Fit + Skills.

You can simplify the main efforts of talent management with the words acquire and retain. Recruiting and sourcing solutions cover acquisition and performance management has a hand in retention. Both are opportunities for talent to drive organizational performance.

There’s a good Staffing.org followup interview with industry veteran and author Tony Lee who wrote a chapter for On Staffing called A Primer on Internet Recruiting. He’s satisfied with the outcome of his 2004 predictions:

1. Reviewing candidate skills will become more sophisticated.
2. Online applications will become the norm.
3. Minority and foreign candidates will become more visible.
4. Niche recruiting sites will proliferate.
5. Legal considerations will restrict handling of candidate data.
6. Demographics will continue to play an important role.

Lee adds one more: “Most companies I deal with are increasingly cost conscious when it comes to recruiting, and using the internet to recruit both efficiently and cost effectively is now well documented. That trend will continue strongly.”

We’ll add one, too. Recruiting will evolve from a siloed, linear function — need to hire, hire, hand-off to hiring manager — to an acknowledged component of organizational talent management — need to hire, acquire talent, grow talent, assess talent, retain talent.

The same folks who brought us the War for Talent have sent a wake up call to talent managers worldwide. McKinsey’s article The value of China's emerging middle class describes how growth begets rising incomes and accelerates development of the middle class. Here is their chart:

Why is this important? Because as you establish your brand in China, you must also consider your employment brand and how your career sites in growing markets will stand up to the talent challenge as buying power evolves.

According to consulting firm XMei International, barriers include:

• Talent management—China is experiencing a talent shortage at every level, sending salaries through the roof as desperate companies lure employees away from their competitors. The average turnover in Shanghai and Beijing is 20-25%.
• Quality of leadership—Key leadership skills that spell success on the global market are often lacking in the current crop of Chinese employees. Some industry segments are growing by as much as 30 percent per year; where will the next generation of effective leaders come from?

Learn more by listening to the archived webcast: Recruiting in Emerging Markets and reading these Career 2.0 white papers about how you can gain the talent advantage by starting at your career sites.

Late last year, WorldatWork, Corporate Voices for Working Families, and Buck Consultants conducted an Internet survey on the aging workforce called The Real Talent Debate: Will Aging Boomers Deplete the Workforce? Nearly 500 organizations contributed responses on the significance of baby boomers retiring from the workforce. The findings are interesting in the seemingly deep sense of denial combined with a significant feeling of potential risk. Here is the odd combination of conflicting results:

• Only 42% think the issue is significant with 60% saying there is no associated business risk. Yet 62% believe that cost increases resulting from the loss of an aging workforce are highly significant and 87% believe the aging workforce’s knowledge preservation is important. When does an issue become really significant or important? After the fact?
• 93% believe aging workers want to remain in the workforce due to financial reasons. But 80% have not bothered to survey their aging workforce about their intentions. So how do they know?
• 52% see the loss of senior leadership as the greatest risk in the loss of mature workers. However, more than 50% do not proactively recruit mature workers. When will they decide to do something about it?

Confused? We think this report underlines the potential disconnect between perceptions and reality. Only proactive efforts inside your organization with structured talent processes and metrics will provide the answers you need to proceed with succession plans and talent depth charting.

Just because it won’t happen for five years doesn’t mean it should take your organization that long to figure it out.

The International Workplace Survey from Robert Half reveals recent research on employer branding. Highlights include:

• 68% of worldwide companies lack an employer brand strategy.

• 44% of UK companies see the importance of a brand strategy.

With 35% lacking plans to exploit their employment brand, the talent advantage goes to those agile organizations that can develop a strategy, execute the plan, and upgrade their career sites the fastest.

The battle for the best talent will be waged on your career site, as described in the Taleo Research white paper, Career Site 2.0: Taking the Lead in the War for Talent. New Web 2.0 recruiting technologies can deliver the most innovative and intuitive talent management experience to customers and candidates.

If you are a UK company, congratulations on leading the pack in employer brand awareness. Yet, as reported in Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies: A Missed Opportunity we found only half enable online applications through a structured form in an automated process.

Author and eRecruiting commentator Peter Weddle added his response to the Deloitte, EIU study results. His take:

Now, I admit I have an old world view of leadership, but I believe that the CEO is responsible for everything that happens on his or her watch. To be sure, they reap the accolades when times are good, so they should be held accountable when things go wrong. And, I would say that a 96% failure rate for their HR function would rise to the definition of something going wrong, seriously wrong on their watch. To put it another way, I'd like to see a survey of those business CEOs and other executives who are willing to put their money where their opinions are. Instead of griping about HR and then investing a measly 0.9% of total operating costs-the U.S. norm for the last ten years-I'd like to see how many would sign up to invest 5%, 6% or more of their operating costs to fix their gripe. Frankly, I'm tired of CEOs' vapor capital approach to HR; all they invest is hot air. If they want a world class HR function, they're going to have to pay for it.

We all know that workforce cost is the largest category of spend for most organizations. We also know that the people who represent this line item are an organization’s primary asset. In fact, many company websites feature variations on the statement: People Are Our Most Important Asset. So it only makes sense that improving the quality of the workforce through HR would rank high on the list of business investments.

Talent is what ultimately drives business success and creates value. Organizations that align talent with business objectives significantly reduce process costs, improve quality of hire, reduce risk, and achieve higher levels of performance.

So why the C-level disconnect? Why the reluctance to invest a corresponding percentage in the HR function to drive business performance? It’s time to put the budget where the ROI is. Because it’s a proven fact that automation and analysis of recruiting and hiring processes delivers returns and improves the bottom line.

Nearly half of administrative professionals and more than half of HR professionals who responded to OfficeTeam's poll for Fitting In, Standing Out and Building Remarkable Work Teams reported a bad fit.

Why is this significant? Because of the answer to next question:

Talent acquisition is expensive. Turnover is far more costly. Use all the tools available – including assessments – to get the best fit for new hires.

A lot of work is being done to find the formula for great employee performance. A lot of talk centers on employee engagement. Here’s a study that looks more closely at the drivers for employee engagement and finds that passion is a key.

PeopleMetrics, Inc. report, So, Employee Engagement Matters... What Next? found that emotional factors—including Purpose & Empowerment, Trust & Confidence, Security & Growth, Connection & Affiliation, Excellence & Reputation, and Recognition & Value play a bigger role in driving employee engagement than do functional factors. When done well, the results are impressive:

Fortune 500 companies in the lowest quartile in company profitability had 50% fewer engaged employees compared to those in the top quartile, according to the PeopleMetrics study. In terms of individual performance, PeopleMetrics found high performing employees were twice as engaged as their low performing counterparts.

We know there are many factors linked with high performing employees. We also know that acquiring and retaining top performers – from the beginning of the supply chain with talent acquisition through talent management practices – has a high payback.

Making a business impact. Transforming the organization’s culture. Driving business performance. HR leaders know they add value on these levels all day and every day. But what’s missing? For some, it’s getting a permanent seat at the executive table and functional recognition.

Recent studies, articles, and blog postings point to a serious disconnect between business executive perceptions of HR and the realities.

The Deloitte and Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) global and cross-industry Aligned at the Top survey said that 85% believe people are vital to performance but only 3% consider their organization as world-class in HR and only 23% percent believed HR plays a role in strategy and results.

