Economic uncertainty reigns. But one thing you can depend on is the list of obligatory predictions as we close a disastrous 2008 and fearfully embark on 2009. Although most predictions are, well predictable—we’ve got roiling economic seas ahead—some are specific. Here’s some excerpts:

Herman Trend Alert: 2009 Workforce/Workplace Forecast includes:
Certain Skill Sets Continue to be in Short Supply.
Some Employers will make Serious Mistakes, Threatening their Very Survival.
and
Wise Companies will use this Time Well to Build Bench Strength.

Among Josh Bersin’s insights for 2009:
Succession Management Emerges as a Critical Issue.

Garner predicts:
By 2011, Organizations That Do Not Manage Their Employer Brands Effectively Will Fail to Attract Key Talent
and
…by 2013, More than 25 percent of the Content that Workers See in a Day will be Dominated by Pictures, Video or Audio

With an eye more toward what to do in 2009, a Taleo Research/HCI survey asked what will be your organization’s main focus in 2009.

It seems that 2009 will be a time to retain and motivate existing talent. That’s a good plan in the light of economic events. Now, as the calendar turns, we need to put the performance management practices—including career and succession planning—in place to make it so.

Many companies are surviving the economic turmoil and looking for opportunities, according to McKinsey Global Survey Results: Economic conditions snapshot, November 2008. In particular, there's a renewed focus on innovation which may be a key driver of economic recovery. Innovation occurs in many ways: the development of new products or services, or in new ways to approach challenges. Here are some interesting examples:

Why an Economic Crisis Could Be the Right Time for Companies to Engage in 'Disruptive Innovation' describes the difference between incremental and disruptive innovation and how real transformation comes from challenging the paradigm with creative destruction, powered by teamwork and human knowledge.

Speaking of teamwork and human knowledge, A New Odd Couple: Google, P&G Swap Workers to Spur Innovation explains how two leaders in completely different markets are doing an informal talent exchange with people in the areas of planning and training.

Assessing innovation metrics: McKinsey Global Survey Results shows that organizations with the highest returns from innovation use metrics to assess innovation more comprehensively.

Employers innovate to reduce job losses shows how European companies are getting creative with alternatives to across the board jobs cuts and retaining their top talent.

And, as we outlined in Don’t Lose Your Head When You Tighten Your Belt:
Upgrading talent says that downturns put your whole talent strategy at jeopardy due to knee-jerk downsizing, but also offer opportunities to upgrade talent and boost your employment brand at a time when top talent becomes available.

What’s the Take on Innovation and Talent Management? Talent Powers Innovation, and is the best way to fuel business performance and value creation.

News of mass layoffs is everywhere and you can start using the official R word– the recession in fact started in December 2007. But you’ve been here before if you experienced the economic downturns in 2000-2002, 1991-1993, and 1981-1983.

The significant talent management question then is: how does your organization adjust your talent management practices for success in a recessionary economy and in the following economic recovery?

Corporate actions in past recessions, especially around layoffs, left negative impressions of many corporate brands, and caused erosion in employee loyalty and productivity. Those lessons learned from past mistakes apply during these more transparent times.

But this recession may be different due to factors such as:
• A more interconnected global economy.
• Having to manage four generations at work.
• Instant global communications which can impact an employer brand.
• Ubiquitous technology for networking that gives top talent easy access to more employment choices.
• More local and global virtual work.
• The breadth of business sectors worldwide affected by the downturn.

Taleo Research and HCI will present new research findings and discuss the strategies to get through these times and position organizations to accelerate as the economy improves. Register for The Economic Impact on Talent Management webcast on Friday, December 12, 2008 / 12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m. ET.

HR has been encouraged to become more conversant with—and dependent on—data: metrics, statistics, and benchmarks. And that’s a good thing, but the numbers themselves often don’t tell the story. It’s the analysis, perspective, and context that changes data from raw information into intelligence.

Break Away From Paradigm Blindness explains the pros and cons of three popular benchmarks: Employee Net Promoter Score, Gallup Q12, and Walker Loyalty. Each can provide beneficial insights. However, to gain maximum value for your organization’s needs, it’s important to understand their strengths and weaknesses. Making good policy and strategy decisions should evaluate “the facts” and consider them in light of organizational goals.

Single number statistics also can be misleading. Although the data may be accurate, lacking trend information and context can drive the wrong conclusion. The HR Capitalist’s blog 64 Percent Turnover... Sometimes That's Pretty Good... describes just that.

Good metrics should be:
• Aligned with business
• Actionable and predictive
• Consistent
• Time trackable
• Peer comparable

The data is the first step but in isolation may not provide value. You can use sophisticated reporting and analytics platforms to support good decision-making and turn information into intelligence.

Amidst generally gloomy economic news, the latest Business Confidence Survey of owners and managers of US small and medium-sized businesses is not so dire: more than 37 percent of owners and managers of small and medium-sized businesses expect a higher rate of growth for their operations in 2009, and 38 percent anticipate the same level of growth as 2008.

The business owners’ five biggest concerns:
1. The economy
2. Controlling costs
3. Rising health care costs
4. Retaining their most valued employees
5. Hiring the right people

Retention strategies include improving employee engagement through specially designed performance management practices. Quality of hire is driven by a fast and effective recruitment process. Business owners know that higher retention and hiring top talent link directly to business results.

Improving talent management practices and solutions is a timely and welcome approach for small and mid-sized businesses. Effective talent management practices supported by web-based robust technology solutions directly address some of the biggest concerns of small and medium-sized businesses—and help drive their performance.

Thanksgiving in the US is an opportunity to take time off, visit with family, and reflect on the positives in our lives while we enjoy our feasts. It’s also a fine time to remind ourselves that it’s good to talk turkey with your talent about how their efforts drive business performance, and to maintain a focus on policies that encourage retention of top talent.

In a downturn economy some low-cost perks can go a long way to boosting morale. A Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. survey reveals that
• 57% of companies have been able to retain their existing perks.
• Only 20% of companies have had to cut or eliminate perks as part of their cost-containment measures. About 35% of these companies were compelled to cut perks in order to save jobs.
• In fact, 35% of the human resource executives surveyed who said that their companies were not cutting perks indicated that they utilized low-cost perks, which precluded the need for cutbacks.

Open communication was valued more than raises in terms of employee retention by nearly a factor of two, according to MAP’s Quarterly CEO Survey conducted by Vantage Research.

White Water Strategies actually quantified “The Power of Thank You” in the UK. Their “analysis shows that acknowledging staff achievements properly has the equivalent perceived value of a 1% pay rise. Looking at current employment figures, that translates to £5.2bn saving for UK business.”

And Companies embrace praise offers low cost but high value communication as a way to let your people know how important they are to your success. According to the cited survey of 10,000 people, lack of recognition was the employment deal breaker.

So prompting your managers to say a simple thank you for Thanksgiving Day—and every day—is a no-cost/high payback talent management strategy worth practicing.

Although most corporations think in terms of globalization, countries think more about how their national economies fit into the global scheme. Examining national competitiveness now and in the future provides important insights for many countries.

The US for instance continues to raise the alarm about student math and science ill-preparedness and that relationship to driving future technology innovations and American prosperity. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine published a lengthy examination in Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.

“The next generation of Americans must be better educated in math and science -- or they won’t be able to keep up in the new global economy,” said Tom Luce, CEO of the National Math and Science Initiative, which was created as a result of the “Gathering Storm” report.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce outlines 14 suggestions in its report Prosperity without Borders: Statement on Canadian Competitiveness. Its key points include:
• People and their skills play an important role in a nation’s productivity performance and are essential to businesses’ ability to grow and succeed.
• Developing talent and supporting innovation within Canada is critical.

Finland is starting an Innovation University with the goal of being a leading institution in the world in terms of research and education in the field of technology, business studies and art and design. China and Singapore are embarking on similar initiatives.

It seems you can substitute or make generic nearly any of the country names in the quotes and stories above. What’s the common thread? Talent – talent drives performance.

The Heidrick & Struggles/Economist Intelligence Unit report Mapping Global Talent: Essays and Insights opens with “Talent is the new oil and just like oil, demand far outstrips supply.” An accompanying video on the Global Talent Index provides additional perspective.

Countries—like companies—need to acknowledge talent as their key to competitive advantage and path into the future. Top talent drives performance in companies worldwide and in countries globally. Therefore, successful talent management is a fit both nationally and internationally.

In past recessions, corporate layoffs were announced in press releases that were strategically positioned as cost reductions for Wall Street. As an HR professional and steward of your employment brand, you should be equally interested in how your company is perceived by current employees, potential candidates, and consumers on Main Street.

Today, organizations are not in sole control of the published information and responses to their actions. This economic downturn is different. The article Blogs put new spin on layoffs offers insights into how all your workforce practices are now out in the open, making them transparent and critical for both your employment and corporate brands. Some smart companies like Taleo customer Tesla choose to strategically pre-empt the coverage by delivering the news on corporate blogs to proactively control the message.

So, although it may not be profitable to lose your head when you tighten your belt, know that how your organization handles workforce reductions will be a public discussion.

Over the past week in the US, we’ve witnessed a major advantage of political democracies over other kinds of government: the peaceful transfer of power. This form of elective and collaborative succession planning is the law of the land, but how formalized is the process in your organization?

With the current economic crisis looming as a backdrop, leadership has come into question on many fronts. Scores of incumbent elected officials were stripped of responsibility on November 4, 2008. An unprecedented number of CEOs have lost their positions. In USA Today, 'Leadership vacuum' sucks up public's faith details some startling business statistics:
• 1,132 CEOs had departed their jobs as of Q3 2008 according to Challenger Gray & Christmas.
• Worldwide confidence in business leaders is the lowest in 10 years according to DDI.

Successful succession planning offers organizations a winning strategy to identify best fits using a complete view of available and qualified talent for a position—be it from your team, other departments, external channels, or personal networks. With barely a third of surveyed organizations prepared for succession planning, it’s time to take action to ensure peaceful—and effective—transfers of power inside your organization.

UCLA Anderson School of Management professor Dr. Samuel A. Culbert shows no restraint in his Wall Street Journal article, Get Rid of the Performance Review!

His article subtitle summarizes his position: It destroys morale, kills teamwork and hurts the bottom line. And that's just for starters. The subject of performance reviews and his take on it surely struck a chord. It was among the most read articles on the day of publication and now—in the Business Insight section—has prompted many pages of reader comments.

Dissatisfaction by both employees and managers with the legacy once or twice a year backwards-looking review process is not a new issue, although for many the practice has been inescapable. Traditional annual performance reviews, often still done on paper or spreadsheets, do little (or worse) for employee development and forward-looking organizational goals achievement.

Instead, a new approach to performance reviews can embed performance management in the flow of daily business and change it from a dreaded lagging indicator to a leading process.

Managing your turnover has its financial advantages and requires housekeeping to deliver returns. HR Reporter’s What’s the Real Cost of Turnover? article revisits the ROI while addressing what we’ve known for a while: the estimated financial impacts fluctuate depending on industry, position, and location. Anecdotal evidence provides a range from 25% to 200% of annual salary.

Take for instance their featured example of a hospitality housekeeper in Alberta with detailed numbers. Termination, new hiring, training, and indirect costs roll up to a grand total of nearly CAN $3,200. And that’s for a position that earns only $7/hour. So you are looking at more than the equivalent of 10 weeks of salary!

One survey found poor talent management practices are a big contributor to voluntary turnover: Thirty percent of 1,308 respondents said they left their job to seek new challenges or opportunities that were lacking with their previous employers. In addition, 25% of respondents reported leaving employers because of ineffective leadership, 22% cited poor relationships with their managers, and 21% said their contributions were not valued.

So, do some detailed housekeeping on turnover to determine how you can increase your retention rate for key roles based on your organization’s industry, location, and turnover rate. Not only will you stem the natural tide of job churn in uncertain times, you’ll be surprised how much you can save in costs and gain in overall productivity.

