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.