So are those old executive perceptions of The Personnel Department primarily taking care of problem employees, company picnics, and payroll still around? If so, they risk embarrassment in the face of all the successful HR transformations and business impacts we have seen with on demand talent management.

In any case, these findings created quite a reaction and online outpouring.

Workforce Management published the provocatively titled article: Business Leaders Don’t See HR as Key to People Strategies.

Thomas Otter on the Vendorprisey blog challenged people to respond.

Jason Corsello of Knowledge Infusion offered three reasons in his Human Capitalist blog: HR was lacking talent inventory, strategies, and business case articulation.

Jim Holincheck from Gartner underlined the importance of strategy in Will HR Ever Be Strategic? and offered some fine real-world examples of positive direction.

The symptoms of HR perception malaise can be seen in many organizations. The recovery begins with a strategic tone and holistic understanding of aligning talent to business initiatives and measuring performance. This understanding must go from high level business goals and team architecture all the way down to filling an individual contributor role in a specialized function.

Talent management processes and technology provide the ongoing therapy for formalizing strategies and executing vigorous workforce plans that show direct alignment between talent and the business.

That way, HR leaders can stand tall when they present measurable results using consistent talent management solutions and strategic performance management practices. And reading all the reactions and sore points, it sounds like it’s time for a backbone adjustment. Out with the old and in with the new.

According to the Recruiting Function Practitioner Consensus Survey, more than a third (34.4%) of companies surveyed have outsourced portions of their recruiting function, compared with 15.4% in 2005.

Notably, this did not create across the board reductions in HR recruiting staff.

What was the total number of HR staff dedicated to the recruiting function before and after the function was outsourced?

The likely hypothesis? Outsourcing is being used as an additional resource to augment rather than replace the recruiting function. With talent shortages and increased competition for top talent, there is a corresponding need for additional specialized recruiting resources. Position your organization. Read Four Key Factors to Watch in the War for Talent.

Business analysts and technology pundits have been kicking the software as a service ball back and forth from the midfield to the goal box for many years, taking their shots from a variety of angles. Much like comparing post-game strategies, recent articles indicate that perceptions of winning with SaaS depend on how many goals were scored.

ComputerPartner’s The truth about software as a service starts with a reaction to the spaced-out marketing statement that SaaS will eliminate both the corporate datacenter and CIO as an across the board replacement for all ERP applications. Back on earth, the focus returns to real-world benefits such as: “enabling enterprises' individual processes while delivering them through a standard but highly configurable code base”.

Compterworld’s Software as a Service: Time for the IT Industry to Take Notice points out that a survey of CIOs revealed that: “those who planned to use some form of software as a service over the next 12 months grew from 38% in autumn of 2005 to 61% a year later.”

CRN.com’s Top 25 Tech Breakthroughs Of All Time lists SaaS as a force that: “legacy on-premise software players—from IBM to Oracle to Microsoft—are scrambling to keep up with”.

Even The Wall Street Journal weighs in with Web-Based Services Take Hold.

And last but not least, eWeek’s 10 Things They Believe in Silicon Valley but Nowhere Else overplays the concept of “SaaS dominates all” due to offsides “sermons” from overexcited executives.

Although some say SaaS plays best in the middle market, we know more than 1,000 organizations of all sizes that have been winning the talent game using software as a service, scoring on improved efficiency, cost reduction, and overall ROI. In fact, Taleo counts a third of the Fortune 100 as customers.

The June 2007 issue of SHRMOnline offers some research perspectives on what high performance HR looks like in terms of six specific competencies.

New Competencies for HR cites the research done by Dave Ulrich from the University of Michigan and The RBL Group and outlines their findings in the 2007 Human Resource Competency Study (HRCS). Of note is the competency titled: The Talent Manager/Organizational Designer. According to the article:

The Talent Manager/Organizational Designer masters theory, research and practice in both talent management and organizational design by:
• Ensuring today’s and tomorrow’s talent.
• Developing talent.
• Shaping the organization.
• Fostering communication.
• Designing reward systems.

We also believe that successful talent management is more than just acquisition. Success does indeed lie in formalizing the processes around talent movement into and inside the organization. That’s why the aspects of workforce mobility, retention strategies, and performance management are important to address when HR uses talent management to improve organizational performance.

An interesting Wall Street Journal Online article, New Goal for Human Resources: Establishing a Work Force of One, discusses methods organizations can use to better meet the varied needs of their employees. Author Susan Cantrell, a fellow with the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business in Boston, emphasizes four methods in the article and the accompanying podcast.

The understanding that employee performance is the key business driver, coupled with tailoring offerings to employees, can create more value for HR department delivery to the organization through higher retention and employee satisfaction. According to this article, the best rule may be to bend the rules.

An article titled Managers don't care if recruitment money is well spent, based on findings from the Cranfield School of Management’s Recruitment Confidence Index (RCI), says that less than half of British firms monitor recruitment costs and three-quarters do not measure cost per hire.

Even though we know that making the investment in a talent acquisition system pays off in process improvements and a lower cost of hire, many UK firms lack the complete end to end process that delivers higher performance.

The Taleo Research study, Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies: A Missed Opportunity, found that only 51% of the FTSE 100 enable online application with a structured form and automated process. Saving pennies by ignoring the wise investment in recruiting systems costs some firms many pounds in the long run.

With all the studies and reports about the challenges and opportunities around talent management and human capital, here’s an interesting one from the perspective of risk managers.

According to Best practice in risk management: A function comes of age, a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit sponsored by ACE, IBM, and KPMG, human capital risks are the most significant threat to a company’s global business operations.

Human capital risk, in particular, stands out as an area that respondents find particularly challenging. This risk, which is related to loss of key personnel, skills shortages and succession issues, has consistently been rated as among the most threatening risks that companies face in the two years that this series has been running. As this survey demonstrates, it is also among the most difficult to manage, and few respondents claim that they are effective at dealing with it. These findings point to the need for closer integration between the risk function and the human resources function, as well as a clearer understanding of the risks that companies face with their location and human capital strategies.

So since we already know attracting superior human capital and using talent management practices correlate directly to revenue and performance quantified as a talent quotient, the counterpoint is the relationship to risk that can be mitigated through retention strategies.

Surveying more than 500 executives, TriNet’s 2007 HR Trends: People to Profitability survey shows small and medium businesses are focusing on attracting and keeping talented employees as a top priority:

“For both larger and very small companies the attraction and retention of talent is more important than increasing revenue.”

Read the survey results to see how strongly executives believe that talent drives performance. You’ll know why when you click on our take on last year’s Gevity Institute and Cornell University research report: Human Resource Management Practices and Firm Performance in Small Businesses.

Companies that implement effective HR strategies outperform the competition, achieve higher revenue and profit growth, and succeed in highly competitive environments. This is especially true for small, high growth companies.

Performance when using person-organization fit employee
selection strategy

7.5% higher revenue growth
6.1% faster profit growth
17.1% lower employee turnover

Making the investment in eRecruiting pays off big time for small and medium business.

When asked about the impact on global business during the next five years, 78% of respondents to a recent survey indicated that “Increasingly global labor and talent markets” are important/very important.

The global talent factor was the third highest in importance as reported in Acting on global trends: A McKinsey Global Survey.

The survey also asked which trends companies have taken action on. In this case, “Increasingly global labor and talent markets” ranked fifth at 48%.

Conclusion? Issues around talent and a global workforce are clearly on the radar, but most companies have yet to move them up in priority and act.