And in these tough times, people are more uncertain than ever. Read Employees leaving? Here's why and what you can do to learn more about managing and measuring the performance of your talent while filling the pipeline of succession.

Baseball’s World Series once again elicits parallels between defining, finding, and developing talent in the sports and business worlds where performance is the key differentiator.

Back in 2003, the book Moneyball showed how the sports world began using basic talent management concepts. In Portfolio’s Homerun Hiring article, a baseball scout shares experiences that work off those ideas:

Look Beyond Looking Good on Paper. The resume used to be the primary source of candidate information. Statistics are not enough anymore. Assessments, certifications, and experience expand the view more holistically. Structured data and smarter screening reduce risk and improve success rates. And quality of hire analytics enable actual hiring batting average measurement.

Define Team Roles and Fill Them. As successful baseball coaches like Augie Garrido will tell you, the key to winning is finding people with passion for the game and putting them in positions where they will succeed. The same is true in business. Aligning talent to business starts with a strategy that envisions outcomes, defines roles, and fills them with talent that matches the organization’s culture.

Keep Feeding the Farm Team. Whether you call it bench strength or a farm team, you need to have development and succession plans in place. Your plan is not unlike a team depth chart that shows where players can play if someone is injured or otherwise cannot play.

Aligning talent to business, defining roles, recruiting, developing, and measuring performance creates an environment where people’s passion for the game can grow and drive overall business performance.

"My job is to put the players in position where they can play at their best. Then, it is up to them." — Augie Garrido

Talent drives business performance and superior employment branding attracts top talent. But what about the connection between talent management and a company’s brand perception?

BusinessWeek recently posted their Best Global Brands 2008 list. Six of the top ten and more than half of the top 50 have used talent management initiatives to attract the top talent they need to distinguish their brands. On the magazine’s Best Places to Launch a Career 2008 list, seven of the top ten employ talent management. (We know because they are Taleo customers.)

SHRM’s study, The Employer Brand: A Strategic Tool to Attract, Recruit and Retain Talent, says that organizations that define and align their employment brand will attract and retain people with a tighter culture fit.

Another talent and brand connection is employee satisfaction. In The Value of Being a Best Employer, Peter Cappelli cites Knowledge@Wharton’s Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices that says research connects how good a place is to work and the employment brand to a 2X+ return compared to the overall market.

Although any good news on the stock market is hard to come by these days, here are some bullish words of encouragement. Wells Fargo’s Chairman Dick Kovacevich takes a more positive view of the economy and the market’s immediate profit-focused misperception of relationship of talent to stock price:

“There may be doubts how long (the recovery) will take, but it will get done and sooner than most people think…Why do stock prices go up with layoffs? Why is it good to lose good people?”

Maybe more CEOs and boards will take a long-term holistic talent view that upstages short-term financial thinking?

According to PwC Saratoga’s 2008/2009 Human Capital Effectiveness Report, nineteen percent of managers and twenty nine percent of executives will be eligible for retirement within five years. This anticipated “baby-boomer drain” raises a big red flag, propelling succession planning to the front lines in the quest for future success.

Despite these demographic alarms and the likelihood of sudden changes in the executive ranks, i4cp’s Taking the Pulse: Succession Planning survey found that most organizations are not well-prepared to fill a vacant leadership position.

To address the issue, the Harvard Business Review article, Solve the Succession Crisis by Growing Inside-Outside Leaders, focuses on CEO development; while The Link Between Succession Planning and Success—Is Your Global Business Ready? identifies key skills and knowledge needed to compete in the future markets.

The reality is that the need for leadership succession is not confined to the CEO suite or even to C-level executives. Today’s dynamic, global business environment demands proactive succession planning systems and practices that reach deeper and farther.

You need to have more comprehensive knowledge on your organization’s rising stars and a wider awareness of talent outside your organization. Successful succession planning practices can also aid in the retention of top talent while protecting organizations from damaging leadership disruptions.

BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange lists the most active news topics that are tracked and shared. On October 7, the top five were:

1. Credit Crunch 580 new articles 164 users
2. AIG 187 new articles 51 users
3. 2008 Election 408 new articles 60 users
4. Social Networking 443 new articles 102 users
5. Lehman Bros. 389 new articles 23 users

In the midst of a contentious US election season combined with the uncertain financial crisis environment, people are tapping into the power of community by connecting to their social networks. The Economist’s article Facebook for suits confirms this observation and adds a point of exclamation:

AMONG the few firms benefiting from the upheaval in the financial markets are professional social networks—websites that help with business networking and job-hunting.

The article surmises that people are updating their profiles and looking for jobs. But there is also the global market momentum where the user bases of LinkedIn, Facebook, and dozens of others are growing rapidly to include more than hip North American Generation Y and the Millennials.

What does this mean for attracting and retaining talent? The socially networked community is expanding across generational and geographic lines to redefine the concept of connected. It has become core to an updated employment brand and making the right connections.

We’ve posted many times on how organizations that focus on talent gain a clear competitive advantage, revenue growth, profitability, and better business performance:

Talent Management Delivers Payoff
Talent Quotient: Quantify the Financial Impact of Talent
HR Best Practices Drive Results in Small Firms Too
The Business Case for Performance Management

Watson Wyatt’s Human Capital Index also states the case for talent management:

“Companies with superior human capital practices can create more than double the shareholder value than companies with average human capital practices.”

Now IBM and HCI have released a study of 1,000 organizations called Integrated Talent Management that further validates the value and ROI. A key finding:

“Organizations that apply talent management practices demonstrate higher financial performance compared to their industry peers.”

The research is a three-part series about the return on investment of talent management, gaps in executing a talent management strategy, and recommendations for bolstering this capability.

Part 1 - Understanding the opportunities for success
Part 2 – Surviving corporate adolescence and reaching organizational maturity
Part 3 – Turning talent management into a competitive advantage: An industry view

The papers explain how investing in talent management capabilities linked to business strategy leads to competitive advantage and better financial performance than industry peers. Specific practices that boosted business performance included defining and supporting employee engagement and performance management.

Pay—and pay for performance—trigger perennially charged conversations. Often, the discussions and perceptions are ill informed or inaccurate.

Gallup reports that half of Americans believe they are underpaid. Many people don’t know the upper and lower limits of pay for their job, as Weddle’s reported:

The Hay Group surveyed compensation executives and managers to get their sense of how many employees actually know the minimum and maximum figures in the salary range for their position. Among the respondents:
• 24% said that few employees knew the salary range minimum and maximum for their job;
• 25% said some employees knew these figures;
• 18% said that that half of all employees were aware of such figures;
• 18% said that most employees had this information; and
• 14% actually said that all employees knew the figures.

To put it another way, almost half (49%) of the compensation experts in this poll felt that hardly anyone in their organization knew much about the upper and lower limits of pay for their job and barely one-in-seven thought that everyone was fully informed. With rising costs and inflation putting a pinch on almost everyone's household budget, such an information vacuum poses a real risk to retention.

Pay for performance (…or poor performance.) has also become a popular topic lately as people look at the disasters of Wall Street. Compensation is one component of overall talent management. At best, a unified talent management platform supports three aspects working in harmony: recruiting, performance, and compensation:

• Recruiting to source, assess, and acquire talent.
• Performance management for goals, careers, and succession.
• Compensation with closed-loop pay for performance.

Fully integrated global compensation management makes it easier to align and reward talent. It provides better localization of total compensation with centralized control, plus a closed loop process between organizational objectives and individual contributions.

Compliant, competitive, and culturally appropriate global compensation models are a key structural element of successful talent – and business – management. Because this is what happens when compensation drives business strategy as opposed to the other way around:

“This financial crisis is a direct result of the compensation practices at these Wall Street firms,” said Paul Hodgson, a senior analyst at the Corporate Library, a governance research group.

Back in the 60s, the noted media theorist Marshall McLuhan said: “The medium is the message”. To play off that term in the on demand software as a service (SaaS) space, today the platform is the service. Here’s why.

Technology talk these days is about cloud computing. Is this a new concept? Not really. Software as a service (SaaS) on an open platform has been around for more than a decade providing online access requiring no software or hardware. You subscribe, configure, and use career sites and solutions on a web browser. With SaaS, thousands of Taleo customers have been able to solve the most complex global talent challenges.

The SaaS platform features easy access, 99.9% reliability, and advanced security. The most advanced platforms work like a Talent Grid that can deliver the benefits of unified talent management:

• Recruit talent before a job opens.
• Know if you are gaining or losing talent value.
• Establish real compensation for real performance.
• Identify future leaders internally and externally before they are needed.
• Place candidates in positions where they are likely to succeed.

You configure core solutions, establish structure and workflow, and then get a choice of plug-and-play extensions from pre-integrated partners. That enables unified talent management on a Talent Grid that powers the process ecosystem you choose to build.

With nearly 1,000 attendees at Taleo WORLD 2008, the caliber of HR talent collected truly reflects the theme of Great Performances. Along those lines, there is the winner of the 2008 Taleo Innovation Award: the City of Chicago.

One of the world’s great cities—with a metropolitan area population of 9.7 million—Chicago boasts a gross metropolitan product of $442 billion. The city has also been rated as having the most balanced economy in the US due to the high level of diversification.

But here’s the challenge: more than 80% of all City of Chicago hires are union and application volumes are very high, often exceeding 1,000 candidates. Prescreening these applicants involved two separate process steps, which created an ongoing backlog in the Department of Human Resources. Cycle times were measured in months, and the best talent was often long gone before applications could be processed.

To meet these and other challenges, the City of Chicago automated initial screening of all job applicants with disqualification questions using Taleo Enterprise Edition. They also took advantage of Staffing WebTop, internal and external career sections, multiple candidate selection workflows, and Taleo Connect integration.

Their unique configuration of Taleo combined with a highly prescriptive screening process produced a measured reduction in the in the number of candidates who must be manually screened by an average of 90%, with a corresponding reduction in cycle times.

Congratulations to the City of Chicago, and to the many other Taleo customers who can tell a great success story of how they were able to drive business performance using talent initiatives!

Remember the McDonald’s signs with their OVER ## BILLION SERVED messages? Today—at Taleo WORLD 2008—we announced the processing of our 100 millionth candidate. Since 1999, our customers have been relying on software as a service (SaaS) technology to process their talent from career sites to job sites.

This is a milestone for talent management and also for the on demand technology space. What was once considered a new and evolving technology has now been proven to deliver 99.9% reliability and 95% satisfaction while serving more than 2,500,000 users in complex global corporations and small local businesses worldwide.

And, When the Solution is a Service Everyone Wins, including the environment. Consider this: By eliminating one envelope, cover letter, and single-page resume per application, organizations that used Taleo in 2007 saved more than 8,250 trees. In fact, since 1999, Taleo customers worldwide have gone green and saved more than 36,000 trees by replacing traditional paper processes with automation.

You’ve strategized and socialized—sourced, assessed, and interviewed. Now your company better hurry up and walk the talk. Because HR departments are reporting that there is a higher rate of new hire turnover among Millennials.

After you invest all the resources to catching Gen Y entry-level talent, a Novations Group study quantifies your opening risk window in the timeline for retention.

In your experience, how much time do employers have to "prove" to employees in their 20s that the company is the best place for them?
• <1 month........26%
• 1-6 months.....51%
• 6+ months......22%

First impressions mean a lot. You don’t have much time to deliver on the promise of your employment brand. And you need to engage these new hires immediately with a tech-savvy approach to getting onboard and productive.

More effective onboarding, anyone?

Baseline magazine’s Software as a Service Survey of more than 250 CIOs reveals increased momentum for SaaS HR applications floating at the C-level:

• HR/benefits applications are most likely to be implemented.
• 72% got up and running within the timeframe they expected.
• 43% have been using SaaS for three years or more.
• 65% say that SaaS has lowered software costs.

Total cost of operation with SaaS—as opposed to total cost of ownership which only happens when you buy a traditional license—means no maintenance costs and low-cost or included support services. Of course there are optional premium support packages available for large complex or global enterprises that require that level of support.

