Dave Ulrich, professor in the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and co-founder of the RBL Group, boldly headlines on his website:

“HR must give value or give notice.”

Ulrich has some fun with the alphabet in his Workforce Management article: The Talent Trifecta. First he cites a 3 Cs formula:

Competence x Commitment x Contribution = Talent

Then he moves to the Bs when describing the options for investing in talent improvement:

Buying: recruiting, sourcing and securing new talent into the organization.
Building: helping people grow through training, job assignments or life experiences.
Borrowing: bringing knowledge into the organization through advisors or partners.
Bounding: promoting the right people into key jobs.
Bouncing: removing poor performers from their jobs and/or the organization.
Binding: retaining top talent.

Next, he creates an acronym—VOI2C2E—to articulate what drives employee commitment:

Vision
Opportunity
Incentives
Impact
Community
Communication
Entrepreneurship or flexibility

He writes: Hoping for talent won’t make it happen. Ultimately, talent measures should be derived to track how well individuals are developing their skills and how well the organization develops its talent bench.

There has been a lot written about the definition of “it”: talent. Besides the alliterative devices, this article is worth a read. Then explore the solutions that make “it” happen.

HR process delivery has worked wonders using web technology in the areas of self-service benefits enrollment, employee information updates, and online payroll stubs. They dramatically cut costs while providing improved convenience for employees.

Watson Wyatt’s Changing Strategies in HR Technology and Outsourcing - 2007 HR Technology Trends Survey reveals that many companies still rely on legacy desktop systems or paper transactions to support their talent and performance management processes. Here are two of the key findings:

• Most companies are satisfied with HR delivery in the retirement and health and welfare areas but are not as satisfied with HR delivery in the talent management area.

• Many companies are looking to implement technology solutions for their talent management programs.

People who connect to these key HR processes are now very comfortable with web browsers in their consumer lives. If they can order books on Amazon.com, they may wonder why they can’t perform recruiting or performance management transactions on a browser, anytime and anywhere. And they are right.

Organizations can meet their employee and candidate expectations while they also take advantage of the value opportunity in ROI. Now you can cut costs and enable a higher level of business performance.

You can easily figure out the premise from the title of the study, The Gap Between Needing and Doing: A Survey on Why Some Companies Don’t Act on Strategic Workforce Planning Needs, and How Successful Companies Do.

The report focuses on another disconnect—again between business challenges and business practices. Survey says:

Eighty-one percent identify talent competition and 53 percent the aging workforce as critical factors affecting their workforce, yet only 46 percent are doing workforce planning of any kind – a clear gap between those who know they need workforce planning and those who are doing it.

The top three barriers to workforce planning?

#1 - Clear accountability (59%)
#2 - Lack of resources (54%)
#3 - Analysis paralysis (50%).

My favorite is #3. It’s clear that identifying the problem does not solve it. You’ve got to do something about it! Talent management solutions are a good place to start.

According to a recent study, in addition to books, card catalogs, and a quiet place to read, nearly 100 percent of public libraries also offer free Internet access. This means the local public library has become a key starting point in the hiring process for potential job seekers with no online access at home.

The Libraries Connect Communities: Public Library Funding & Technology Access Study 2006-2007 conducted by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Information Use Management and Policy Institute at Florida State University (FSU) lists this as one of three main themes:

Providing education resources and services for job seekers are the Internet services most critical to the role of public libraries. Seventy-three percent of libraries report they are the only source of free public access to computers and the Internet in their communities.

Especially for retailers, the library channel is where many job seekers will naturally connect to your open positions, especially as the trend towards accepting online applications for hourly positions continues.

Douglas Ready and Jay Conger, visiting professors in organizational behavior at the London Business School, recently published an article titled How to Fill the Talent Gap in The Wall Street Journal. Based on research with dozens of companies, they identified the main talent problems and solutions.
Here is a quick summary:

THE PROBLEMS

1. EMERGING MARKETS
2. NARROW THINKING
3. DEMOGRAPHICS AND ECONOMICS
4. THE EXPECTATIONS GAP
5. BLIND SPOTS

THE SOLUTIONS

1. MAKE YOUR TALENT PLAN MATCH YOUR BUSINESS PLAN
2. TALENT MANAGEMENT IS EVERYONE'S JOB
3. GLOBAL EXCELLENCE NEEDS LOCAL EFFECTIVENESS
4. SUPPORT MATTERS
5. MEASURE WHAT MATTERS

Our key learning from this article is summarized in this quote:

Companies are racing to find solutions, but most of them are making a crucial error: They're treating these problems as separate issues… companies must rethink how they hire, train and reward their employees, placing those tasks at the heart of their business plans. In doing so, they have an opportunity to address all these separate problems with a unified plan, rather than waste time and resources attacking each of the issues individually.

If you need justification to establish or extend your talent management strategies, attach this article and The Hackett Group’s report to your business case. They provide a nice one-two punch to get you started on building your own world class talent factory.

They also align well with many of the themes and presentations at Taleo WORLD: Performance 2.0 last week. Hundreds of conference attendees had the opportunity to view our new Taleo Performance products that run natively integrated on our Taleo Enterprise Edition platform for an end-to-end talent solution. Now large global organizations that are already using Taleo—such as P&G cited in the article—have the opportunity to directly address these issues and build their world class talent factories using a holistic talent process for a higher level of business performance.

