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.