OK. You can’t come to the Taleo Blog and not read about our IPO that happened yesterday!

Placing a high regard towards integrity and respect of the SEC rules, our communication policy has been very strict and I will remain in line. But you can visit our brand new Investor Relations page at www.taleo.com and read more about it in our press release.

As I am at the ERExpo tradeshow today, I think I can report that many people have congratulated us on the IPO and mentioned its significance for our industry.

Veritute’s September newsletter, Workforce Data Insights, reports that in a survey of 138 senior executives, they asked them to rank which people related metrics were the most important to you?

Guess what? Cost per hire ranked last while productivity and labor cost as a percentage of revenue ranked first and second!

So the next question we often get at Taleo Research is: “How do you go about measuring productivity at the corporate level?”

This is exactly why we created a report for our customers and published our paper Key Metrics for Today’s Talent Economy (available online – free subscription) that came out earlier this year in the Accenture People Project book.

In short, we call this metric Return on Workforce or ROW. It is operating income divided by total labor costs. That is exactly the kind of people metric that matters! But how can you impact this metric the most? Read the full article .

Last week, Oracle OpenWorld was raging here in San Francisco. Our offices are in fact not too far from the Moscone Center where it was held…parking, restaurants, and hotels were full!

This was the first time for Oracle OpenWorld to appear with one face to the world, after the major PeopleSoft + J.D. Edwards acquisition and the recent Siebel announcement.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, features open standards “to give customers choices”. The Oracle project called Fusion is key to their strategy and will be based on service oriented architecture (SOA). What does that mean? And why is it important?

“So you can build composite applications from them [best of breed services]," said Charles Phillips, Oracle President in his keynote. Oracle’s Fusion Architecture will be the core on which all components will have to be able to “hot plug”. So they will enable components to be certified as Fusion Applications as they comply with this architecture.

For Taleo, it is good news. We are already integrated to the PeopleSoft/Oracle and SAP core HR applications.

Not so long ago, Oracle was talking about how a tightly integrated suite from a single vendor was the only answer. Now, it seems that the best of breed world has a balloon of fresh air! Service oriented architecture (SOA) supports loosely-coupled software interaction using extensible generic interfaces based on Internet protocols like web services. In other words, it uses messages to send information back and forth. So imagine a world where all your systems are on demand applications running from a single portal with Taleo as your talent management destination!

In the meantime, Craig Conway, ex-CEO of PeopleSoft, is slamming Oracle practices for the first time since the acquisition. Conway is personally considering going into the private equity world after nearly one year since his last days there.

And Dave Duffield is starting a new company called Workday.

So in the HR applications software business, life goes on. Stay tuned!

The Conference Board’s StraightTalk on Global Demographics in the September online issue makes us revisit the two questions we hear most often when our customers do their internal Talent Inventory using Taleo and wonder about world demographics.

What about China and India? What about the aging population?

So what about China and India? Together today they represent 40% of the world population, and by 2034 India will overtake China. Less developed countries is where population growth will happen. With the high level of education delivered today in those regions and a way lower GDP with a growth rate of 6%/year, you are not likely to see offshoring stop anytime soon.

What about the aging population? Well it is a reality, but the interesting fact is that we won’t see any change in the most advanced economies in the numbers of people in the working age group (20-64) for the next 20 years. In what is just a shift, the 20-44 group will decrease, while the 44-64 group will increase.

So how can developed regions ensure growth going forward with virtually no net workforce growth? Offshoring is one option of course. But maybe the best suggestion came from a recently promoted young CEO of an established midsize firm that I met last week when I was in my native Belgium: “Sure, I am leveraging the expertise of the previous CEO, and will do so as long as he will allow me. He has 40 years in this business. I only have 10.”

I will have the pleasure to interview Jim Holincheck from Gartner this Thursday, September 22 at 10:00 a.m. PT – 1:00 p.m. ET – 18:00 London time in a special free webcast. He will discuss:

From eRecruiting to Talent Management—Definition to Implementation.
Want to make that strategic leap from eRecruiting to talent management? Jim will give you his expert views on:
• What organizations are doing today in eRecruiting.
• Why talent management is emerging.
• What things an organization can do to make the transition from eRecruiting to talent management.
• How to become a talent management leader.

