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.”