However, with traditional ERP providers charging an average of 22% on top of already high license and implementation fees, SaaS total cost of operations is a true value. Maybe that’s why more than half of those surveyed experience greater satisfaction with SaaS than in-house, purchased, and hosted applications.

Not to mention that SaaS makes your company greener. This survey further validates that when software is a service, everyone wins and shifts the advantage from software vendors to the customers.

Saugatuk Technology’s Enterprise-Ready, or Not: SaaS Enters the Mainstream outlines how SaaS adoption is growing in all sizes of enterprises, going international, and demonstrating strong customer satisfaction.

“In just a few short years, SaaS has evolved from simple subscription-based application solutions at the margins – email, web conferencing, and CRM – to offering core application solutions such as HR, Finance, BI and Procurement, as well as IT infrastructure solutions delivered as cloud-based services.”

Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, notes this in an interview with CIO Insight:

“If you can get the information processing you need in a more economical way, then companies will naturally move in that direction…Companies are more open to using software-as-a-service offerings and other Web-based computing services than they were a year ago...Smaller and midsize companies are leading the way…It allows them to level the playing field without having to invest a lot of capital.”

BusinessWeek’s technology columnist Sarah Lacy agrees in her Valley Girl post:

“Great news for the user, but the software makers miss out on the once-lucrative massive upgrade every few years and seemingly endless maintenance fees for supporting old versions of the software.”

This great news for the user is bad news for traditional legacy ERP companies. They complain they can’t make as much money and even sometimes rant and rave. Here’s an odd example: SaaS market will 'collapse' in two years. From Lawson CEO Harry Debes:

“People are stupid…Getting signed up as a SaaS customer is fast, but getting out is just as fast. Whereas traditional software is like cocaine--you're hooked. It's too difficult and expensive to switch providers once you've invested in one…Larry Ellison has the same perspective as I do.”

Perhaps Mr. Debes is in denial and doesn’t see the elephant in the room. In any case, you can catch more of Sarah Lacy’s perspectives along with Marcus Buckingham and Polly LaBarre live at Taleo WORLD 2008.

For even more on SaaS, check out Computerworld’s Software As A Service Grows Up executive briefing guide which outlines these basic advantages and more:

• Lower equipment, staffing and power/cooling costs than internal hosting.
• The ability to grow the number of users or functions quickly.
• No commitment to long software licenses or infrastructure upgrades.

McKinsey has published another stylish chart. The data points echo the oft-cited disparate (and dismal) view of HR performance – which of course depends on your point of view (POV). Take a look at the perception gap.

Aligning talent strategies with business objectives along with accountability and responsibility perceptions are clear disconnects.

So, HR needs to:

Demonstrate the connection between HR and business performance.

Implement talent metrics and communicate business value.

Analyze and evolve the status of talent management capabilities.

Now let’s focus on areas of near agreement. Most HR professionals and Line managers regard HR as administrative not strategic. Many from both sides think HR lacks authority and respect.

Yet the oddest common perception in the findings is that only about one-third of HR pros and Line managers agree that HR relies too much on best practices when designing systems. Although convoluted, the learning from the study findings seem to indicate more reliance on best practices would be welcome, regardless of your POV!

“Show me the money.” Although sports agent Jerry Maguire provided a different style of human capital management, the words ring true. When it comes to HR contributing to the bottom line, we’ve seen the business value of talent management as have a number of independent analysts and studies. Now there are more proof points that deliver evidence of the growing impact.

The Conference Board’s Evidence-Based HR in Action describes how Taleo customer Hewlett-Packard and others are using a methodology called Evidence Based Human Resources (EBHR) to demonstrate the connection between HR and business performance.

EBHR begins with the notion that talent drives performance. Starting with the financial and organizational performance measures, HR professionals then identify human capital strategies that empirically drive the desired outcomes.

That sounds familiar…in fact, talent drives performance is Taleo’s tagline.

Supporting this connection between HR and business performance in the Age of Talent, two Harvard MBAs explain why HR is the place to be in Why Did We Ever Go Into HR?

HR today sits smack-dab in the middle of the most compelling competitive battleground in business, where companies deploy and fight over that most valuable of resources—workforce talent.

The New HR they describe has evolved to the unified talent management platform and executes with a keen understanding of how talent aligns to the business. They describe a transformed function that creates value, nurtures intellectual capital, connects people, engages employees, and channels people’s strengths.

The arrival of the Millennials of Generation Y taking the seats of retiring Baby Boomers signals it’s time to upgrade career site employment brands with Web 2.0 technology and fire up online social network recruiting connections.

Why? Because connection & collaboration drive career choices for Gen Y. Social utilities are beneficial for the enterprise in both recruiting and daily work. However, this issue carries controversy as social network profiles spark debate about appropriate use of the tools to make social networking job connections.

But there’s no debate when it comes to attracting candidates with technology. Innovative career sites can enhance your employment brand. Register for the webcast: Career Site 2.0: 11 Essential Elements on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT to learn more.

There’s no doubt the competition level is high in China with the Summer Olympics. And it may be the same on the business front. It seems that hiring and retaining world-class talent is just as competitive.

The McKinsey article, How to address China's growing talent shortage, opens by highlighting the trials:

“The growing need for talented managers in China represents by far the biggest management challenge facing multinationals and locally owned businesses alike…44 percent of the executives at Chinese companies surveyed by The McKinsey Quarterly reported that insufficient talent was the biggest barrier to their global ambitions…”

The article, Chinese ‘Pay Now, Worry Later’ Mentality May Be Retention Killer, describes the hurdles associated with the sport of job-hopping and notes:

“Organizations can mitigate some of their recruiting and retention woes without throwing money at talent. Implementing some basic building blocks of effective reward-program management into compensation considerations might be a good place to start.”

So the judges would say that unified recruiting and performance management practices and a strong employee value proposition are compulsories for the competition in China as they are worldwide.

The Beijing Olympics surely contributed to other business talent shortages by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs to work on the event. Estimates for the 2012 London Olympics peg this number at 100,000 with 27,000 in service industries.

Predicting the future is more art than science, but it can be instructive to speculate on scenarios and extrapolate on trends. In the PricewaterhouseCoopers study Managing tomorrow’s people*: The future of work to 2020 three key themes emerged:

1. Business models will change dramatically.
2. People management will present one of the greatest business challenges.
3. The role of HR will undergo fundamental change.

The report paints HR in the corporate landscape as passively standing at a crossroads with its service baggage where it will choose to become the heart of the organization, drive social responsibility, or get outsourced for acting too transactional while retaining the people sourcing function.

In line with these themes, unified talent management offers HR a combined process, strategic, and bottom line approach to become the heart of business performance. It’s part of our vision of The Future of Talent Management: The Four Stages of Evolution.

Rich man, poor man,
Beggar man, thief.
Doctor, lawyer,
Indian chief!

That’s the traditional counting rhyme. Depending on which positions you are trying to fill, here’s some interesting rankings of job types: wanted or not, easy and hard to fill, and those in demand:

The 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill Worldwide, as reported by employers for 2008:
1. Skilled Manual Trades
2. Sales Representatives
3. Technicians
4. Engineers
5. Management/Executives
6. Laborers
7. Secretaries/Administrative Assistants
8. Drivers
9. Accounting & Finance Staff
10. IT Staff

The top 5 of the Top 20 Most Recession-Proof Professions:
1. Sales Representative/Business Development
2. Software Design/Development
3. Nursing
4. Accounting & Finance Executive
5. Accounting Staff

The occupations at the top of the Most Prestigious Occupations list:
• Firefighter (57% say "very great prestige");
• Scientist (56%);
• Doctor (53%);
• Nurse (52%);
• Teacher (52%)
When the numbers for "very great" and "considerable prestige" are added, all of these occupations are very favorably regarded by 74 percent or more of all adults.

The Least Prestigious Occupations:
Only 15 percent or fewer adults regard the following occupations as having very great prestige:
• Real estate agent/broker (6%);
• Stock broker (10%);
• Banker (15%);
• Accountant (15%);
• Entertainer (15%)
Substantial majorities of adults (from 61% to 83%) believe that these occupations have "hardly any" or only "some" prestige.

But there are also trends that bear watching. It’s a good time to be an IT worker. Green industries offer job growth opportunity. And the Federal commission calls for two million poll workers. Let’s hope they do a better job hiring for those positions than when the Justice Department hired lawyers!

Eighty-five percent (85%) of employers concerned with hiring creative people say they can't find the applicants they seek.

This quote comes from The Conference Board: Ready to Innovate: Are Educators and Executives Aligned on the Creative Readiness of the U.S. Workforce?

While spontaneity, poise, and enthusiasm may play well in interviews, there are better ways to consistently gauge creativity across a wider range of candidates:

• Interdisciplinary history of abilities, certifications, and experience.
• Problem identification, analysis, and articulation.
• Focused assessments and prescreening exercises.

HR and recruiters need to think creatively when designing their employment brands, attracting creative talent, and building optimal profiles based on traits of their own high performers. They also need a consistent and disciplined hiring process.

For the strategy to succeed, close the loop between the recruiting and performance process so you recruit and review on the same system to drive quality of hire.

Stephen J. Dubner of Freakonomics fame weighs in on measuring innovation and asks some experts for their opinions. Note Seth Godin’s take; it applies to innovation, talent management…and life in general:

"Innovation happens long before the benefit is realized… And if we embrace the process, not the event, we win."

At The New Yorker Conference themed Stories from the Near Future, the ever-perceptive Malcolm Gladwell focused on hiring as the biggest challenge for organizations and called it a collective crisis.

In this video of his presentation, Gladwell uses the sports analogy of scouting combine events to talk about the assessment process in hiring. His stories about attending hockey, basketball, and football combines provide insights into how you can do a better job of scouting your talent.

“In order to make that assessment, you feel you need to gather some objective data about who this kid is and what he can do. As much as that makes sense, is it true? Scouting combines are a disaster…”

Unless you represent one of the dozens of professional sports teams in the world, you may ask what does this have to do with hiring assessments? Plenty. It’s all about what he calls The Mismatch Problem:

“It is when the criteria we use to assess someone’s ability to do a job are radically out of step with the actual demands of the job itself.”

How do you deal with the problem and find a solution?

“Wait until they do their job and analyze them when they are on the job.”

Gladwell’s observations align perfectly with the need for a unified approach to recruiting and performance management. Once you are able to gather the attributes of your top performers and translate them into recruiting assessment criteria, then you can mitigate The Mismatch Problem and drive higher performance. “Life has become more complex…We want profoundly different things from workers today than we have in the past” comments Gladwell, “…but the way we hire has largely remained simplistic.”

For a lighter view of The Mismatch Problem, read Peter Norvig’s tongue-in-cheek fictitious performance review for a Patent Clerk Third Class position in the Bern Patent Office: Albert Einstein. It’s a very nice parody, but also a great talent example of missed opportunity and mismatch while demonstrating the real value of performance reviews done correctly.

There may be wacky excuses for missing a day of work and getting caught sleeping in your cubicle. But there’s no excuse for non-compliance in your hiring process. From OFCCP to I-9, you’ve got to stay current on recruiting compliance risks and rewards.

The New Components of Compliance points out that compliance awareness is not optional, and lists 10 factors to improve compliance with OFCCP regulations that can get you on the way to reducing risk and exposure. Deferring the technology investment can cost a lot more than just your peace of mind.

“In 2006 and 2007 combined, the OFCCP collected more than $100 million in settlements from federal contractors with noncompliant recruitment and hiring practices.”

Compliance 101: Work-Eligibility Verification and the IRCA offers ideas on staying ahead of the game with employment eligibility I-9 verification in the US. Stay aware of changes in your state as new laws can require immediate compliance.

When it comes to hiring compliance, there are no excuses. You need a systematic process that captures data and delivers a consistent approach across your company.