Here’s more validation of good works translating into good business. According to a survey conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence, “employees who are satisfied with their company’s commitment to social responsibility have positive views about their employer in several other key areas – including its sense of direction, competitiveness, integrity, interest in their well-being, and employee engagement.”

• 86% of employees who are satisfied with their organization’s CSR commitment have high levels of engagement. When employees are negative about their employer’s CSR activities, only 37% are highly engaged.

• 82% of employees who are satisfied with their employer’s CSR commitment also feel their organization is highly competitive in the marketplace. When employees are negative about their company’s CSR activities, only 41% feel it is competitive in the marketplace.

In terms of a talent management practice, satisfied employees are productive employees and have high retention rates. Attention to corporate social responsibility is not just good citizenship, it's good business.

Leading employers are constantly striving to find ways to differentiate themselves with candidates and enhance their employment and organization brand – especially with Generation Y.

Here’s one way: the 2007 Deloitte Volunteer IMPACT Survey found that providing volunteer opportunities can sway Gen Y jobseekers your way. 62 percent of respondents prefer to work for a company that provides them with opportunities to apply their skills to benefit non-profit organizations.

And there’s clearly room to stand out:

At Taleo, we actively encourage volunteerism and recently raised thousands for a great organization called Room to Read that is “changing the world, one book at a time”. This organization is responsible for building 287 school rooms, establishing 3,600 libraries, and publishing/donating 2.8 million books!

Good corporate citizenship may also provide an edge in building your workforce.

We’ve always known that the war for talent doesn’t rage equally across all battlefields. Rather it’s dependent on how the multiple variables of job function, industry, and geography align in a given time and place. Sometimes even broader international affairs and global weather play a role.

Here are two studies on two different functional skill sets – with two different conclusions.

Issues in Science and Technology Online, published by the National Academy of Engineering in Texas, says:

Respondents to our survey reported that they were able to fill 80% of engineering jobs at their companies within four months. In other words, we found no indication of a shortage of engineers in the United States.

89 percent of respondents to the 2007 National Physician Nurse and Supply Survey are currently recruiting nurses and 86 percent are recruiting physicians. They reported:

Nurse recruiting was rated as either somewhat or extremely difficult and challenging by 86 percent of hospital administrators surveyed.

94 percent of respondents described the process of recruiting physicians to their facility as somewhat or extremely difficult and challenging.

Here’s the bottom line. Getting the right people into the right jobs at the right time has so many variables that you need to build a consistent hiring and sourcing process to cover all your bases.

Last month Jobster published the results of a quick survey that focused on Web 2.0 topics among other data points. Questions covered social networks, video resumes, and sourcing methods. Looking at the responses, we saw some interesting indications of trends and perceptions.

• 79 percent of respondents said they read recruiting blogs.

• A majority of respondents (56 percent) classified themselves as not at all familiar, or a beginner, when it comes to Web 2.0 and recruitment.

So if they read this blog and want to understand more about applying the technology and principles of Web 2.0 to gain competitive advantage in a talent acquisition process, they have come to the right place.

Taleo Enterprise Edition 7.5, our latest solution release has just been announced and offers Web 2.0 eRecruiting technologies in addition to dozens of enhancements.

ExecuNet announced in the results of their fifteenth annual national survey, the Executive Job Market Intelligence 2007 report, that:

• More than two thirds of executives and search firms believe there is a shortage of qualified talent.

• Only a third of executives believe their company is working harder today to retain top talent than one year ago.

Also included is a chart revealing some misalignment based on differing perspectives:

Successful talent acquisition – for any level or job function – requires a solid understanding of the motivation of candidates, the attitudes of third-party suppliers, and the perception of the priorities communicated by the HR professionals.

“At the very broadest level we're going from the industrial age to the information age to the talent age.” – Thomas Friedman

A Business Strategies Magazine interview with New York Times columnist, global commentator, and best-selling author Thomas Friedman echoes the remarks of Robert Reich and supports people who are using talent strategies to transform their business culture and improve performance.

Question “Are you saying that beyond cost, talent and differentiation are going to affect the key decision?”

Friedman answered, “Yes, talent is the differentiator beyond cost. There are so many people now that any company can access to do just the vanilla jobs on the basis of cost. If you don't want to get caught up in that trend then you've really got to be able to offer some really unique talent that gets you out of that pool, that vanilla pool. Talent is the skills of your work force—the ability to imagine and synthesize different products or value opportunities and then to execute them, to design them, to refine them. That's really where the great job opportunities and value adding profits are going to be.”

With increased general exposure in the business press, research and analysis of the practical economics, and proven ROI from case studies, we believe even the most reluctant C-level executives will increasingly see the advantages of funding proactive talent initiatives brought to them by HR.

The Wall Street Journal’s Career Journal Online featured a fine interview called Preparing the Work Force: An Interview with Robert B. Reich.

Mr. Reich, the former Secretary of Labor and author of The Work of Nations, articulates our views so well:

“The only unique asset that a business has for gaining a sustained competitive advantage over rivals is its workforce -- the skills and dedication of its employees. There is no other sustainable competitive advantage in the modern, hightech, global economy…”

This seminal insight outlining the talent/performance equation of talent management has been finding its way into conversations wherever innovation and business performance are spoken. The interesting thing is that we are hearing it articulated lately by more people more often.

Ken Blanchard’s 2007 Corporate Issues Survey with more than 1,000 responses from HR, training, and line managers offers some insights into important trends, including:

“Respondents continue to place leadership development, selecting and retaining key talent, creating an engaged workforce, and managerial skills as critical areas of focus.”

At Taleo, we agree that a key area of focus for all organizations should be attracting and retaining key talent.

“Creating an engaged workforce has not only remained in the third place ranking for three years, it has increased seven percent since 2003. Respondents cite this issue as being the driver for the success of many other organizational initiatives and being a key to retention and service.”

Workforce engagement truly has a measurable financial component in terms of business performance, as we noted in What is the Impact of Employee Engagement? and Is Engagement Enough?

“On the financial side of managing people, respondents cite the high cost of recruiting talented and qualified people from a shrinking labor pool for both line and leadership positions as an additional major challenge.”

Cutting recruitment costs is a major benefit of establishing a talent management system. Taleo customers have been able to cut their cost per hire in half.

Ken Blanchard was a keynote speaker at last year’s Taleo WORLD conference where he delivered a fine speech on the secret of great leaders. Taleo WORLD 2007 will feature keynotes from Tom Peters and Lyn Heward. Read the agenda and register soon.

It’s costing companies more to recruit top talent in a seller’s market. According to the 2007 Worldwide ERC New Hire report, the tighter labor market is forcing companies to offer more enticements with their recruiting strategies.

• “More than 90 percent of the companies surveyed reported having difficulty in recruiting the right people—22 percent considered the problem fairly severe.”

• “The majority of respondents (79 percent) use their relocation policy as a recruiting tool. Most companies also use signing bonuses, although usually only for select new hires.”

Here is their chart that summarizes the challenges:

The first two factors seen together paint a bleak picture. Increased competition with other companies, combined with a decreased number of qualified candidates, means the demand is steadily rising while the supply continues to shrink. Read Four Key Factors to Watch in the War for Talent for more about how market factors and technology are contributing to the scenario.

In a recent blog entry, Jim Holincheck from Gartner makes an important point: Who Owns Talent Management?

