Preliminary findings are out from Staffing.org’s 2007 Job Seeker’s and Employee’s Report. Among them:

50% of the respondents visit [company job sites] regularly or occasionally to look for opportunities. However, familiarity and experience has also fostered discrimination. 75% of all respondents are now consciously ranking the user experience on these sites and “red carding” sites that don’t measure up. 21% say that a poor website would “definitely” affect their decision to apply for a job.

A legacy career site can not only chase away jobseekers, but also customers. As we found in research published in our paper, Career Site 2.0: Taking the Lead in the War for Talent, the perception of your employment brand works both ways:

Candidates, commonly dissatisfied with their jobseeking experience, are also consumers. They transfer their jobseeking experience to the corporate brand, and they draw on their consumer web experiences to set their expectations for their online jobseeking experience.

Implementing a next generation candidate experience will attract and engage higher quality candidates and ultimately help win the war for talent.

For the past two years, CedarCrestone has researched and published an independent customer value and satisfaction study. The results of this year’s study reveal once again that organizations that employ talent management processes get significant value in return.

Value highlights in the study include dramatic results in these areas:

Efficiency Gains. Weyerhaeuser saves from 10% to 12% by replacing the manual scanning of resumes, as reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Process Standardization. AREVA Group established consistent global processes for 58,000 people speaking 20 languages across 100 countries.

Increased Process Visibility. Hewlett-Packard increased quality of hire and manager satisfaction while reducing cost and time to hire.

Metrics for Management. Dell measures quality of hire using new hire and hiring manager surveys to gauge success in the recruiting process.

Faster Time to Hire. On average, customers report an average time to hire reduction of 17 days to 35 days, one day below the Saratoga best practice metric.

Lower Cost Per Hire. Direct Energy cut time to hire nearly in half and cost per hire from $10,000 to approximately $5,000.

Talent management delivers business value.

Nice coverage by Human Resource Executive Online of the JPMorgan Chase Takes U.S. Recruiting Global presentation by Judy Lannin Panagakos, the VP of HR Operations at JPMorgan Chase at the HR Technology conference.

Take a scroll down to the Global Recruiting subhead to read the details on how JPMorgan Chase will soon have all 172,000 global positions covered in more than 50 countries with consistent processes and global flexibility.

What listeners seemed most intrigued by was how a company with assets of $1.3 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries could so successfully and seamlessly implement transitions from individual, paper-based systems to a central HR system in so many different cultures.

A new study from DDI and HCI titled Talent Management in Motion: Keeping Up with an Evolving Workforce queried hundreds of HR executives in North America on the evolving workplace. Here are the findings on workplace trends:

Factors Expected to Increase in Organizations Over the Next Three Years

These are indications that organizations expect to increase their focus on talent management activities – especially investment in employee development, and even more importantly, improving each employee’s view of their contribution to strategic business goals.

That’s good news. As noted in the related article, organizations must “…ensure that employees—at all levels—see the clear connection between their day-to-day activities and the success of the organization.” That’s the vision baked into our performance solution.

In the manufacturing and industrial ages, organizations were measured by physical asset value. In the talent age, higher value is placed on knowledge and innovation – a shift from bricks to brains. If knowledge is king, then the risks a company faces are primarily talent related. You can call the symptoms brain drain, knowledge loss, or revolving door syndrome due to the nomadic career hunting of Generation Y. But they are all conditions that can be treated with a sharper focus on talent management.

The Boston Consulting Group’s Opportunities for Action article Hidden Talent discusses the impact of transitions on an organization’s collective knowledge pool. These mass talent transitions can be driven by business events that happen in a month or demographic trends that take years to run their course. They include downsizings, mergers, and baby boomer retirements.

In any case, you need to be ready in advance with a clear strategy, workforce mobility tools, and a system of record to build your world-class talent factory for a higher level of business performance.

We are probably all aware of the impact of the book What Color is Your Parachute? on the career process. But have you thought about the color applicants see when they consider your organization? You better hope they see a green employment brand or you may be seeing red.

Here is a roundup of recent articles on the power of green recruiting:

• Environmentally conscious candidates representing Generations X and Y are looking to work for green employment brands.