Traditional economic supply and demand curves measure the price you pay for goods and services in a specific time and place. This works fine for static commodities. But when it comes to sourcing talent, there are additional dimensions to the equation. The Economist Intelligence Unit has published two briefing papers that provide fresh insights:

Talent wars: The struggle for tomorrow's workforce echoes the need for talent initiatives to be more closely integrated with business strategy. Nearly half (47%) believe the aging population will accelerate talent shortages and 64% see recruitment and retention getting harder.

People for growth: The talent challenge in emerging markets describes how companies are struggling to bridge the ever-widening talent gap with 80% of nearly 1,000 executives worldwide expecting this challenge to grow over the next three years. Top talent is expected to cost more while creative sourcing strategies and a stronger employment brand to attract young professionals are keys to success.

These reports reinforce the prevailing idea that large international companies need a consistent global approach to talent management but also local flexibility to meet regional talent challenges effectively.

People are the difference and talent management is clearly the strategy. IBM’s Global CEO Study: The Enterprise of the Future asked more than 1,000 CEOs and leaders what will have the greatest business impact – 48% said employee skills. From the board room to the lunch room, everyone is a participant in the war for talent.

The title of Rusty Weston’s post at FastCompany.com—Gen Y's Retention Deficit Syndrome—sums up the challenges with hiring and retaining Generation Y.

Why focus on Y? Because they are your new fresh talent source. These Millennials will replace your retiring Baby Boomers. Who are they and what do they want?

60 Minutes says there are 80 million out there. And according to media articles, they want to reshape our institutions using technology, choose hotels in their own terms, and become serial entrepreneurs.

The Chartered Management Institute’s Generation Y: unlocking the talent of young managers debunks some stereotypes and offers recruiting recommendations. Study findings include:

There are some job attributes and values that are sought by all Generation Y managers. The overwhelming majority (97 per cent) are looking to build their transferable skills. …51 per cent anticipate moving to a new job within two years, and 67 per cent expect to have a range of jobs throughout their career…

For even more insights, register for the upcoming HCI/Taleo webcast: Generation Next: High Performance in Gen X and Gen Y.

BusinessWeek posted a Harvard Business article by Tammy Erickson on Today's Top 10 Talent-Management Challenges. The #1 challenge was:

Attracting and retaining enough employees at all levels to meet the needs of organic and inorganic growth.

Recruiting and retaining top talent no longer has a pure leadership focus. It’s acknowledged to be important at all levels in the organization, and calls for a comprehensive talent pipeline with unified recruiting and performance.

To improve retention, you also can revamp your performance review process to take evaluation from an annual event to a regular ritual. A personalized approach sends the message that you are making every person count.

That way you can mitigate a few of the Top Reasons Employees Consider Leaving. According to BlessingWhite, only 58% plan to stay with their current employer. In other words, a third of North American workers expect to quit this year. How many of them are your employees?

Every few months, we revisit the latest thinking on software-as-a-service. Last time we wrote When the Solution is a Service Everyone Wins. This time we’ve got a potpourri of opinion and thinking on the greener SaaS side.

Market and Revenue. The Wall Street Journal responded to Taleo’s acquisition of Vurv with an interesting analysis and chart in Web-Service Firms Take Non-IPO Routes. They state: “Most software-as-a-service companies are still growing more quickly than traditional makers of business software, whose products must be installed on a customer's server systems.”

Environment. Intacct’s Going Green with SaaS blog entry reaffirms the common sense point that SaaS customers running in a multi-tenant environment are helping reduce the amount of electricity used versus on-premise software. Dan Druker says he’s seen numbers that estimate savings as high as 20:1.

Horses. And Phil Wainewright’s Software as Services blog weighs in with The four horsemen of SaaS. He also echoes the theme of market growth when he says: “…people management sector — one of the hottest segments of the enterprise SaaS landscape.”

So it seems SaaS is good for customers, vendors, and the environment. Once again: everyone wins.

In the past decade, applications of talent management practices have undergone a substantial progression. Although it’s interesting to consider these developments conceptually, it’s more informative and valuable to see how organizations—each in its own place on the talent management technology and processes journey—strive to improve.

The Future of Talent Management: Four Stages of Evolution by Taleo Research examines the stages of talent management maturity in a new model while covering future technology and processes.

The paper categorizes the supporting applications, enabling technologies, and business processes required for proper—and optimal—talent management proceeding through four stages of evolution:
• STAGE 1: Companies use automated core HR systems with a group of manual and disparate human capital management (HCM) systems and processes.
• STAGE 2: Organizations begin to automate some of their HCM processes.
• STAGE 3: HCM systems are being integrated and talent management suites are forming.
• STAGE 4: A truly unified platform of talent management and application delivery.

Use this practical tool to help measure where your applications and strategies fit into the Talent Management Maturity Model, and then you can identify opportunities and next steps for driving business performance.

When it comes to the talent management and recruiting systems market, you usually see solutions tailored for the small and medium business or the large global enterprise.

Companies caught in the middle choose from the top end of the bottom or the bottom end of the top. Defining this middle market is even difficult to articulate. Your needs don’t fit these molds. There you are: smack dab in the middle.

For small and medium sized enterprises, selecting a talent management suite or justifying a performance management system entails a significant investment of time and money. Do you compromise on features and hope to not outgrow the system? Or risk budget, timing, and success with a more robust solution?

Talent can have a much larger impact on medium sized organizations than on a large enterprise, however there are typically fewer resources—people, money, systems—to invest in the talent management challenge. This can sometimes put smaller enterprises at a disadvantage in the war for talent when competing with larger enterprises for the same talent.

Medium sized enterprises need every competitive edge they can get; yet, the talent management vendor community has done very little for the growing medium-sized enterprise company—until now.

At Taleo, our product and service groups have combined best practices, easy configuration, and packaged implementation. Our team looked at nearly a decade of customer success to build a methodology based on proven practices for medium sized companies.

The new packaged solution, dubbed Taleo Edge, gives the middle market company the benefits of a faster and lower-cost competitive edge in the war for talent with:

• Core enterprise recruiting functionality with configuration.
• Guided implementation methodology and deployment.
• Packaged best practice templates, content libraries, and guides.
• Remote system administration and integration.
• Bundled training, eLearning, and support.

Check it out if you are stuck in the middle but still want to take advantage of a leading solution.

Staffing.org's 2008 Recruiting Metrics and Performance Benchmark Report just came out based on results from 20 industry groups with data covering 1,000 companies. The report reveals some key trends.

Here is a quick summary of the pluses and minuses:

+ “Internal trends include metrics, business alignment, access to management, and technology.”

– “Fewer than half of all employers reconcile candidate qualifications with what they originally sought.”

The pluses show that the strategy of talent management has taken hold and is understood in HR and at the executive table. Investments in talent technology have paid off. But there is definitely more work to do.

Clearly, getting the best talent through creative sourcing and attracting talent from the career site through an automated process remains the primary tactical focus. But the career site must deliver a high quality experience and effectively market your employment brand. And—to deliver value to the business—the quality of hire loop must be closed through unified recruiting and performance management.

In late 2006, Gartner produced the first Magic Quadrant for E-Recruitment Software. That was a big milestone for the e-recruiting and talent management software market. Having an independent analyst firm evaluate the competitive landscape validated the space and differentiated the offerings in a standard format.

The 2008 Magic Quadrant for E-Recruitment Software, authored by HCM software industry analyst Jim Holincheck, is now published.

The report examines “vendors that have more than 100 e-recruitment software customers with more than 1,000 employees, more than $25 million in total revenue (license, maintenance and services) or both."

The evaluation criteria is based on the company's vision and ability to execute, which includes market understanding, overall viability, innovation, business model, market responsiveness, and customer service experience.

We are proud to see that Gartner positioned Taleo as the leader in the Leaders Quadrant!

Disclaimer
This Magic Quadrant graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research note and should be evaluated in the context of the entire report. The Gartner report is available upon request from Taleo.

We all know that cost cutting is a reflexive way to balance a reduction in revenue. But leading companies that put talent first are looking at creative solutions before immediately resorting to layoffs. Consider these:

While HR Might Face Cuts, Talent Remains a Top Priority reports on an Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) study that found while 88% of corporations plan cost-cutting programs, they will look at other categories first before slashing headcount. More than a third would look at HR.

Companies Shy Away From ‘Slash and Burn’ covers a Towers Perrin report with similarly positive numbers. They say 60% of companies are looking towards growth with 40% expecting layoffs. And the issues around reducing headcount are further explored in Recession: Handle With Care.

For some companies, layoffs can appear to be an attractive short-term financial fix. But they may actually do more harm than good in the short and long terms.

In downsizing, firms often lose more than they bargained for cites a study in the Academy of Management Journal and notes that downsizing can set in motion a dynamic that can affect even the employees you want to retain. The numbers back this up: downsizing 0.5% increases the overall turnover rate momentum to 13%.

The Harvard Business Review’s article Halting the Exodus After a Layoff bears this out by succinctly equating layoffs with voluntary turnover. They also recommend increasing awareness around communication programs and benefits to stem the tide. Layoffs are clearly stressful to company culture. Some even consider hiring interior decorators to transform the empty space!

Even though the human capital budget line is the largest category of spend for most companies, there’s no need to lose your head when you tighten your belt in a down economy. Remember, the intellectual property of your talent is your greatest performance differentiator and powers innovation regardless of the economic season.

We all know that HR wants to get closer to the business to add more value. We also know the main goal of talent management is aligning people to business goals and powering improved business performance. The article Recruiting Inside the Loop highlighting Taleo customer, Advanced Technology Services, describes a great example of achievement in this endeavor.

Advanced Technology Services immerses their recruiters in specific areas of the business, employs innovative sourcing strategies, and measures results to create an environment where continuous improvement drives success. Sourcing and recruiting direction starts with an inside knowledge of the business before heading outside to find the talent.

This quote from Jeffrey Owens, president of ATS, sums up their alignment philosophy:

"HR is our competitive advantage. Retention, recruiting and training are all critical to the company, and HR is deeply involved in new business prospects.”

Another example of proactive engagement of the business with a teamwork approach is Taleo customer, Johnson Controls. They improved the hiring manager experience with best-of-breed technology and better process alignment of headcount approval with recruiting to improve visibility. Russell Gallas, global programs manager for the company’s Talent Acquisition Systems, says:

"Our current process provides our recruiters with a view into the business so they see and understand what’s coming."

Recruiters are not measured by their ability to simply fill the slots quickly and efficiently. Using metrics to measure recruiting performance quantifies results; none is more important than quality of hire. And adding value to the business starts with proactive engagement in an environment of continuous improvement.

Diversity.com has followed up with more detailed lists of companies which rank at the top in specific categories of diversity hiring. Check out their lists for Top Ten Companies for People with Disabilities, Top Ten Companies for LGBT Employees, and Top Ten Companies for Asian Americans.

In previous posts Hiring Diversity: Knowing Where You Stand and Recruit and Retain People with Disabilities, we commented on getting beyond simple compliance to creating cultures of diversity. We are also seeing many of the same names listed as on The 2008 Top 50 Companies for Diversity List.

Why do these leading organizations succeed across the diversity spectrum where others fall short? We think it’s because many of these companies have formalized hiring strategies around a consistent process that supports specific diversity and disability hiring goals. The five Top Global Diversity Companies article notes how even large global enterprises can meet this challenge with training, programs, groups, and executive accountability.

We know a large majority of the top tens and the global five powers diversity, fosters innovation, and measures performance with Taleo Compliance because they are Taleo customers.

But there is still much work to be done by companies, starting with executive leadership. The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) Taking the Pulse: Diversity and Inclusion study revealed that:
• 53% do not sponsor diversity training.
• 65% are missing a global diversity strategy.
• 66% lack specific diversity councils.
• 77% have no affinity support groups.