Talent management is a cultural transformation that HR naturally leads by establishing consistent processes and technology. But ownership ultimately comes down to line management. The business from the CEO on down must fully support the process to reap the ultimate benefits: improved business performance.

Read more about how this cultural transformation happens: Powering Your Organization’s Transformation into a Talent Focused Culture.

For almost a decade, the highest priority for companies of all sizes was the high cost of healthcare. But there is a rising challenge that is greater: attracting and retaining top talent.

According to Deloitte Consulting's 2007 Top Five Total Rewards Priorities Survey, the top priority for companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue is now meeting the challenge of talent shortages.

“For 2007 and the last eight consecutive years, survey respondents identified controlling the cost of health care benefits as their number one Total Rewards priority. However, for the first time there is now a clear divergence between opinions based on the size of respondents’ companies – companies with revenues of more than $1 billion see attraction and retention of a high-quality workforce as their number one priority for 2007.”

If that’s your new priority, talent management is your solution. Read Consistently Acquiring and Retaining Top Talent.

The World Wide Web has become an online simulation of reality. You can buy at Amazon.com and millions of other online vendors. You can sell at the world’s biggest garage sale on eBay. And you can search the cached card catalog of the world’s knowledge on Google. But wait, there’s more.

Virtual communities and 3D worlds have sprung up on the web to support nearly any interest from gaming to social networking. But virtual worlds are more than games and networks. Companies like IBM are taking this channel seriously for marketing and recruiting. In the PCmag.com@work article, IBM's Michael Rowe says: "If Web 2.0 is a place where everyone becomes a producer, everyone becomes a content creator, the 3D Internet gives us a whole new level of social interaction in this collaborative space."

But what does this have to do with recruiting? Plenty. In Popular Blogs Sprout Job Boards: Targeting Like Minds, we talked about building relationships with target audiences. Now you can target your recruiting to virtual worlds like Second Life. Check out the BusinessWeek feature for a quick overview.

Then read how IBM Brings HR into the Virtual World with private onboarding, training, and mentoring sites. One of the public areas is a recruitment office that whisks Second Lifers to IBM Canada's recruitment site, powered by Taleo.

To see how seriously one large recruitment advertising agency takes the virtual world, Set a Course for TMP Island “where employers can host job fairs, conduct employee presentations, build virtual replicas of their real world offices, and connect with the job seeker like never before.”

We think that if you take an innovative approach to sourcing, you can benefit from targeting like minds nearly anywhere on the web. But the key to your investment should be a clear focus on your targets.

MONEY magazine released its second annual report on the best jobs in America. There are situational categories that list 20 jobs. That they are divided by “life stage” group makes the report particularly interesting. What may seem desirable as a great job for one person may not appeal to another.

The #1 job matching each group is:
Young and Restless: Product/Brand Manager
Parents Returning To Work: Executive Recruiter
Retired from the Military: Operations or Intelligence Analyst
If You’re Over 50: Nonprofit Executive

For recruiters, this is a nice piece of research to help target a specific candidate pool. Looking for Sales Reps? Find moms looking to return to the workplace. Need a Field Service Engineer? Identify someone retiring from the military, and so on.

Once you’ve identified those candidates through targeted sourcing, make sure you also are meeting their expectations for job design and benefits. A flexible schedule is key both for parents returning to work and the over 50 group. Mental stimulation and challenges are sought by the young job changers. And a passion for the work aligns well with military retirees.

Proactive, targeted candidate sourcing and the use of automated solutions can go a long way towards filling open positions with talented employees who will stay with your organization.

Best of breed.
Seamless.
Integrated suite.

The first phrase used to pertain only to cat and dog shows! Now you’re more likely to hear it when a software vendor does their dog and pony show. The second word sounds better describing a pair of slacks than a computing process. And phrase number three works best when it describes having one room in a hotel for you and your partner and an adjoining room for the kids.

Unfortunately, these buzzwords are here to stay. But they bring up practical questions as well. How do you evaluate the most effective integrated talent management platform? What’s the difference between native integration and less direct forms of integration? Native integration and true platform interoperability certainly have production performance, reliability, and upgrade advantages. This is especially important when it comes to the more technically demanding operating environment of on demand software as a service. We believe that long term value comes from investing in what you believe is the best platform.

For an amusing perspective that rings of truth in the buyer beware department, read Bill Kutik’s column in Human Resources Executive Online titled A Cynic's Six Steps to Application Integration. He will take you on a tour of some of the less direct forms of integration.

The winners of the 2007 Recruiting Excellence Awards were recently announced at ERE Expo in San Diego. Once again, our customers who power their career sites and talent management with Taleo are well represented by these leading organizations:

Congratulations to:
• Starbucks - Best Corporate Careers Website winner and Best Employer Brand finalist.
• Citigroup - Best Corporate Careers Website finalist.
• Tenet Healthcare - Most Innovative Employee Referral Program winner.
• Merck & Co., Inc. - Best Employer Brand finalist.
• Whirlpool Corporation - Most Innovative Recruiting Process or Departmental Structure winner.
• Ernst & Young LLP - Best College Recruiting Program winner.

As a company in 2006, Taleo won ten industry awards for our innovative products, leading technology, and business performance. But we are even more pleased when our customers achieve this kind of recognition and success.

Here is an interesting situation that reminds us of the commercials with people pitching their skills and dream jobs. Vault.com is promoting the idea of video resumes with a report that states 89% of employers revealed that they would watch a video resume even though only 17% have actually viewed one. There’s even a contest being promoted called Vault's Wall Street Big Break Video Resume Contest.

CareerBuilder.com also announced that it will launch a video resume service in the second quarter of 2007. However, Dice.com lists some pros and cons of using the faddish technology popularized by web surfing YouTubers with the bottom line of video being a potential complement but not a replacement for the traditional resume.

While we applaud innovative use of technology, we think using video resumes presents some backfire realities for applicants and potential legal risk for organizations on the basis of discrimination regulations (OFCCP/EEOC). If one candidate was hired based on their video and another was declined, even though they both seemingly had equivalent skills, it would be a difficult position to defend.

Our position is that promoting skills in a consistently structured format is the basis for making the best match between candidate and employer. Once a short list is defined, video can be introduced at the interview stage as an offsite option instead of flying someone in for a face-to-face interview. At that point, the candidate short list would need to be defensible based solely on qualifications for the position.

Thanks to Bryan Baldwin, Assessment Consultant with the Washington Department of Personnel for adding this info to the post on More Boomer Californians Working:

…BLS data indicates it's not just California that's seeing increased labor participation from those 55+: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/10/art3full.pdf (see Table 14 on page 52).

You can tap into this valuable and desirable talent pool:

Consider where you are advertising your job opportunities. Given the rise in Internet usage by older candidates, one of the most effective ways to reach a large audience of older candidates is on the Internet.

Word your job opportunities carefully. Focus on the nature of the job and the skills required. Job descriptions can seek enthusiastic and dynamic people, but they can be enthusiastic and dynamic at any age.

Drive the selection process based on skills. Analyze the role to define the skills and capabilities and drive your selection process off them, rather than career history.

Consider reskilling or upskilling employees. Exploit the potential to train people in mid career into new positions.

Right in the middle of the discussion about baby boomers retiring and the resulting talent shortages, here’s a study by the California Budget Project.

• The number of Californians ages 55 to 64 who are working has grown from 54.2 percent in 1995 to 61.6 percent in 2006.