Bloggers Jason Corsello, Phil Wainewright, Zach Thomas, Josh Bersin, and Mike Potter have all weighed in on Taleo Performance. Their observations support how a next generation of talent management that’s focused on usability can be the engine that truly powers the talent factory and business performance.

Serving 77 of the Fortune 100 and 50 percent of the FTSE 100, The Hackett Group is well positioned to do a study on the economic payback of talent management practices. So the results in their new Book of Numbers research volume Talent Management: Buzzword or Holy Grail? should ring loud and clear from the HR suite to the board room.

Based on more than 125 HR benchmarks over three years, the companies using talent management outperformed their peers in four key financial categories. The results point to nearly $400 million in returns for a typical Fortune 500 enterprise:

• Earnings improvement of nearly 15%.
• 22% improvement in net profit margin.
• 49% improvement in return on assets.
• 27% improvement in return on equity.

We’ve documented similarly dramatic results with our studies over the years in the Hidden ROI of Talent Acquisition & Mobility and other papers. We’ve also seen the connection between our customers using talent management practices and their overall performance in our Taleo Stock Index.

Thanks to Jim Holincheck, Jason Averbook, and Forbes for the linkage to this important study. As we say at Taleo: Talent Drives Performance.

A next generation performance management solution is clearly needed by employees and employers alike, according to the results of a new Taleo study conducted online by Harris Interactive® of 2,416 adult Americans.

Here are just a few of the key findings:

• Only 12% of full and part-time workers say that their employers give them a career path plan.

• 43% of respondents employed full/part-time said opportunities for advancement are a key motivator.

• The top reasons currently employed respondents cited as having voluntarily left jobs were pay that wasn’t competitive (35%) and a lack of growth opportunities (34%).

• 57% of those employed full/part-time say that they have never had a performance review or said it was neutral to not useful.

• Only 27% of employees who have ever had a performance review considered their most recent one to be extremely useful.

As has been the theme of many blog postings, successful talent management requires a unified, integrated approach encompassing internal mobility, talent acquisition, onboarding, performance management, career planning, succession planning, goals management, and insightful talent management reporting.

Today, Taleo released a new performance management solution called Taleo Performance that runs on our leading talent management platform. What makes it different? It’s uniquely designed to transform the way you align, develop, and motivate talent. It delivers intuitive usability for viral adoption, productivity and social networking tool integration, and a common talent acquisition and performance database. That powerful combination makes it a timely and important solution to achieve a new level of business performance: Performance 2.0.

Check out Taleo’s approach to driving your organization’s business performance instead of tolerating employee dissatisfaction, and get more information on the survey results and methodology.

One of our partners has revealed another opportunity for HR to choose a more strategic road in the journey to business performance. IBM Global Services conducted a survey about HR transformation and reveals their findings in the report, A New Approach, A New Capability: The strategic side of Human Resources. It opens with this warning from former SHRM president and CEO, Helen Drinan:

“If HR does not force its way into the heart of strategic planning in organizations, it will default to a technical and transactional dead end.”

Because of the familiar talent management/workforce issues—talent shortages, workforce demographics, increased global competition, and more—organizations are now looking to the human resources (HR) function to go beyond the delivery of cost-effective administrative services and provide expertise on how to leverage human capital to create true marketplace differentiation.

Facing these challenges, many HR organizations have been actively revamping to more effectively deliver the strategic insights the business requires. According to the report, organizations should focus on three areas to improve their strategic HR capability:

1. Enable HR professionals to apply human capital data and information – on par with what the CFO would expect in Finance – to drive business decisions.

3. Build a roadmap for HR transformation that builds momentum and embeds strategic changes into the DNA of the business.

The demand for HR transformation is growing. Join us at Taleo WORLD to learn more about Performance 2.0 and how your organization can benefit. On Tuesday, Tim Ringo, the Global Leader for IBM's Human Capital Management practice, will give his insights into what leading edge organizations are doing to transform their workforce and develop a strategic HR capability.

Mergers and acquisitions are a regular occurrence in business. Traditionally motivated by the expectations of cost savings, multiplied revenue generation, market dominance, and more, many mergers and acquisitions can run full steam ahead into trouble.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: The Distinct Leadership Capabilities for Organic, Alliance and M&A Growth, a study of more than 300 executives from companies across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, focuses on firms looking to grow their organization either organically through strategic alliances or via merger and acquisition (M&A). The conclusion?

The biggest challenge in M&A deals is not generating synergies or proving the value of the deal but retaining staff at the acquired company…

So, M&A success is all about talent. That’s another reinforcement of the importance of business-driven talent management platforms and practices in successfully conducting the business of business.

If you are going to Taleo WORLD in San Francisco, you’re in luck. You’ll learn firsthand how important the talent equation is to merger success. Todd Luckasavitch, Manager of Global Staffing and Sue Paquette, Global HRIS Project Manager from Alcatel-Lucent will present on: A Global M&A Staffing Strategy Based on Taleo Enterprise Edition. Hear how Taleo served as a core element of the staffing strategy during Alcatel and Lucent’s massive 2006 merger.