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!