• The number of Californians ages 65 to 69 who are working increased from 19.6 percent in 1995 to 26.5 percent in 2006.

As goes California goes the nation? As one of the top ten economies in the world, this trend bears watching.

A recent BusinessWeek slideshow feature demonstrates once again how important talent management strategies are to organizational success.

On the minus side, The Ten Worst Corporate Practices lists poor recruiting practices as a losing proposition. How you treat job applicants is important. After all, if you give them the cold shoulder when they apply, you risk losing them as a customer. Your careers site and candidate relationship management practices are key elements of your brand image. But they are only as effective as your talent management solutions.

On the positive side, The Ten Best Corporate Practices include emphasizing employee referrals and internal mobility. This comes as no surprise. If you look at sources of hire, referrals consistently make up a large percentage, followed closely by the company website. Workforce mobility programs formalize your process to address the growing importance of retention in your war for talent.

These two quotes in a recent article should make any HR person revisit their approach to preventing workplace violence with a solid plan and the use of background screening.

1. “A USA Today analysis last year indicated that an average of 25 people per week are injured and one person per week dies from workplace violence.”

2. "In virtually every case there were signs beforehand which were ignored." –Chris McGoey, an expert and consultant on workplace violence

Read the online article: How to Prepare for Workplace Violence by Scott Berinato in CSO The Resource for Security Executives. He lists nine steps suggested by Chris McGoey that can help you proactively take steps to minimize your risk.

Then read the Taleo Research white paper: Background Checking: Uncovering the Facts. You will learn how new methodologies and technology mitigate compliance issues, fraud, workplace violence, and negligent hiring—along with potential personal liability. Make these process improvements and you will get higher quality screening results faster to reduce your cost and risk.

Innovation is a hot topic these days. What creates an innovative culture; one that drives your next blockbuster product or service? How do you identify the talent and set the stage to foster innovation? The IndustryWeek article titled Where Is Your Company's Next Big Idea Coming From? focuses primarily on driving innovation in a manufacturing setting. The article, though, presents a view of talent management that I think applies broadly:

Looking at how people 'flow' through an organization there are three stages; recruiting and integration (now being called onboarding), development and retention. During each stage people can contribute -- from fresh perspectives during recruiting -- to a better understanding of customer needs during retention.

In the retention stage, create an environment where supervisors catch people doing something right, rather than focusing only on catching mistakes. Make idea implementation part of every leader's role. It should involve building an environment that encourages ideas, helps employees develop knowledge and sharpens employees’ problem-solving skills to increase the quality and impact of their ideas.

Online advertised job vacancies were up 18% from March 2006 through March 2007 according to The Conference Board Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series™. The report dices the data by year, months, nation, regions, states, and functions.

This chart is interesting…

…especially in light of Manpower’s 2007 Talent Shortage Survey results:

The top 10 jobs that employers in the United States are having difficulty filling are (ranked in order):

Total number of respondents: 2,407
Employers indicating difficulty filling positions: 41%
Employers indicating no difficulty filling positions: 59%
Margin of error: +/- 2.0%

Once again, we are seeing a nice surface metaphor for another argument where everyone agrees become popular enough to sell books, hit the blogosphere, and even become a marketing theme.

Do you remember I’m OK, You’re OK? Similar wave. Different decade. But the more things change, the more you see old ideas repackaged.

You can have a look at the ideas in the article that spawned it all in 2004 called Nasty People. Read the book and learn something about surviving psychological abuse and building a more civilized workplace. Then read this interesting article entitled Boss Science. You may be amused by the alignment in the authors’ thinking on fitting personality traits with roles and “the psychopathology of the modern American corporate leader”.

What much of this approach comes down to is really quite simple: cultural fit. But how do you measure it well? Many Taleo customers have used our structured assessment platform to develop their own assessments or use custom assessments developed by our industrial/occupational psychologists. Learn how to use a pre-hire assessment to find if there is a cultural fit between candidates, roles, and your organization.

The Internet has made worldwide communication nearly instantaneous. How has that affected the global labor market?

The network power of the Internet has shifted time and space for employers. Cycle times are shorter. Additional silos of information connect every day. Technology moves tasks across the globe. Outsourcing cuts expenses. Connectivity shifts the workplace from office to home. Labor supply chain velocity increases.

The question is where will this lead us? To a single global labor market? McKinsey has weighed in on this topic with The coming global labor market.

With baby boomers headed towards retirement in record numbers, a rapidly growing tech economy, and lack of computer science graduates, it’s no wonder that finding good IT managers is getting harder. This lagoon in the big talent pool is drying up.

In CIOs Play Waiting Game When Hiring, Robert Half reports that “CIOs polled said it takes an average of 56 days to fill a staff-level position and 87 days to bring a new manager on board.” This US study surveyed more than 1,400 CIOs from companies with more than 100 employees.

How important is employee retention? Is it a more significant business driver than cost control? Read the article about the MetLife study that says “keeping key workers happy, challenged and motivated is becoming more important to U.S businesses than controlling costs.”

The 5th annual MetLife Study of Employee Benefits Trends highlights this important challenge: “the need to recruit and retain the best talent in an increasingly competitive labor market.”

Interestingly, the study found retaining employees is the most important benefits objective of employers.

Employee retention was described as important by more than half of employers with retailers (62%) and services (59%) coming in higher on retention.

However theindustryradar.com reports that Salary.com found pay and title rather than benefits as the prime motivators for retention.

At Taleo, we take a more holistic view. We see the symptoms, but instead focus on transforming your culture to improve retention rates by enabling workforce mobility. Keep employees looking internally at opportunities within your organization and you will improve your employee retention rates. Use this approach to retention and win your war for talent.

You can also read about the Four Factors to Watch in the War for Talent and keep in touch with industry trends when you subscribe to TalentTalk.

The March issue of the Harvard Business Review has an interesting, comprehensive article titled Maximizing Your Return on People. Authors Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer of McBassi & Company explain “New tools can show you which investments in employees are driving company performance now and which you should emphasize to advance your strategic goals.”

Quantifying the results of HCM practices has been an elusive goal. It’s worth paying the nominal reprint fee for a copy of this article. It’s based on 10 years of research, and includes a framework and checklist to use for your own organization.

Fay Hansen, writing in Workforce Management magazine online, describes how OFCCP fines could affect your organization in Avoid Getting Sued: Risks and Rewards in Recruitment Record Keeping.

The US Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) has increased monitoring and enforcement of recruiting practices. For more information, listen to the archived webcast: Understanding OFCCP’s New Definition of an Internet Applicant.

Discrimination comes in all forms. As baby boomers get older, age discrimination has emerged as a larger issue for employers with more lawsuits seen on the horizon. HR Executive Online covers this topic in: Baby Boomers Create Age Discrimination Challenges for Employers.

In the UK, it’s a regulatory imperative due to the Age Regulations introduced in October 2006. UK organizations can use a number of practical strategies to recruit older talent into their workforce. Read the Taleo Research white paper: Tapping into the Older Worker Talent Pool.

In this year’s second edition of the Pan-European HR Barometer, produced by Hewitt Associates for the European Club for human resources (EChr), findings show HR in large firms is having an impact on the business. Much like last year, the study pointed to talent management as the leading way for HR to drive business performance.

HR-related activities which have the highest positive impact on the business performance of the company:

“Survey respondents expect an even greater emphasis on talent management over the next three years.” notes a Personneltoday.com article. Leonardo Sforza, the committee chairman of the study, comments: "The conditions are there for a definitive shift of HR from being a cost administrative centre to becoming an agent to drive business performance across an organisation."