Join us for the Q&A and ask your questions about the talent management space or the latest talent research at Taleo.

Click to RSVP: https://www.taleo.com/news/GartnerWebcast.php

Talk to you on Thursday!

A conference summary report from Enterprise 2005 produced in collaboration by Sand Hill Group and McKinsey reports on a couple of key trends in the software industry.

If you are a buyer, it is always good to know the trends of the market. That way, you will know if your spending is aligned with how leading organizations are making their investments.

If the primary pricing percentage still falls within the licensing model (54%), the second highest is the Software as a Service (SaaS) or application service provider (ASP) model at 29%, and probably the one with the most growth potential. The SaaS model is today seen as good for many applications and all sizes of companies (65%).

This is great news for talent management.

HR is indeed typically underserved by IT. HR’s most strategic facet, talent management, has already mostly migrated to the SaaS model. This is where poor support for a specific market turns into an ally for jumping to the next generation of technology.

So if your IT department is still challenging you about the SaaS model, direct them towards Emergence of Alternate Business Models on page 13 of this report!

As Sue Meisinger, CEO of SHRM describes in her response to the Fast Company article titled, Why We Hate HR:

“It’s time we brush off those old HR stereotypes and take a fresh look at the profession.”

The same message is echoed in the featured article of the September issue of HR magazine. We see it again at the Human Capital Institute where they describe their “raison d’etre” as:

“In this new world, HR functions are rapidly fragmenting - and as companies outsource traditional HR administrative functions, a new internal leadership model is emerging.”

At Taleo, we agree. We believe that the model of the future is a talent management model focused on high value added strategies.

Now is the time to align talent strategies with enterprise goals and tell the business to get ready for a new generation of empowered talent leaders emerging from HR! Or maybe it will be the end of HR as we know it. If you are in charge of HR, here is my one main recommendation: understand your business. The best way to do it: recruit your talent manager from the line!

The most striking counterexample is probably the story of a gentleman here in the San Francisco Bay area. He was let go from a large investment bank due to a reorganization. Two weeks later, he was rehired by the same company, but this time for the Asia Pacific operation! Great for him, but a waste of time and money for the company. The whole process could have been way smoother for both!

At Taleo, we have seen some of the largest M&A activities happen within our own customer community. A recent article in CareerJournal.com describes the positive role that talent management can play in the HR strategy during mergers & acquisitions.

Make sure that you understand the economic side of truly proactive human capital management activities during M&A and not only its very important, but less tangible cultural fit side.

Thanks to our software as a service (SaaS) infrastructure, the talent management IT side of the house can be integrated quickly at a minimal cost to support HR immediately with redeployment planning. This should be a high priority task. Because how can you remodel your house if you don’t have your most valuable power tools available? Otherwise, right-sizing and all the associated costs are too often done randomly.

The key value that our customers experienced is the ability to accelerate the decision process around who to keep and not keep, thanks to the profiling system. Secondly, they had the ability to redeploy redundant individuals using internal mobility processes, rather than incur the huge separation costs.
In other words Talent Management is operationally crucial for good M&A.

CEOs can be heard to say: “Our employees are our most important asset”. Sometimes they say it even when HR people are not in the room. But this sentence does not tell the whole story. We should actually say: “Our best employees are our most important asset.” Or perhaps the CEO really means: “The organization with the best talent wins.” Then we can all agree.
So for all companies that want to deliver superior value, the key understanding is that Talent Drives Performance!

So the next question is how can we assess, acquire, and manage talent? Doing that as quickly and efficiently as possible has been the focus for talent management companies such as Taleo

Today, by releasing a new brand, Taleo affirms that even if you are the leader in the space, you shouldn’t be too shy to be innovative!

So let’s get back to basics. For the curious, what does Taleo mean? “Tal” stands for talent. And “eo” is a Latin word which means to move, progress, or advance. So Taleo means: to move or advance talent. And all of us here at Taleo intend to advance the art and science of talent management within the enterprise and the world to create value for our customers.
What does the symbol represent? It symbolizes people gathering to form high performance teams. The “greater than” symbol in dark green signifies how finding and retaining the right talent will result in improved business performance.

All of us in the talent management industry are very excited about the growing momentum for talent strategies at the boardroom level. But be aware that enthusiasm is based on real-world results and sustainable performance!