Toni Riccardi, Senior Vice President of Human Resources and Chief Diversity Officer of The Conference Board sums up the research in Creating a Competency Model for Diversity and Inclusion Practitioners with this statement:

"The focus is on how these executives can help their companies capture new markets, build effective global teams, and manage their companies' brand reputations. Companies are increasingly seeking the expertise of their diversity executives as they enter new markets, build profitable relationships, and develop credibility across different cultures."

The Role of HR in The Age of Talent whitepaper prompted some blog buzz, including The HR Capitalist posting—and thread of comments—When People Say HR Stinks, It's Simple...Don't Stink... It revisits the controversy around the role of HR as a business partner.

We think that talent management is best implemented as a partnership between the business and HR. We already know it’s a top business priority. Interestingly, the study results from a small sample of respondents from Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) show a sharp difference from North America (NA). Their encouraging perspective?

• HR reports directly to the CEO in 71% of companies in ANZ versus 58% in NA.

• 78% of respondents from ANZ claim that HR is either respected or highly respected and occasionally or frequently consulted on corporate strategy versus 64% in NA.

• 32% from ANZ assess their organizations as being well prepared or very well-prepared to address coming talent management challenges versus 18% in North America.

In the age of talent, we agree that HR is a profession in transition, especially when it comes to realizing the transformational power of unified talent management on organizations. We understand the pain but we also see the gains, and agree with the comments of report author Alan Schweyer, Executive Director of the Human Capital Institute:

“…the most successful organizations make talent management a priority for every leader, manager and supervisor…”

“…the gap in awareness between talent management and HR, is narrowing, as is the time spent in each activity…”

Take the time to make talent management happen in your organization, to realize HR elevation, deliver the payoff to the business, and perhaps even add to your own compensation.

The new Taleo Research white paper Unified Talent Management: Critical to UK Business discusses how UK businesses are under increasing pressure to optimize business processes and assets in an uncertain economy.

Yet they face increased talent shortages, lack unified talent systems and strategies, and must adjust career site strategies to accommodate an increase in online jobseekers.

Key findings show that talent management is acknowledged to be highly important and critical to business success but presents execution and technology challenges. A closer look at the survey analysis paints an impressionistic picture where the dots are clearly disconnected:

• 89% of respondents indicate that talent shortages are impacting or highly impacting leadership development in their organizations.

• 76% expect the current talent shortage to remain the same or increase (40%) over the next 12 months.

• And less than one-third (30%) have a talent management strategy in place.

The study also reveals that during the current economic downturn, the value of unified recruiting and performance management is top of mind:

• 74% see an increased need to retain top performers by driving the focus on performance management and career planning.

• 67% think succession planning and internal mobility programmes can maximise the value from current employees.

• 63% report the importance of quality of hire increases in this current climate compared to a high growth period (53%).

Nearly 200 UK HR leaders contributed survey answers and direct responses. This one summarizes what the results quantify:

“We need to be better at integrating a talent management approach across all aspects of business. We also need to have a well documented approach which is then owned by the business but co-authored/driven/facilitated by HR. This should be one of the major functions of an HR department.”

The journey from Personnel Department to Human Resources and Talent has taken decades. And the magic words most often used to elevate—or perhaps better define—the function in the eyes of the business include efficiency, strategy, and transformation.

These words always look good up front on the PowerPoint slides when approaching the executive table for HR initiative blessings and budget funding. But what do they really mean? And what results will they achieve?

The Human Resource Executive Online article, Talent and Transformation, says this:

While HR groups must clearly define what strategic means in their own organizations, the study's findings point toward a growing consensus about what "strategic HR" is.

Survey results found that 70% of HR leaders view talent management as a key strategy. They are not alone. Executives have also made talent management a top business priority along with talent retention.

Our key takeaways:

• Effective HR/business partnerships are built on actions that actively engage people in the recruiting and performance processes. You need a unified system that candidates, recruiters, hiring managers, executives, and employees can easily use and will rapidly adopt.

• Getting a seat at the executive table requires more than selling a program and simple ROI. You need to commit to tangible benefits of value creation and metrics for measuring recruiting and performance results such as quality of hire. Initiatives must respond to business challenges such as growth plans, leadership gaps, the need for innovation, or higher productivity, instead of HR compliance programs.

Making the words efficiency, transformation, and strategic HR equate to real business partnership value requires talent management to be a core element of the business process, not principally an HR activity. Embedding talent management into the business process—facilitated by HR and owned by line managers and employees—puts the strategy into practice.

Long relegated to HR journals, research papers, and occasional magazine features, talent management is now appearing regularly in mainstream news.

As we’ve progressed from the agricultural, industrial, information, to the talent age, the performance generated from successful talent management is Empowering the Next Level of Business Results.

Recent talent management features in the news include The Sunday Times of London’s major spread available at TimesOnline, and Fortune magazine’s article titled Does your employer deserve you?, where John Cheese of Accenture says this on how to spot a talent-powered company:

“There should be a lot of upward mobility, and lateral movement as well, within the ranks. Talent-powered organizations give their employees frequent, constructive feedback on their performance.”

We agree that unified workforce mobility, recruiting, and performance management that take the process from an annual event to a regular occurrence can make all the difference.

Development Dimensions International (DDI) with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) recently published Growing Global Executive Talent which points out that talent awareness is not enough. Immediate action is required according to the more than 400 executives polled. 55% felt that business performance would likely suffer due to a lack of talent.

Aberdeen’s recent study of more than 9,000 organizations, The Looming Leadership Void: Identifying, Developing, and Retaining Your Top Talent, reveals that less than half have a succession planning strategy in place today. However, 73% will develop one in the next year. Aberdeen offers a proven roadmap to success:

• Gain senior management support.
• Standardize employee evaluation.
• Target key positions for succession.
• Define position attributes and behaviors.
• Establish position skills and knowledge.

To learn how succession planning plays a key role in talent management, join Kevin Martin, Research Director HCM, Aberdeen Group and James Harvey, Product Manager, Taleo Corporation on May 28, 2008 for an informative webcast, “Best-in-Class Succession Planning, The Real Scoop”.

Interesting findings are presented in the Results from the 5th Annual Rocket-Hire Online Screening and Assessment Usage Survey article, which is subtitled:

Quality screening and assessment tools can pay off, if you demonstrate their value.

Study data shows a significant increase in the use of screening and assessment: 57% now use online prescreening to sort applicants.

Note the dramatic increases in the usage rates of common assessment tools from 2002 to 2007:

Also there are the standard measures of automation in the hiring process:
• 79% of all respondents use an applicant tracking system (ATS).
• 100% of those who make > 5,000 hires use an ATS.

Overall satisfaction was high with 65% of prescreeners and 77% of assessors feeling the tools added value. And 42% of those not using them are considering one or both.

Our takeaways are:
• You need to collect metrics to evaluate and adjust assessments.
• Well-designed and validated assessments are critical to value and satisfaction.

Although the term inflection point has its root in mathematics, Andy Grove described it in business terms in his 1996 book, Only the Paranoid Survive as “An inflection point occurs where the old strategic picture dissolves and gives way to the new.” In 2008, the term inflection point is an apt description of the state of talent management and HR. The prevailing view of HR as a cost center tasked with primarily personnel issues has transformed. Study after study acknowledges the critical role of talent management in business performance, executed in partnership with a mission-critical, strategic HR department.

How organizations successfully accomplish talent management brings us to another inflection point, another point of change. That is in the technology tools and platforms that support and drive talent management strategies and processes for business performance.

Today, Taleo announced our acquisition of Vurv. This inflection point delivers on the promise of a unified talent management platform. Not only is this combination of interest to industry and financial analysts, but it also represents an important—and positive—development for both of our customer bases, and the broader market.

Now, the industry’s leading talent management resources will be focused on a single development investment. That development powerhouse—along with more Software as a Service (SaaS) and talent management experts than any other vendor—will create the next-generation of talent management applications.

More details are just a click away...

In the midst of economic uncertainty, a majority of respondents to Knowledge Infusion and ERE’s The Future of Recruiting & Sourcing Survey consider recruiting and sourcing in the top third of business—not HR—but business priorities.

That’s because best practices for finding and hiring great talent is never out of style—regardless of the economic season. We also see the advantages for all size businesses using new processes and tools for recruiting and sourcing.

Yesterday, smaller businesses:
• Relied on simple career sites, print ads, and limited job board access.
• Missed relationship building with passive candidates.
• Lacked sophisticated job board tools.
• Had to manually troll the social networks.

Today, technology and targeted marketing has leveled the playing field.

Join me—Alice Snell, Vice President of Taleo Research; Krista Bauer, Talent Acquisition Recruiter with MobiTV; and Kevin Nanney, Senior Director of Products with Taleo, as we explain how to hire smarter and faster in a slow economy using innovative sourcing channels and real-world examples.

Register for the Innovative Sourcing in Today's Economy webcast on Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 9:00 a.m. PT / 12 noon ET.

If you missed the last post, be sure to look at BusinessWeek’s The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies and how these organizations drive success. Their formula:

“They nurture cultures that value creative people in good times and bad.”

IBM used to have a cultural mantra posted in their offices: THINK. Apple used the tagline: THINK DIFFERENT. How about: THINK CREATIVE…because creativity drives success.

Ready to Innovate: Are Educators and Executives Aligned on the Creative Readiness of the U.S. Workforce? from The Conference Board offers some artful insights on the disconnect in business between creativity and innovation.

99% of educators and 97% of employers believe that arts are crucial for teaching creative thinking. But they don’t necessarily back beliefs with action. Says Jonathan Spector, Chief Executive Officer of The Conference Board:

"In particular, we believe it is time for employers to evaluate how well their corporate support of education and the arts, as well as their own employee-training programs, stack up against the strategic value they themselves place on innovation and its creative underpinning.”

If arts are primarily elective, then is innovation mostly optional? We don’t think so. Neither should business, however:

“…among those employers who cite creativity as a primary hiring criterion…80% provide the three activities/training options that they say best develop creativity — working in departments other than their own, managerial coaching, and mentoring — only on an ‘as needed’ basis.”

The summary statement says it all:

“...this new research shows that both businesses and schools recognize the critical role of creativity as a workforce skill, and both groups accept the role they have in fostering it. Both also recognize that arts-training is a key way to foster creativity. Yet despite this recognition, most schools do not include arts training as a mandatory part of the curriculum, and most businesses provide creativity-fostering training only to very few employees. With this growing recognition of the role a creative workforce has on the global competitiveness of American business, both business and education leaders need to examine what changes can be made to more widely foster these skills in our current — and especially our future — workers.”

How many times have you seen business executives wave their hand and call for increased innovation? Usually it’s when business results are not up to par. Innovation does not just happen. It’s driven by a number of factors and we believe talent is #1.

In tough economic times when it’s much easier to think of cost-cutting and pulling back on R & D, the innovative keep on going. They focus on business advantages and talent opportunities regardless of the economic season.

BusinessWeek's article and recent ranking of The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies in association with the Boston Consulting Group summarizes how these organizations drive success:

“They nurture cultures that value creative people in good times and bad.”

There is no innovation setting on the business control panel. You can’t just switch it on. But you can formalize processes to help jumpstart your culture. Talent management is the strategy that sets the table for innovation.

More and more executives are seeing the results and making talent a top priority. In fact, on the Scoreboard of Innovative Companies, we noticed that 11 of the top 15 and nearly 45% of the top 50 are using talent strategies and advanced online tools to source and hire top talent.

How do we know? They are Taleo customers. We look forward to seeing them at Taleo WORLD 2008 later this year to discuss new ideas and outline their winning talent strategies.

Google asked the question What will you do for Earth Day '08? There you can see a map of the globe or the continental US with suggestions ranging from using biodegradable golf tees to walking to work instead of driving. You can also submit your own message and scroll down to view suggested actions.