• According to Harris, more than 33% of Americans are more inclined to work for a green company.

• A survey by Sun Microsystems said 73% percent of workers believe it’s important that their employer is environmentally and socially responsible.

• GE and others are gaining competitive advantage in the hunt for top talent with green programs.

• The Brown-Wilson Group’s Black Book of Outsourcing: 2007 Green Outsourcer Report says more than 88% of executives see environmental commitment as influencing their outsourcing selection process.

• Human Resource Executive Online outlines how companies like Dow Chemical successfully emphasize their green employment brand in the recruiting process.

The green perception of your employment brand starts at your career site. If the process is completely automated without the use of paper, then candidates can tell your company has taken the steps to enable green recruiting.

Providing flexible work arrangements to attract, accommodate, and retain workers is an emerging strategy in tight talent markets—including in Singapore where turnover rates range between 15 to 25 percent.

The HR Trends Survey Singapore found flexi-work arrangements earn good feedback from employees.

Tight talent markets call for superior talent acquisition combined with ongoing talent management practices that drive retention of top performers. That enables your organization to meet its goals instead of experiencing poor performance resulting from having a revolving door for employees.

A survey of 1,350 European executives from 27 countries conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the European Association for Personnel Management (EAPM) concluded that managing talent is the most critical challenge today. This quote from Hans Böhm, general secretary of EAPM, stood out for us:

"Human resources has never played a more important role in business than it does today…HR executives must face these challenges to draw on human capital as a major source of competitive advantage."

The Future of HR: Key Challenges Through 2015 lists talent management as their primary concern with this foreboding statement in the Executive Summary:

Talent shortages loom, both in Europe and in new markets abroad, and companies must take steps now if they hope to address these shortages—and avert disaster.

Based on our own research in careers site recruiting in the UK, and in France—where 75 percent of SBF 120 companies have a careers section on their corporate website, yet only a slim majority (55 percent) allow candidates to apply online through a structured application form that can support a fully automated end to end recruitment process—we believe there are unprecedented opportunities for European companies to use automated recruiting methods and establish competitive advantage.

SAP, Microsoft, Google, and Adobe have all recently announced new forays into the on demand application space where software as a service rules. Notably absent is Oracle, but that’s no joke and also our punch line.

Software-as-a-Service and Web 2.0 advantages are well known. Lower costs, greater flexibility, and higher user adoption are just a few of the benefits to organizations of all sizes from Fortune 100 leaders to growing businesses.

Two articles caught our eye on the topic. Forrester Says 'Design for People, Build for Change' describes four important design factors that SaaS and Web 2.0 applications are uniquely positioned to deliver:

1. Business processes adapt to changing business conditions.
2. Applications evolve continuously while preserving process integrity.
3. Processes, tasks and the associated information always maintain context.
4. Systems are unitary, information-rich and reflect the social needs of the business.

3 Guiding Principles to Technology Acceptance outlines the keys to manager and employee user adoption in an interview with Bob Otto, the former CIO and CTO of the USPS:

I have three guiding principles—principles I've used since I was young. First, standardize everything. If you find a process you like, standardize it. Second, centralize everything you can. If you have services in five different places and you can centralize them, you will have reliability, predictability. Third, simplify. The computer has taken over your life, so I want it to be intuitive.

At Taleo, we’ve seen the advantages that Web 2.0 technologies offer and incorporated them into our continuously evolving recruiting and performance management SaaS applications to make them more personalized, intuitive, and socially and contextually connected. Why? Because our customers benefit by being able to drive a higher level of business performance at less cost.

Now let’s look at the other side. Information Week reported that when queried on Oracle’s SaaS strategy, Larry Ellison provided our punch line:

Larry Ellison told financial analysts in a quarterly earnings call yesterday that Oracle hasn't participated in the software-as-a-service trend because there's no money to be made there.

In the same article, Mary Hayes Weier delivers the bottom line:

“If a traditional software vendor tries to convince you that SaaS is no good for your specific need, don't take it as gospel. Do the research and find out if what you want really does need to be on premise. After all, it's your money.”