With the emphasis on talent management as the primary driver of improved business performance, we see technology providing the means to accomplish the goals of improved professional efficiency and more strategic business contributions.

Salary.com's 2006/2007 Employee Satisfaction and Retention Survey is just the latest piece of research to highlight the disconnect between what employees value and what HR professionals perceive to be the most important factors in employee job satisfaction.

In fact more than six out of 10 of the employees surveyed said they plan to look for a new job in the next three months, nearly double the proportion that employers believe are looking.

A number of recent articles shed more light:

• Underpaid, over-titled and on the way out
• Mind the Satisfaction Gap

Check out our takes on job satisfaction: Misunderstanding of Employee Satisfaction by HR and What Drives Job Satisfaction and Organizational Performance?

Even with dramatic cost and time savings, the perception of software as a service (SaaS) applications with on demand delivery can sometimes be misunderstood. Some see SaaS in the IT back alley known as service oriented architecture (SOA). Others think web browser on the front end and hosted ERP applications in the backroom. But with the rising popularity of on demand services on the consumer front, it’s only a matter of time before on demand takes center stage.

A recent Baseline article using data from The Cutter Consortium reported that “about a third of all organizations are using on-demand applications, and that 43% are considering it.” Citing salesforce.com’s outages, there’s a “look before you leap” message due to customers facing some vendor challenges.

We think it clearly depends on the platform approaches these other on demand vendors have taken and which customers you ask. If you talk to nearly a third of global Fortune 100 enterprises who have been using on demand talent management from Taleo, you may hear a different story.

Here’s a look at the performance of this proven on demand technology platform. In 2006 alone, Taleo processed 4 billion customer transactions, nearly 30 million applications, and more than 850,000 hires — all with better than 99.9% system availability. We believe this scale of consistent success is unmatched in the on demand technology arena. You simply cannot overlook the power of this kind of proven scalable, reliable, open, and global on demand platform.

With Google and Microsoft strongly backing SaaS strategies, stay tuned to the accelerating appearance of on demand applications nearly everywhere. Here is what Jeff Kaplan of THINKstrategies says in his article Changing channels: new ways to do business at NetworkWorld.com:

“The proliferation of on-demand services in our personal lives has made many of us receptive to a comparable set of on-demand services to satisfy our professional needs.”

Stephen Moulton’s article at ActionInsight.com called 7 Keys to Successful Employment Selection Decisions presents a great framework based on an array of research results. He summarizes his philosophy at the beginning with this statement:

Successful Interviewing is a Process, Not an Event.

Employee selection decisions should be based on a consistent process. In fact, meaningful workforce performance improvements start with the hiring process – and with practices that have been proven to work.

"Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" was a hit duet on the radio in 1985. This collaboration between the British band the Eurythmics and American R&B icon Aretha Franklin reached the Top 20 on both sides of the Atlantic.

This tune of empowerment across the ocean continues 20 years later in the fight to crash the glass ceiling and fight workplace discrimination. The Cranfield School of Management in London has published making good connections: best practice for women’s corporate networks. This study reports a number of interesting findings on how women’s networks are making a difference in the workplace. Here is one example:

“Whilst the original objectives of women’s networks were to focus on facilitating women’s careers, the pressure from business has meant that most network leaders focus on benefits to the company. These are primarily in the areas of recruitment, retention and reputation.”

Why invest in the power of networks? Because even though women have made strides in the workplace, there is still room for change. There is still workplace discrimination. There is still a significant lack of pay parity. Company networks and social networks for recruiting are making a difference. Now we know women’s networks even improve company performance – a bottom line benefit the executive suite will enjoy.

DDI’s Selection Forecast 2006-2007 again drives home the perception of increasing competition for talent, according to nearly three-quarters of the survey respondents.

Competition for Talent Since 2005

In addition, the report identifies a number of disconnects among jobseekers, hiring managers, staffing directors. In this environment, alignment on candidate desires and expectations is more critical than ever.

Reading the SystematicHR entry on HR Transformation that cited last year’s Deloitte study on Global HR Transformation made us think about how self-service has revolutionized HR. Over the last decade, HR has made great strides. Starting with administrative systems of record, HR drove efficiencies using ERP and standalone HRIS technology.

Then Internet and web applications arrived. One great example of HR savings was self-service benefits, which replaced a costly and error-prone manual paper process and redundant data entry. Self-service drove cost savings and process acceleration. Web browser applications enabled people to connect with that process.

Then talent management arrived online with the added bonus of software as a service (SaaS) delivered on demand. That meant organizations no longer had to purchase a software license and nurture a large scale IT implementation before they could see results. Talent management enabled organizations to establish a consistent process across the enterprise and drove significant value creation while reducing costs in the hiring process.

But wait, there is more. Now we are seeing HR create a significant cultural transformation with the self-service career empowerment of hiring managers and employees. Everyone gets immediate access to information and a direct connection to talent processes on a single system of record.

With recruiting, compliance, reporting, and performance in a closed loop process, organizations can take the next step. Aligning talent with business strategies to create a talent focused culture.

For more, read On Demand Technology: Powering Your Organization’s Transformation into a Talent Focused Culture.

Global companies design products worldwide. Manufacture in China. Support customers with call centers in India. Talent is important at every stage. Success depends on managing your talent supply and demand globally while focusing locally.

There is a lot going on regarding global sourcing, bridging talent gaps, finding good managers offshore, and evaluating recent graduates. Here are some fresh insights:

• Is outsourcing still a buyer’s market? Survey Reveals Global Sourcing Trends answers this question and more. China is an emerging outsourcing provider. Morrison & Foerster reports that India currently has a cost and language advantage, but China is closing the gap.

• Many companies are fighting for top talent in India. Is there enough to go around? As Hiring Soars in India, Good Managers Are Hard To Find describes how there is a shortage of managers that’s being filled by expatriates and training.

• Candidates with college degrees in China are increasing and they are eager for jobs. But do they have the experience and business skills for immediate impact? An Executive Action report from The Conference Board called Bridging China’s Talent Gap says that the gap between talent supply and demand is getting wider.

What’s your global talent strategy? Are you looking to India or China? Listen to the Recruiting in Emerging Markets webcast to hear how to achieve global talent management success.

Two new articles recently published by Taleo customers focus on process optimization and compliance while quantifying the value achieved in business case terms. Read these for ideas and insights:

Rethinking Talent Acquisition by Kurt Ronn, the president and founder of HRworks.
A new level of scrutiny is coming to the hiring process, which is just one reason companies need to have a smart, consistent program in place.

and

So What? Quantify how you help the business, not just how you helped recruit by Lisa Calicchio, Director, Professional Recruiting at Johnson & Johnson. It’s an excellent outline of how to calculate, describe, and position the “the positive impact your contributions have on the business. Demonstrating impact brings credibility to what you do, and underscores your value to the organization.”

Here’s another view into what drives career choices for Generation Y, according to a survey conducted by corporate social networking company SelectMinds.

The results suggest how Generation Y is different. Some highlights of the findings:

• Gen Y Demands Networking Opportunities: Nearly half rate networking programs for employees with common interests as a very important employment factor.

• Younger Workers Feel Disconnected: More than three quarters feel somewhat or very disconnected from the information flow, politics, and career opportunities.