We’d like to reiterate our green suggestion to move from paper resumes and manual forms of recruiting to career sites and eRecruiting. Because when the solution is a service, everybody wins. In addition to the obvious paper savings, here’s how Planet Earth wins:

SaaS is green and eRecruiting delivered on demand is much greener than traditional paper processes or on-premise solutions that create redundant computing environments:
“Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications running in a multi-tenant environment…tend to be greener than on-premise software and servers. Multi-tenancy delivers more efficient power utilization per customer resulting in a smaller carbon footprint…helping reduce carbon emissions instead of powering more servers.”

Green is the color of successful recruiting. People are investigating employer brands to see what companies are doing to help the environment. Differentiate your brand and get green with eRecruiting.

A new global study, Creating People Advantage: How to Address HR Challenges Worldwide Through 2015, conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA), and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) surveyed 4,741 executives in 83 countries and markets.

Here is their major finding:

Managing talent is the most critical human resources (HR) challenge worldwide.

The report also ranks the global priorities:

Globally, Eight Topics Demand The Most Immediate Action and The Greatest Attention

Business managers and executives also voted with their reading choices. The McKinsey Quarterly Top Ten Newsletter reported that Making talent a strategic priority ranked #2 last quarter in popularity among McKinsey readers.

More and more board members, business executives, and line managers are embracing the concepts of talent management as a core business strategy for success. They realize that the war for talent is real and talent management is a concept that drives results up and down the organization.

A new unified approach to talent management takes advantage of the natural synergies between recruiting and performance management on a single platform.

This creates an opportunity for HR to get the top down support it needs to make the investment and realize the returns. Along those lines, Knowledge Infusion explains How to Buy a Talent Management Suite. And Bersin & Associates makes The Business Case for Performance Management Systems.

Survey shows nearly half of UK job seekers use the Internet to apply for jobs:

• 43% of workers applied online or sent a CV by email.
• 53% preferred online methods due to the fast response time.
• 24% found online job searching to be less time consuming
• 13% appreciated the ability to apply for many jobs at once.
• 27% still use word of mouth as the traditional way to get employment.

On the employer side, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says that using the Internet:

• 71% reduce recruitment costs.
• 41% increase speed of hiring.

Concurrently, there is a surge of momentum towards online recruitment advertising in the UK. In The Success of Online Recruitment Advertising, Onrec.com reports rapid growth due to enhanced audience engagement, measurability, and targeting with the online process. Their numbers demonstrate how success breeds success:

• 72% of online job seekers applied for jobs.
• 65% of online seekers gained interviews.
• 56% of interviewees got the jobs.

Additional benefits are expected when companies extend their recruitment strategies to employment branding. This is where Web 2.0 technologies come into play to make recruiting more personal and intuitive.

Enhance Media saw this trend and projected that The internet will be the UK’s largest recruitment medium by 2008!

UK Online Ad Revenues Predicted to Overtake TV in 2009 according to the World Advertising Research Center – with recruitment at the forefront.

Classified web advertising saw a 54% year-on-year leap to £585.3m in 2007, recruitment firms leading the pack with 25.7% market share.

Yet, in our study Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies: A Missed Opportunity last year, 49% of companies were still relying on email or physical CVs to drive their process. UK companies can seize this opportunity and create competitive advantage with eRecruiting. The data on jobseeker and recruiter use of the Internet and the benefits proves the tipping point is here.

DiversityInc.com has published The 2008 Top 50 Companies for Diversity List. More than 350 companies that have more than 1,000 employees participated. We’re pleased to note that nearly half of the top 20 for the past two years are companies that use Taleo.

Congratulations also to Taleo customer JPMorgan Chase who was ranked #1 of the Top 10 Companies for Recruitment & Retention, is considered “a longtime human-capital diversity leader”, and also made the Top Ten Companies for Executive Women.

Not focusing on diversity is simply bad business. The impact of workplace unfairness on retention is costing the US economy an estimated $64 billion per year in turnover of managers and professionals according to The Corporate Leavers Survey published by the Level Playing Field Institute.

A commitment to the power of diversity goes beyond simply employing compliance in the hiring process. It’s an organizational culture initiative. However, having systems in place that measure and monitor diversity certainly help a company know where it stands.

Making the board more strategic: A McKinsey Global Survey outlines responses from nearly 600 corporate directors. What are they thinking? They are concerned about developing more forward-thinking strategies for value creation and shareholder return. What’s at the bottom in terms of time spent yet primarily top of mind? Talent management.

Boards and Time

Leading the pack of issues, 53% of respondents would like to see more time devoted to this initiative. Add this insight to the epiphany at Davos and current CIO thinking, the “war for talent” coined by McKinsey a decade ago is on everyone’s minds from the top down.

Executive minds are rethinking priorities when it comes to talent management. They want more strategic thinking around talent. The exciting news for HR is that board level leaders know what value talent brings to business and what kinds of results can be achieved by the organization.

Of course succession planning is there. But note the emphasis on Defining optimum organizational structure and core skills, capabilities needed below the top team. That lines up with the value of unified performance and recruiting and a talent master system of record.

Now that talent management is top of mind from the board room to HR, now is the time to plant the seeds of opportunity, regardless of the economic season.

BusinessWeek’s Debate Room recently featured Employers, Get Outta My Facebook on the issue of employers using profiles on social networking sites to evaluate job applicants. Check out the pro/con arguments and have a look at the comments.

Making legitimate social network job connections is powerful for recruiting, especially if you want to net the net generation. Structured data is replacing the traditional resume. Mapping migratory career paths between companies is becoming more transparent. And blogs are changing the recruiting landscape in terms of finding talent.

The proliferation of online personas created by people is now widespread. Just make sure you know where to draw the line if you Google your candidates. Because a majority of people feel that’s taking recruiting a step too far, as expressed in this comment:

…What would you think of a potential employer that drove to your house to gauge your “status” and neighborhood and how meticulously you kept up your house?

ExecutNet’s report Dealing With Your Digital Dirt reveals that executive recruiters are supplementing candidate research with online searches that they admit has serious ramifications:

Our bottom line is that online sources such as blogs and social networking can be a prime source of passive candidates for many recruiters. However, we’ll leave the background checking and ongoing screening to the professionals.

The National Law Journal’s story Employment tests may fail legal exam and recent settlements regarding testing procedures in the hiring process have raised a few eyebrows. Since many more companies are using some form of aptitude testing, the number of discrimination complaints regarding job screening tests has also risen.

"This is an enforcement priority for the EEOC right now," said Michael Rosen, a management-side attorney at Boston’s Foley Hoag. "That in and of itself is something that employers should be paying attention to."

Organizations can take certain steps to maximize the level of defensibility of the selection tests they deploy. Trouble begins when you use tests that are not properly developed for your company and/or your positions.

According to Nathan Mondragon Ph.D., a Senior Industrial Psychologist at Taleo, following these five steps could help maximize the legal defensibility of your selection tests:

1. Conduct an analysis of the jobs for which tests will be deployed.
2. Select tests that will best predict competency or develop custom versions.
3. Statistically validate the test with job outcome criteria.
4. Establish selection cut-offs to differentiate between poor, good, and excellent scores.
5. Continually check and revalidate tests over regular periods of time.

If you do a good job in defining who you are looking to hire, there is a much greater chance for success. Now imagine doing this across all your positions. How do you do it? The key is using performance information to drive recruiting.

Kevin Wheeler drills down to the core of the performance + recruiting formula and summarizes the benefits in It's All About Performance: Defining and finding great people. Here are his steps to success:

• Identify and Measure.
• Develop Profiles.
• Find Them and Target Your Messages.
• Build a Database.
• Decide Whether to Recruit or Develop.

The power of the talent pipeline model is described in Unified Talent Management and the Holy Grail, and The Value of Unified Recruiting and Performance Management depicts the power of recruiting + performance management this way:

Business performance: it’s all about the people.

From the title, you may think this is a blog about blogs. The Wikipedia reference for self-referential says it occurs in literature when “an author refers to his work in the context of the work itself”. However, many blog authors reveal the quality of their professional work and discuss innovative ideas in the context of their corporate or personal blogs, much like authors of books or print articles.

The two-part article Using Writing and Speaking to Recruit Candidates says this about sourcing candidates using the written word:

“When you write an article, a blog, or a book, you attract people who like your message and appreciate your expertise.”

The Wall Street Journal published How Blogs Are Changing the Recruiting Landscape outlining the potential benefits of scouring professional blogs and recruiting passive candidates.

You can learn more about a person by experiencing their online professional identity than by Googling them or searching for their MySpace page. Plus making the recruiting contact is only a click away.

Blogger Seth Godin makes a similar point in his Why bother having a resume? post. He suggests that rather than use a resume, you could be recruited based on factors that include:

“…a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?”

Also take a look at his endorsement of a talent strategy in Marketing HR where he says:

“Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.”

E-Verify is an Internet-based system operated by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in partnership with the Social Security Administration (SSA).Current and pending legislation is mandating employer use of the Department of Homeland Security E-Verify database. Tougher US I-9 employment verification laws using the E-Verify system are already on the books in some states.

There are many questions—and misconceptions—around I-9 and E-Verify, particularly how to comply with changing I-9 employment eligibility requirements.

Register to attend the What's New in Employment Eligibility Webcast on March 26 featuring Darlene Baker who is HireRight’s liaison with the US Department of Homeland Security and has worked on the I-9 E-Verify database since its inception.

Until last winter’s financial discontent, the US economy had been growing steadily since 2003. But the revaluation of subprime loans and record high energy prices threaten to slow growth and resurrect inflation, leading some economists to predict slow economic growth or a possible recession.

On the heels of the World Economic Forum in Davos, while they were pondering the global challenges of finding talent, business executives factored these economic forecasts into their plans. Although some may question making technology and process investments, they would be missing the point. Hiring continues even in rough economic times.

There are indications that gross job creation will continue to follow historical trends regardless of the economic season. Green collar jobs are poised for growth and IT jobs are still in high demand.

Talent management in a low growth economy offers new opportunities to deliver significant business performance benefits in the midst of financial constraints—especially internal mobility, performance management, and quality of hire. Citing historical data and demographic trends, a new Taleo Research paper dispels misconceptions that HR investments should be pared back when markets get frosty.

Talent Management in a Down Economy explores the relationship between talent management strategies, processes and practices, and the advantages that can be gained by organizations coping with an economic downturn. Learn why talent management is the key issue for businesses worldwide and remains a central strategy in any economic season.

The Gartner EXP Worldwide Survey provides CIO insights from more than 1,450 enterprises across dozens of countries and many industries. In addition to the theme of significant change, it also reveals some interesting thoughts on talent, employment brands, and technology. Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP, says:

"IT difference is the reason customers use when they choose a company's products and services."

Employment Brand. We believe that IT difference also carries over to a technically superior career site. We’ve found that candidate experience is a major factor in establishing a winning employment brand.

With only 27% percent of CIOs thinking that they have the right number of people to align with business needs, McDonald says:

"The skills of your people count. Two-thirds of IT organizations that do not meet business expectations claim that skills are at the core of their performance issue."

This finding is confirmed by the FPS Umbrella study called Recruitment and IT – Shaping the Future where CEOs worldwide are relating up to half their growth problems to the shortage in IT workers which is now the highest in a decade.

War for Talent. The war for talent is clearly raging in IT; the solution: a unified approach to recruiting talent and reviewing performance.

The Gartner report also states that CIOs think Web 2.0 and social computing are on the rise. McDonald states:

"Every company is entering a world rich with information and personal expression. Web 2.0 and social computing provide tools to capture both and turn them into customer insight, engagement and retention."

Social Networking for Recruiting. We believe and Gartner agrees that organizations should allow and encourage social networking to boost referrals and recruiting. Substitute candidates for customers and you will see how this applies to HR.

With IT budgets expected to increase 3.3% in 2008, organizations look like they want to make the investment in making a difference. We think SaaS delivery of talent management should be at the top of the list. Read how Jim Holincheck of Gartner weighs in on how SaaS is a delivery model, not a market.

Your recruiting results are only as good as your sourcing strategies. Success in a highly competitive market means knowing the latest trends in hiring sources and using metrics to evaluate and maximize your sourcing investments.

