The latest research from Hewitt is targeted to identify how the top 20 companies build leaders. Although the foundation of the methodology looks a bit circular, I believe there is one interesting finding: accountability for leadership programs is not for HR alone.

Top companies hold senior management accountable as well. Companies in which senior leaders are not held accountable are not as successful. The value of having both HR and senior leadership accountable is the key. HR cannot go alone. While HR is often required to set up the infrastructure, they still need the buy-in and support of the senior team. Simple but key to success for any initiative.

Gartner’s Jim Holincheck does not only enjoy a good game of golf but also has deep understanding of what this new industry of Talent Management can do to workforce effectiveness. A new short research paper called “Talent Management Application Suites Can Enhance Workforce Effectiveness” published a couple of weeks ago highlights what comprises a Talent Management suite.

Workforce planning, talent acquisition, performance management, career development, succession planning, learning, compensation management all creates the mighty suite. Holincheck also adds competency management, portal/self-service, integration broker, business process management, content management, knowledge management and reporting as somehow related and important. As we understand, it starts to be pretty large and broad.

With this analysis, what is the key for the success of your talent management initiative? “Competencies are the underlying foundational element in all of the applications in a talent management application suite.”

We often hear many terms used in the industry. People set products in different categories according to the need they fulfill. The three most commonly used terms are ATS (Applicant Tracking System), HMS (Hiring Management System), and TMS (Talent Management System).

I am asked, how would you categorize Taleo today? The short answer is Taleo is a Talent Management System. Why say that? Read on.

What is an Applicant Tracking System or ATS? The term appeared with the first generation systems started by Restrac (resume tracking) in 1984 and Resumix (I guess mix the resume ;-) and served one major purpose: get rid of the filling cabinets that recruiters were keeping to store the resumes received from candidates. It helped most companies as well to track the applicants during the recruiting process, hence the name ATS.

The second act of this industry came with the growth of the Web and the fact that most of the resumes were not scanned into a system but coming straight from the Web. Indeed today scanning resumes is an activity that is performed less and less. In this transition the big buzz was the new relationship that was made possible directly with the candidate, saying we can process resumes online as well and maintain a relationship with you.

The true issue of this Web resume-centric approach (still central to many systems today) is that it started to send unqualified email to candidates. It is during that key period that the term HMS was used. It was not a simple tracking system anymore, since it was helping to track and maintain relationships for the sake of hiring.

More recently we have seen the term TMS, or Talent Management System, in which the focus is around Talent. Often though it is used as a term for everything and anything that touches talent (see our definition of Talent Management). At the core is a system that deals with employee talent, however not with employee payroll, benefits or accrued vacation time.

It is a system that helps employees to first categorize their talent; second, find the most appropriate job for their unique profile (that can be inside or outside the organization); third, help organizations understand their talent inventory for planning and alignment purposes; fourth, reward and train where the need is felt for each talent resource to contribute to the organization at its full potential. Of course, this vision of a complete integrated view is nowhere to be seen today (except on some slideware). So the question today for us is what makes a TMS, if none have what a full system would require?

The primary role of a TMS as a system is to manage talent (not resumes). It is not to track applications even though it can do that. Does it need to have a performance management component, an applicant tracking component or a learning management component? Not necessarily, but in all cases it needs a talent inventory tool or “Talent Master” in order to perform every single future step with any hope of success. In our eyes, the Talent Master is what creates a true foundation of a Talent Management System and Taleo is probably one of the best.

Our world is often full of paradox and potential conflict of interest. The most visible example in the last couple of years has been the Arthur Andersen scandal. You see it in the big accounting companies, with a double standard lurking between audit and consulting revenue, or on Wall Street, where a firm's brokers recommended a strong buy on the same stock that their investment bankers have underwritten as an IPO.

In the staffing industry there is the same potential conflict of interest in the field often call VMS, or Vendor Management Systems. These are software systems that automate the procurement of contingent labor in the form of temps and contractors. The value of gaining control of this process is great for companies that often have hundreds of suppliers and can’t cope with the complexity and price control. But the issue is that most vendor management systems are provided by the suppliers of labor themselves. They use those same systems to protect their business and gain market share with companies. Some even give the system away for free! This was well depicted in a recent article To Whose Advantage?. Our questions now... is it just a matter of time?…when will the public exposure occur? And whose business will suffer the consequences?

A few people asked me about the new domain ending .jobs, and if it is the beginning of a new area in corporate website talent management? If you are in charge of your company’s talent strategy or website or corporate event branding, should you care to have a .jobs extension in addition to your traditional URL?

As promoted by SHRM, this will be a way to access in a standard fashion the section of the site that is related to jobs, or careers as we often refer to it. My point of view is yes, you should do it. Will it change your world dramatically if you don’t? No.

We have been analyzing careers website best practices for some time now (see our reports) to optimize every single aspect that can influence the effectiveness of a corporate careers website. I would categorize the use of the .jobs domain as a means to optimize your traffic generation. Thanks to it, you may have more people coming to your site.

I have been asking some job posting aggregators if they believe the .jobs extension would impact the way their technology fetches the job postings from the individual corporate website, and the answer has been in the negative. We believe that you have to make sure your careers website is world class. That means have a fully integrated front-end and back-end, and all of the best practices on the list we identified. The .jobs domain would be one, but only one practice, and it will only be effective as a majority of people adopt it. Otherwise it could be just like the .biz trial a couple of years ago.

The results of a study by Saratoga and Dr. Richard Beatty—based on 300 phone surveys and 13 in depth face-to-face interviews—were put together in a paper presented by Convergys. With such brainpower we were expecting a study that would give us a bit more of comparisons and benchmarks, but here it is.

The key message is: you have a strategic gap between your business strategy and your workforce strategy. You should fix it, because it costs you as much as 10% on overspending and 10% on underperformance.

The key reasons for this gap are: limited access to actionable workforce data and intelligence, rigid policies, workforce organized around jobs and tasks rather than skills and competencies, and hard to retain top players.

The similarity with the other outsourcer’s assessment (see Is HR Still Stuck in the Middle?) is the rigidity or the lack of vision for a talent-centric organization. While the previous report was centralized around the HR organization, this one overlays a company wide philosophy around talent management even more. Convergys tries to give a rough sketch of what it could look like.

The key idea is to organize the workforce around skills and competencies rather than simply job title. The results from their survey are that about 2/3 see data to identify skills as important to very important, while only about 1/3 mention they are proficient at obtaining this data.

A quick example may highlight the point. At Taleo we promote our internal employees a great deal using our own platform. Our legal department at one stage needed a new staff member. They promoted the need internally first and to many’s surprise, at the end of the cycle someone from marketing ended up with the job. Why? She had the skills (in this case even the certifications as she is a lawyer) and it was easy to locate her and for her to locate what skills were required.

The beauty of this as described in the report is that “retention becomes a sourcing strategy …[and]… knowledge capital not only remains intact but grows”.

So agile companies of tomorrow, you may want to re-assess your skills inventory strategy!