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 dont 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.