The CareerXroads 7th Annual Source of Hire Study: What 2007 Results Mean For Your 2008 Plans provides this news on the latest trends:

• 30% of open positions were filled internally.
• 28% of all external hires were referrals.
• 25% of external hires were from job boards.
• <5% came from traditional print sources.

The ERE Media and Classified Intelligence report Recruitment Advertising: Moving in New Directions polled recruiters and lists employee referral programs, recruitment sites, and business and social networking sites as the most effective ways to find and hire employees.

And Sourcing Today's Candidate: What's Working to Attract Top Talent from Kennedy Information describes “where, when, and how should job search resources be used to most effectively deliver the best candidates”.

These findings point directly to action items you can implement to update and tune your sourcing strategy for success:

Internal Mobility. Make it easier for your employees to find new positions within your organization with workforce mobility.

Social Networking. Understand and use social networks for your organization as a component of a sourcing strategy.

Smart Sourcing. Candidate relationship management (CRM) and automated search and sourcing tools can extend your reach to find the people you want.

Career Site. Your career site is the destination where these candidates will interact with your employment brand. That’s where the process begins. Implement Web 2.0 features and functionality to gain competitive advantage.

Although research found that more than two-thirds of HR professionals said their organization did not allow access to social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, social network usage is a reality – especially for the powerful combination of Social Networks and Talent Acquisition.

Facebook claims more than 67 million active users, and is the sixth-most trafficked site in the United States, according to comScore. LinkedIn’s online network has more than 19 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.

Computerworld sponsored a shoot-out of sorts called Facebook vs. LinkedIn: Which is better for business? to see which social networking or social utility fit more easily into the workplace. The first three scenarios they tested focused on hiring:

1. Look for a job without your boss knowing
2. Find information about a job you're interviewing for
3. Find a contract worker for a three-month Web project

Recruiters are using a variety of social networks to connect with active and passive candidates. How do you make the automated connection? Integration with recruiting systems provides direct access to LinkedIn user profiles and personalized relationship information throughout its global network.

Smart sourcing techniques tap directly into this popular social utility with job postings on Facebook. Either way, you’ll gain access to a larger pool of talent including the Net Generation.

Retaining talent continues to be the number one challenge for hundreds of senior Human Resources (HR) managers according to the HR Challenges in 2008 survey by Taleo. Here is a summary of their ranked responses:

• Keeping it in the company – 30% cite “employee retention”.
• Recruiting the right staff – 23% say “hiring the best talent in the marketplace.”
• Attracting candidates – 11% mention “attracting candidates to the organisation.”
• Keeping it legal – 11% point to “complying with new legislation.”

The top challenges echo the recruit and retain mantra that reduces talent management to its simplest form. These two primary actions are no longer exclusive initiatives. The power of a single talent system of record that captures and reports recruiting and performance information cannot be overstated. In fact, it provides the solution to these top three HR process requirements:

• 44% need “a system to improve performance management, succession, and career planning in the organisation”.
• 21% want “an easy way to measure the effectiveness of HR processes like recruitment”.
• 15% seek “better visibility into employee’s skills.”

Converged processes combined with robust reporting holistically meet these HR needs. You can take advantage of a single platform for talent management and realize The Value of Unified Recruiting and Performance Management.

The 2007 Workplace Issues Report: Key Challenges for Leaders found:

• "Soft" issues such as finding and keeping talent are over 3 times as prevalent as “hard” issues such as finance.
• Leaders are twice as concerned about leadership than all other issues combined.

That’s why a talent focus should no longer be perceived as just a strategic HR approach. Talent management with unified recruiting and performance has become a business requirement and a business process. However, not every company knows where to begin or how to build a business case.

Talent management expert Josh Bersin of Bersin & Associates provided great information in our webcast last week on Building the Business Case for Performance Management, and in the accompanying white paper, The Business Case for Performance Management Systems.

Josh takes it a step further in his blog entry, Performance Management Creates Agility in Copper Mining. He highlights Taleo customer Freeport McMoRan’s business challenges which motivated a new talent management strategy and the implementation of a performance management system to meet dynamic business needs. He concludes, “My point of this article is simple: we have to remember that tools like performance management, as important as they may seem to HR, are really business tools.”

Wharton professor Peter Cappelli has written extensively on important issues around talent management. He has analyzed—and refuted—the demographic talent shortage. He has also clearly articulated The Challenge of Talent Management.

His upcoming book, Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty describes a new model for talent.

In a recent article on his views, 'Talent on Demand': Applying Supply Chain Management to People, Cappelli remarks, “…the principles of supply chain management, with its emphasis on just-in-time manufacturing, can be applied to talent management.”

It’s a viewpoint that strongly echoes Taleo’s supply chain roots and makes for interesting, thought-provoking reading.

Technical innovation has taken the power and reach previously reserved for large companies that could afford powerful tools and made them affordable to anyone who has the ambition to use them. From desktop publishing to spreadsheets, email, and online search, we’ve come a very long way in a short time.

Small companies can produce videos, post them on YouTube, become overnight viral sensations, and compete with large established brands. The same can be said for recruiting top talent. If you’re a small or medium business, at the price a café latte per day, you can establish your employment brand, career sites, and candidate sourcing online.

Here are two new Taleo summary reports for SMBs that can get you up to speed quickly:

What SMBs Should Look for in an Applicant Tracking System summarizes the features that small and medium businesses need to more effectively source, track, report, stay compliant, and integrate their recruiting processes.

Sourcing in a Time of Scarcity summarizes the evolution of social networking as an aid to hiring. Small and medium businesses can now use online technology to cost-effectively realize the same recruiting advantages available to large enterprises.

While reading Love Your Job Enough to Marry It: Let Me Count the Ways, we found more evidence that career sites can be a huge differentiator in the war for talent. In Sarah Needleman’s article More Corporate Career Sites Satisfy Job Hunters' Demands, The Wall Street Journal covered how large enterprises are increasingly relying on their career sites to attract the wandering eyes of the top talent they need.

That’s because the popularity of online job searching is growing steadily among job seekers. Here are the main features they seek:
• Detailed company and job profiles.
• Ideal candidate descriptions.
• Long-term career insights.
• Clearly defined application process.

In its annual study, Potentialpark Communications of Stockholm ranked more than 100 career portals sites based on responses from more than 1,200 job hunters representing web-savvy Generations X and Y. Looking at the list, we know that more than half of the top 20 are powered by Taleo.

If you’re looking to take advantage of the career site difference and make next year’s list, read more about the next generation of corporate career websites in the Taleo Research white paper: Career Site 2.0: Taking the Lead in the War for Talent. The article Web 2.0 Recruiting is Here by Kevin Wheeler is another must-read for those looking to gain competitive advantage with Web 2.0 technologies.

Happy Valentine’s Day! It’s no secret that many Americans spend more time at work than with their significant others. Even on the holiday created in the name of love, millions of people will dedicate at least eight hours of their day to a date with their employer as opposed to a date with their spouse.

In the spirit of the holiday, Taleo Research commissioned a survey performed by Harris Interactive. We asked 1,215 employed people how they would feel about their job if it was a person. From marriage to break up, respondents were asked to describe their affection for their current position. What did we learn? Employees lack deep affection and commitment for their current position:

“Love my job? I’m not married to it!”

• Only 9% love their jobs and would marry it.
• 14% hate their jobs and want to break up or don’t like their job and won’t date it for long.

The rest are currently dating somewhere in the middle with a “like it” or “OK” rating. You can just see their wandering eyes. Don’t expect them to stick around if a hotter job comes along. You need to engage these employees fast or be prepared to execute on succession plans and fire up the recruiting machine.

Some of the ways we suggest companies help employees find and ignite their passion for work are by better understanding and supporting their career goals, providing regular feedback, offering mentoring, and rewarding strong performers across the workforce using performance management tools.

For HR, there’s a lot of insight embedded in these Sly and the Family Stone lyrics:

“If you want me to stay
I'll be around today
To be available for you to see
I'm about to go
And then you'll know
For me to stay here I've got to be me”

The U.S. Bureau of Labor estimated the 2007 annual voluntary turnover rate at about 24 percent. Talent replacement costs can range anywhere from 30% to 150% of annual compensation to even more—when you take into account lost business performance, customer satisfaction, cost of acquisition, and the cost of developing the new employee to the same level of performance as their predecessor. Vacancy alone can cost thousands per day. Multiply this against your attrition rate and you can see why retention is important to the bottom line.

And your challenges in this area appear to be greater than ever before. Here’s a roundup of some interesting articles, studies, and findings:

The article How to hire, train, and retain great employees lists real-world costs for replacing employees while mentioning: “The Harvard Business Review reports that the number one reason people leave is Job Content…Thankfully, an easy, inexpensive, and powerful fix is available: Accurate job descriptions.”

The Natives are Restless—Again says: “more people anticipate leaving their employers this year than last.”

Human Resource Executive Online reports: “More than 60% of Professionals Have Switched Employers at Least Twice in the Last Five Years”

Knowledge@Wharton states that even in fast-growing markets like China: “It takes more than a competitive salary to retain staff.”

Watson Wyatt/WorldatWork Survey finds: “more than half of companies report difficulty retaining top-performing (52 percent) and critical-skill (56 percent) workers.”

Hodes 2007 Workplace Study – Playing for Keeps/Recruiting for Retention found the top two reasons employees are looking or are open to new employment are: limited career path (51%) and compensation (benefits and pay) not in line with skill set (50%), and concludes: “it is imperative that companies focus on quality of hires and finding long term talent, as opposed to just filling open seats…”

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news.

You can help improve retention by systematizing performance management and internal mobility recruiting processes that deliver the job descriptions, career planning, interactive performance reviews, quality of hire metrics, and job visibility that people really want if you want them to stay.

Although only 30% of respondents to WorldatWork/Sibson’s State of Performance Management Study report that their employees trust their performance management system, two-thirds from top-performing companies believe performance management advances their organization’s goals.

This endorsement of the power of performance management speaks to the need to have next generation performance management systems and processes in place. One of the keys is buy-in—both literally and figuratively—by senior management and executives. Many companies are challenged to understand the drivers and benefits of these systems in a way that allows them to cost-justify the systems to upper management.

Our upcoming webcast, presented by Josh Bersin, President of Bersin & Associates, will explain how you can present the benefits of online performance management in ways business leaders can understand, align these benefits to corporate priorities and drivers, and justify investments.

The webcast will cover:
• Evolution of performance management solutions.
• The challenges of traditional performance management software.
• The main categories of business benefits.
• Factors to consider when looking at solution providers.
• Recent case studies that highlight hard savings.

Additionally, everyone who attends this session will receive the just-published Bersin & Associates research report, The Business Case for Performance Management Systems: A Handbook for Human Resources Executives and Managers.

Register to attend The Business Case for Performance Management on Thursday, February 21 at 9:00 - 10:00 a.m. Pacific (12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m. Eastern)

The smarter you source, the better your recruiting results. A smart sourcing strategy starts with immediate insight into your total talent pool—including internal and external sources with succession, career, and performance information—combined with best fit criteria to produce a short list of preferred hires.

Neil Dunabie, Group HRMS Manager at Reed Elsevier, recently shared some interesting thoughts on candidate sourcing that combine information from performance management with recruiting.

• Position Succession Data – Candidates identified as potential successors to the position.
• Job Family Succession Data – Candidates identified as successors to this type of role.
• Priority Moves – Candidates identified during our talent review process as needing a developmental move either: 1) Cross divisionally, 2) Cross business units, 3) International moves with associated timescales.
• Regression Data – Candidates who have held a similar job in the past and performed well, what were they doing before, and have we got any more that match the criteria.
• Best Fit Search – Comparing competencies, skills, experiences, etc. across the candidate database.
• Internal Applicants – Self-nominated candidates from employee base.
• External Applicants – Externally-nominated candidates from employee base.
• Preferred Rehires – Ex-employees we would welcome back.

