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…”