• Gen Y Not Afraid to Walk Out the Door: More than one in four left a job because they felt disconnected from their employer.

Read the Taleo Research white paper: Social Networks and Talent Acquisition for more about social networking and recruiting.

The new CareerXroads 6th Annual, 2006 Sources of Hire Study has—as usual—interesting data and results. The “money” chart in this study shows Referrals and Company Website in the #1 and #2 positions for sources of external hires.

Sources of Hire (as a % of External Hires only)

One conclusion: with the range of possible sources, it is more important than ever for strong talent acquisition reporting and analytics to guide effective resource allotment.

For additional observations on the study, listen to an interview with study co-author Gerry Crispin.

Skilled technical professionals are in high demand worldwide. Here’s a view from BlessingWhite’s study, Leading Technical Professionals 2006. It shows just how challenging the retention of these key employees is by region and in selected industries.

In its ongoing research on Employee Satisfaction, The Conference Board has measured a disturbing trend of growing job dissatisfaction. U.S. Job Satisfaction Declines, it reports.

“Today, less than half of all Americans say they are satisfied with their jobs, down from 61 percent twenty years ago.”

We commented on the SHRM results that correlate to this trend back in December with Is Everyone Out Shopping…for Jobs? and Misunderstanding of Employee Satisfaction by HR.

So now we know that more than half of the employees out looking and more than half of the companies are not doing anything about it. Could that be why so many are out shopping for a new job? Not enough organizations are making them feel like they should stay. Maybe it’s time to push internal mobility programs to the front burner, before it’s too late.

The recently passed Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2007 prohibits discrimination based on genetic information in employment and healthcare insurance. It adds another legal requirement for compliance. Critics, though, don’t view genetic discrimination as a front-burner employment issue.

In contrast, OFCCP/EEOC compliance looms much larger for corporate liability risk. Taleo is offering a webcast, OFCCP Internet Applicant Definition - One Year Later, Wednesday, March 14, 2007 at 2:00 p.m. ET / 11:00 a.m. PT that will cover:

• Common lingering issues with the original Internet Applicant Definition.
• Real-world advice on how you can adjust your strategies for success.
• New OFCCP FAQs and clarifications and how they can impact you.

Register today for essential OFCCP compliance information including guideline updates and compliance best practices from the experts: Carla Irwin, President, Carla Irwin & Associates, and Lisa Kobe Cross, Assessment and Compliance Consultant.

Many years ago – when I was first analyzing and writing about the intersection of Internet technology and recruiting – the refrain I often heard was “but the executive level is not searching the Web for jobs; it’s only for the managers and below.” You don’t hear that argument much anymore.

As noted before, job boards are getting more specialized and are combining with social networking sites. Here’s some interesting data from an exec-level job board survey:

• Sixty-four percent (64%) of its members are currently employed.
• Of those presently employed, thirty-eight percent (38%) of those are motivated to move into a new position.
• Twenty-five percent (25%) are open to new opportunities.

Today, when recruiting high-level executives, you can use the power of Internet as part of your recruiting strategy.

Here’s a follow up to our Expectations for Employment High in Singapore entry. Are talent management practices universal? Or do retention and motivation factors vary by business region?

ISR’s white paper How To Retain & Motivate Your Talent: Results of ISR’s Asia Pacific Talent Survey reveals how management culture influences retention. They surveyed 3,000 employees in 120 companies and found that talent engagement rates vary dramatically across the region. In the Asia Pacific region, employees expect:

• leaders to demonstrate that decisions are consistent with the values and objectives of the organisation;
• leaders to encourage an environment of constant learning; and
• that all employees are treated with respect.

ISR also found that talent management practices are key to attracting, retaining, and engaging high performers:

“In addition to the Talent management practices that engage high performing employees, Leadership and Company Brand or Image are also revealed as key drivers of Talent engagement. These findings should encourage companies around the region to continue to focus on building an attractive employment brand.”

Your employment brand experience starts with your career sites. The front ends of your talent management systems should be tailored to the region you are targeting. You need globally consistent automated processes to drive efficiency. But you also must have the local flexibility in your global foundation to achieve success.

I guess it's Valentine's Day for Taleo when you read these two recent posts:

I Love On-Demand

I Love Taleo

Happy Valentine's all!

The Hudson Report: Employment and HR Trends, Singapore, Q1 2007 paints a rosy picture of this growing economy – especially if you’re in the market for a job or a job change.

“Employment expectations are rising and companies express a high level of optimism about future performance. But the other side of the coin is severe competition for staff. Companies recognise they must be prepared to look at the packages they offer which would now include significant increases in salaries and bonuses in order to attract appropriately talented individuals.”
—Mark Sparrow, Country Manager, Hudson, Singapore

With a robust economy comes increased employee turnover. This study found nearly one-third (32%) of respondents in all sectors experienced staff turnover of more than 10% in the past year, with the IT&T and Banking sectors reporting the highest levels.

Staff poaching is identified as the most significant cause of staff turnover. If you do business in Singapore, it’s time to tune up your talent management best practices…

A study released from the The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Cranfield School of Management, titled HR and technology: impact and advantages, explores the relationship between system implementation and the support needed for effective HR practices.

It corroborates the findings of our research on the connection – or actually the gap – between IT and strategic HR. Although these are both UK-based studies, the findings certainly apply across geographies.

We recently presented on the HCI Quality of Hire webcast with Taleo customer Dell. The tremendous interest in the subject was not surprising. Really, quality of hire represents the most upstream driver of corporate performance. McKinsey research shows that quality of hire is becoming even more important.

Here it is—in characteristic McKinsey-speak:

Three categories of American jobs:

1. Transformational: extracting raw materials or converting them into finished goods.

2. Transactional: interactions that can easily be scripted or automated.

3. Tacit: complex interactions requiring a high level of judgment.

The analysis shows that quality is becoming even more important because the jobs people perform are getting more and more complicated.

• In the past six years, jobs that emphasize “tacit interactions” have grown two and a half times as fast as the number of transactional jobs and three times as fast as employment in general.

• These jobs now make up some 40% of the US labor market and account for 70% of the jobs created since 1998.

The studies keep rolling in. The Angela Mortimer Salary Survey 2007, The blue book, surveys 1,000 job seekers and over 700 businesses, revealing that 78% of companies struggled to attract the staff they wanted in 2006. Many experienced a longer and more expensive recruitment process compared to 2005.

The situation is even more pronounced in Europe, with 97% of companies in Brussels and 86% of companies in Paris complaining that the recruitment market was challenging in 2006.

Additional findings:
1. 31% of companies found an increasing number of applicants withdrawing from the recruitment process.
2. 26% experienced an increase in the number of jobs declined by candidates, particularly in Manchester (31%) and in Brussels (32%).
3. 43% of employers found that more candidates increased their financial demands at offer stage.

Pressure on the European hiring market is clearly increasing. Now is the time for European companies to revisit sourcing and hiring processes for automation opportunities.

More validation on growth and expected hiring in the Asia-Pacific and emerging markets comes in the findings from The McKinsey Global Survey of Business Executives: Confidence Index, January 2007.

These high expectations for hiring provide yet another good reason to streamline and optimize your hiring process to compete in this hot global market for talent.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s CEO Briefing: Corporate priorities for 2007 and beyond sends a clear global talent message. More than 1,000 executives (half of them at C-level) responded to The Economist’s online survey. Note this finding:

“The dynamism of emerging markets largely explains the spring in the executive step. For the second year running, rising demand in the developing world is seen as the most critical force at play in the global marketplace. A clear majority of respondents intends to invest more time and money in emerging markets over the next three years than in developed markets.”