To source effectively at the worldwide enterprise level, you need a truly global online recruiting platform, innovative sourcing solutions, and an intelligent design that you can evaluate with integrated analytics.

Learn more about the sourcing power of natively integrated recruiting and performance processes by reading the Taleo Research white paper: The Value of Unified Recruiting and Performance Management.

Reed Elsevier is a world leading publisher of information-driven services and solutions for scientists, lawyers, and business professionals—and a Taleo customer. The company employs approximately 36,500 people in over 200 locations worldwide.

There is a classic Pogo cartoon written by Walt Kelly that states: “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us.” The illustration has the little possum staring into a mirror registering shock. When it comes to talent management, everyone thinks it’s important. But McKinsey’s series of articles such as Making talent a strategic priority have placed the blame squarely for success on the same entity that it benefits: people.

According to The people problem in talent management article:

“…a majority of the business leaders and human-resources (HR) professionals interviewed by McKinsey say that a lack of time and attention from senior executives and line managers is one of the principal barriers to managing talent effectively.”

That’s why a superior user experience modeled after popular websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace will increase user adoption of performance management for line managers and employees with self-service convenience.

Unified recruiting + performance will increase HR’s contributions with incremental benefits in recruiting, performance, succession planning, goals, and careers.

Intelligent reporting will engage executives because they will see the results.

To be successful, talent management needs to be supported up and down the organization. Deloitte’s Human Resources Transformation: A Case for Business Driven HR survey covering more than 150 of the largest companies worldwide says:

“HR transformation is very much top of mind for C-suite executives…At the same time, when asked to identify the current business drivers for HR transformation, the overwhelming majority of respondents, 85 percent, cited cost savings or efficiency…”

Where HR executives are compelled to take on more strategic roles, this study reveals that HR functions in corporations today still focus on systems and processes. HR leaders are made to answer to cost savings or efficiency markers rather than to how HR can best help support business strategy.

Clearly, this supports the idea that talent transformation needs to be led by senior executives and their managers.

Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For is compiled each year using a large number of attributes and an exhaustive process. Being on this list gives you a major employment brand advantage and results in a jump in the number of job applications.

Candidates from college graduates to seasoned job hoppers use this annual list to target potential employers – typically starting online at your career site. Online is where applicants get their first impression of your employment brand. The Taleo Research paper, Career Site 2.0: Taking the Lead in the War for Talent, and webcast show how technology makes a measured difference.

As Great Place to Work® Institute notes:
Great Workplaces Outperform the Stock Market Studies show being a great place to work is good for business, as publicly traded “100 Best” companies have consistently outperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin. A 2007 paper, "Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices," found that an “annually rebalanced portfolio of FORTUNE magazine's ‘Best Companies to Work For in America’ earned 14 percent per year from 1998 to 2005, over double the market return.”

Of course, your career site and your employer brand are just one aspect of a bigger financial picture, but they can provide a positive contribution to your organization. Taleo is proud to serve a number of the companies on this year’s list. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!

Onboarding is an overlooked process that can make or break the productivity of a new hire. Not to mention employee engagement and long term career investment. So it’s time to stop treating it as a checkbox and see it as a very important first step in the new hire’s relationship to the organization.

Although onboarding appears to be purely transactional, it can be a strategic process that improves your bottom line. Get employees up to speed faster and contributing to your bottom line. We’ve already noted that only 30% of executives are satisfied with their onboarding process. Our paper, Onboarding: Speeding the Way to Productivity, outlines the process, explores current practices, and describes how it integrates into the hiring process.

Also Aberdeen’s Onboarding Benchmark Report: Technology Drivers Help Improve the New Hire Experience shows how paper based systems are more expensive and less effective than automated solutions.

But it’s not just your first impression that’s important. It’s also their first steps and what gets done once a new person starts the job that sets the path to higher productivity and retention.

Novations Group offers symptomatic findings in a survey of 2,000 HR executives that help explain why significant percentages of employers lose a staggering 25–50% of their new hires in the first year. Only 29% train hiring managers in onboarding. Their lack of retention, churn, and high cost of hire add unnecessary costs to the talent line simply because they lack automated tools and programs.

The first 90 to 100 days can make or break an employment relationship. And for HR executives, that same first impression time is an opportunity to shine. Mercer’s paper, Your first 100 days as Chief Human Resource Officer: Make a good first impression for lasting success, offers the insights needed to build a lasting foundation connecting HR goals and talent to those of the business.

Every endeavor has a process – a process with distinct steps and a flow. In recruiting that process involves stakeholders both inside and outside of your organization: corporate recruiters and HR staff, hiring managers, and outside suppliers such as job boards and background checking. Then of course don’t forget the applicants and candidates.

The flow of information and data through the steps and among the stakeholders determines the efficiency of the process. Why faster? Faster is better due to candidate obsolescence risk. Good talent does not wait around when your hiring bureaucracy moves at a crawl.

Why better? Better is better for sure. Hiring quality talent who become productive, high performing employees is the ultimate desired outcome of the process.

Why cheaper? Cutting costs in any process makes it more optimal. For example, cheaper can be accomplished through a process that mines candidates from a proprietary corporate talent pool, instead of sourcing anew for every requisition.

You can learn more in our upcoming webcast, High Performance Recruiting Processes: Faster, Better, Cheaper. I’ll be joined by Thom Brockbank, Director of HRIS from Sutter Health and Chris Tratar, Director of Solution Marketing, Taleo Corporation, for an hour of insights based on the Taleo Research white paper Make Your Recruiting Process Faster, Better, and Cheaper. It’s on February 13, 2008, 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. PT / 12 noon to 1:00 p.m. ET.

Although it has been labeled as a disruptive emerging technology since 1999, recent articles and studies underscore that a Software as a Service (SaaS) has earned its proven track record as an established force between the lines.

McKinsey’s Delivering software as a service cites the lower barrier to entry and economic advantages to both vendor and customer: “since software as a service delivers fees over time rather than large up-front license purchases” and “reality of ongoing relationships with customers rather than periodic upgrades.” They also put SaaS on their list of Eight business technology trends to watch.

Phil Wainewright’s blog posting Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008 points out that software is all about services now that the Internet provides the proven network that services oriented architecture (SOA) has promised all along.

Even Wall Street is bullish on SaaS in an uncertain economy as Fortune’s story titled Tech stocks for tough times proclaims.

So why SaaS now? Why talent management now?

Because a talent management solution delivered on demand as a service provides four levels of winning for everyone involved in organizations of all sizes regardless of the economic climate.

Users Win
You may wonder what the new Datamonitor report called Decision Matrix: Selecting a CRM Vendor in the Pharmaceutical Industry discussing the rapidly growing trend towards on demand CRM has to do with talent management. It’s another validation of the superior user experience offered by SaaS that’s similar to any other web experience: "End users of such products are more satisfied with customer support and services provided by SaaS vendors rather than by traditional vendors," Datamonitor stated.

IT Wins
On demand solutions require no software license purchase or costly maintenance. Secure, configurable, best practice processes run on the Internet. Users access the system on a web browser—anytime, anywhere—without creating a hassle for IT. THINK IT lists the Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services Will Soar in 2008 and describes the advantage to corporate IT departments: “Now, a growing proportion of IT people see managed services and SaaS as a way to out-task mundane work or overcome complex application/technology deployment and maintenance responsibilities.”

HR Wins
With SaaS delivery, HR becomes the strategic enabler of talent processes for managers and employees. Innovative technologies empower business-centric talent management that can drive a new level of business value: Performance 2.0: Empowering the Next Level of Business Results.

The Planet Wins
SaaS is green and eRecruiting delivered on demand is much greener than traditional paper processes or on-premise solutions that create redundant computing environments:
“Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications running in a multi-tenant environment…tend to be greener than on-premise software and servers. Multi-tenancy delivers more efficient power utilization per customer resulting in a smaller carbon footprint…helping reduce carbon emissions instead of powering more servers.”

London Business School Professor Doug Ready’s work caught our attention with the publication of The Wall Street Journal article, How to Fill the Talent Gap. He is also the co-author of an outstanding Harvard Business Review article, Make Your Company a Talent Factory.

In a terrific ten-minute video, Prof. Doug Ready further articulates his view of Talent Management: "The Perfect Storm". He covers growth, emerging markets, what Taleo customer P&G is doing, and his take on functionality and vitality.

As he states: Stop losing out on lucrative business opportunities because you don’t have the talent to develop them.

The wisdom is there. Read…view…learn…and act.

The strategic challenge of using talent as a business performance driver has flirted with market dynamics since McKinsey’s coining in 1997 of The War for Talent. Initially focused on management talent and best-and-brightest leadership, McKinsey has arrived at a more holistic destination a decade later with the cogent article: Making talent a strategic priority. Two studies revealed two key findings:

“…respondents regarded finding talented people as likely to be the single most important managerial preoccupation for the rest of this decade.”

“…nearly half of respondents expect intensifying competition for talent—and the increasingly global nature of that competition—to have a major effect on their companies over the next five years. No other global trend was considered nearly as significant.”

And a probable cause.

“…executives must blame themselves for their current talent woes.”

Good talent management programs are approved by top management and administered by HR. Great talent management programs are sponsored by top management, engineered by HR, and driven by everyone in the organization. But that requires a total talent mindset and tools to make unified recruiting and performance an everyday affair.

The prescription?

“…organizations can’t afford to neglect the contributions of other employees.”

For C-level leaders, this begs for a change in their mindset. Look at the language that leaders use for people: talent, our most important asset, human resources, human capital, and largest expense. Which name would you use?

When HR looks at people, they see people in roles contributing to the success of the organization. I doubt many CEOs consider themselves to be the largest item in the largest expense line of their companies. They most likely think of themselves as talent.

Now if they see the whole company as an aggregation of talent, they’ve taken a giant step and cleared their thinking to drive talent management success and higher business performance:

“What’s needed is a deep-rooted conviction, among business unit heads and line leaders, that people really matter…”

Top to bottom, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

When people discuss whether or not there is a renewed war for talent, those who are on the front lines and see the action are usually the best sources. Ask those in IT who are recruiting to fill positions.

Computerworld.com ran the article 8 New Weapons to Fight the Talent Wars in '08 with the subhead: “Luring hot prospects will require creative approaches in the coming year.” We agree with the need to be creative. Here are four ideas that caught our eye and why:

Social Networks. Finding a higher quality pool of applicants is just one of the advantages of using social networks.

Global Thinking. You need to look worldwide for talent in emerging markets, so you need a truly global online talent solution.

Business Vision. Digging deeper into candidate skills and qualifications that include business savvy requires four-tier automated prescreening and assessments.

Imagination. Perks, flexibility, and a green recruiting and employment brand provide the differentiation you need to win top candidates.

Two more sets of forward looking views are noteworthy as 2008 begins. WorldatWork Highlights Key Predictions for Human Capital Management in 2008 and Beyond’s first two predictions of eight combine to validate the process and technology investments that companies need to make if they want to achieve the next level of business performance:

1. The successful organization of the future will excel at acquiring, organizing and strategically deploying global resources.

2. There will be increased global connectivity, integration and interdependence in the economic, social, technological, cultural and political spheres.

The Herman Trend Alert: 2008 Workforce/Workplace Forecast also calls out eight factors in the coming year. Four caught our immediate attention:

1. Recruitment in a Tightening Labor Market
3. Retention in the Face of Increasing Choices for Employees
4. More Employers Will Focus on Metrics
6. Lack of Succession Preparation

Without innovative recruiting and sourcing solutions, time to fill and recruiting costs are predicted to increase as the war for talent tightens the labor market. Retention of key employees is more than worth the investment in formal internal mobility programs. Increased efficiency of automated performance management processes also delivers consistent performance metrics. In many companies, formal succession plans will become not just a stretch goal for HR, they will be considered a basic operational requirement.

And finally because a little humor is a welcome way to start a new year, read CareerXroads Tongue-In-Cheek Predictions for 2008. Happy New Year 2008!