According to 50% of executives, the most significant factor to growth in emerging markets is the talent gap:

“One of the biggest problems that businesses will contend with in 2007 is a shortage of talent. This is especially true in emerging markets, where one in two respondents identify a lack of available talent as the primary barrier to growth.”

Also, 22% of executives expect to invest heavily in recruitment/talent—even more than in IT infrastructure and operations & production. For HR, the message is to revisit your talent strategies for emerging markets. At Taleo, we’ve anticipated this need. Here are some resources:

Listen to our archived webcast: Recruiting in Emerging Markets
Hear Judy Panagakos of JPMorgan Chase, Frank Wittenauer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Pete Engardio of BusinessWeek, and Don Chun of Taleo offer expert advice on developing recruiting strategies to succeed in China and India.

See how the Taleo Global Foundation can help you succeed. Read the Talent Management International overview article. Then download the free Managing Global Deployments white paper.

Quantifying the impact of high quality talent to an organization is an interesting challenge. In the tradition of McKinsey’s seminal War for Talent study, and Watson Wyatt’s ongoing Human Capital Index work, Hewitt Associates has released its version.

The Talent Quotient is a human capital metric that quantifies the financial impact of pivotal employees on an organization’s business results.

Hewitt analyzed the HR data of more than 1,000 large companies and 20 million employees to determine the financial impact of human capital programs. Results showed that the flow of pivotal employees—defined as employees in the top quartile of their peers in pay progression—into and out of an organization is a strong predictor of changes in Cash Flow Return on Investment (CFROI) and shareholder value.

According to Hewitt’s research, for the average Fortune 500 company with about $10 billion in sales, a 10-point improvement in TQ Retain could improve a company's CFROI by 0.7 to 1.6 percentage points on average over three years, or approximately $70 million to $160 million in cash flow.

The Talent Quotient presents another validated reason to emphasize the processes and technology to acquire and retain valued employees.

The New York Times recently reported on Google using automation to accelerate their hiring process in a time of rapid growth: Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm.
With 100,000 applications flowing into Google each month, we’re not surprised.

We commend Google for their use of testing to help select their workforce. Google is surely innovative in many ways, but on this one they've turned to a method many organizations have already been using to achieve volume hiring success.

As they have found through experience, relying solely on interviews and school GPAs is problematical. However, this type of testing is not new to the assessment industry. Combining biodata with personality testing and statistically linking the test to on the job performance measures is not new and essentially required by the professional standards for employee selection.

This process is called criterion validation. In fact, Taleo deploys a very similar methodology and design in our assessment content for campus and hourly selection. We combine biodata, personality, situational judgment, and cognitive ability questions into a single assessment. We also ensure the questions are statistically and practically related to the success criteria for the specific job group. With tailored assessments, each client can predict success criteria that are highly relevant to each job group, such as turnover reduction, sales performance, or dependability.

We believe that well designed assessments can deliver a more useful score than a simple GPA in terms of who makes the grade in an organization’s hiring process.

“Fear of the unknown…” That is the reason cited by a DiversityInc. article to explain why many organizations struggle to recruit and retain qualified people with disabilities. How can business do a better job? Let’s look at some examples of success.

The Best 4 Ways to Recruit Employees With Disabilities offers these recruitment methods taken from interviews with top ten companies listed in The 2006 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity:

1. Partnerships
2. Human-Resources Training
3. Use Employee-Resource Groups
4. Use Government Organizations/Job Boards

Read the article. Then formalize your strategy around a consistent process that supports your diversity and disability hiring goals. Improve your quality of hire through support of diversity programs that foster innovation with Taleo Compliance. It’s more than just a regulatory imperative; it’s a smart way to tap great talent.

Here at Taleo Research, we’ve followed retail hiring trends for many years. Hourly workers are the largest and one of the fastest growing labor segments. With high average turnover, the sheer volume is staggering. Plus a poor hourly hiring process can impact revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand perception.

We conducted a study on the Top 100 US retailers in 2004. Now we’ve published the 2006 results: Trends in Hourly Job Application Methods at Top 100 Retailers.

Here are some of the key findings:

• 70% accept hourly applications on their corporate website. Of those, 16% accept only online applications - a significant increase from 41% in 2004.

• In-store automated hourly applications have become more prevalent with 37% providing a kiosk or computer station versus 22% in 2004.

• Surprisingly, 44% accept in-store paper applications. But 22 retailers still accept only paper applications!

Retailers are using technology to help with hiring and recruiting, yet they still have a long way to go. Nearly half could lose the paper process and optimize hourly volume hiring to streamline communications, provide more reliable reporting, and reduce recruitment costs.

Automation also improves speed of hiring and enhances your ability to recruit and retain top performers. The message is clear. Get automated before your competitors hire all the best talent.

Recruiters are spending more on online media ($5.9 billion) than they are on print ($5.4 billion). These figures were reported in the 2007 Outlook: Online Recruitment Advertising report published by Borrell Associates last month.

Here are some quotes from the executive summary:

“When the history of Internet advertising is written, recruitment sites will undoubtedly dominate the first chapter.”

“With so much activity, we expect recruitment advertising online to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.3 percent over the next five years, approaching $10 billion by 2011.”

These statements are consistent with what The Conference Board has reported about the dramatic 17% rise during 2006 in online advertised job vacancies.

In just a few short years, the power of Internet technology combined with on demand best practices has made it possible for organizations of all sizes to achieve success by cutting advertising costs while improving business performance.

According to the eWeek article, Survey: Talent Management a Top Concern, nearly 62% of respondents to an HR executive survey by ORC Worldwide cite talent management as a key strategic issue. And 33% predict talent management will take up most of their time during the coming year.

The results of this study don't come as a surprise to us. But they do demonstrate once again how important talent management has become when HR executives look to develop strategies for improving business performance.

While playing the report title The Great Divide off the Australian Great Dividing Range, a study of Australian work attitudes reveals a serious disconnect:

• Almost 90% of employers believe that up to 80% of their workforce will be stable for two years.
• Yet, 74% of employees say that they will move either as soon as possible or when the right opportunity comes along.
• Furthermore, 62% of employees believed that their career path requires that they leave their current employer.

The issues of perception based on viewpoint are not confined to Australia, but are repeatedly revealed in studies in many locations. Can the needed actions be more clear?

Don’t take your employees for granted. They will only stay in a win-win situation. Stress career development and internal mobility opportunities to increase retention. Successful retention strategies require bridging that great divide.

Two retirement studies conclude that many retirement age Canadians won’t be retiring so fast. Depending on the source, half to three quarters of them plan to continue working in their golden years.

A retirement survey from Fidelity Investments has found that, while almost half of baby boomers are planning to retire early, an almost equal amount plan on continuing to work in their retirement.

According to a BMO Financial Group study conducted by Ipsos Reid, three in four pre-retirees in Ontario (73 per cent) expect to work in retirement. In addition, 91 per cent of Ontario boomers stated that they are willing to continue to work if they're not able to save enough to fund their retirement.

Although the baby boomer brain drain may not be as dire as some predictions, this still challenges organizations to engage and retain this valuable talent through attractive work arrangements and favorable benefits.