Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For is compiled each year using a large number of attributes and an exhaustive process. Being on this list gives you a major employment brand advantage and results in a jump in the number of job applications.

Candidates from college graduates to seasoned job hoppers use this annual list to target potential employers – typically starting online at your career site. Online is where applicants get their first impression of your employment brand. The Taleo Research paper, Career Site 2.0: Taking the Lead in the War for Talent, and webcast show how technology makes a measured difference.

As Great Place to Work® Institute notes:
Great Workplaces Outperform the Stock Market Studies show being a great place to work is good for business, as publicly traded “100 Best” companies have consistently outperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin. A 2007 paper, "Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices," found that an “annually rebalanced portfolio of FORTUNE magazine's ‘Best Companies to Work For in America’ earned 14 percent per year from 1998 to 2005, over double the market return.”

Of course, your career site and your employer brand are just one aspect of a bigger financial picture, but they can provide a positive contribution to your organization. Taleo is proud to serve a number of the companies on this year’s list. Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!

Onboarding is an overlooked process that can make or break the productivity of a new hire. Not to mention employee engagement and long term career investment. So it’s time to stop treating it as a checkbox and see it as a very important first step in the new hire’s relationship to the organization.

Although onboarding appears to be purely transactional, it can be a strategic process that improves your bottom line. Get employees up to speed faster and contributing to your bottom line. We’ve already noted that only 30% of executives are satisfied with their onboarding process. Our paper, Onboarding: Speeding the Way to Productivity, outlines the process, explores current practices, and describes how it integrates into the hiring process.

Also Aberdeen’s Onboarding Benchmark Report: Technology Drivers Help Improve the New Hire Experience shows how paper based systems are more expensive and less effective than automated solutions.

But it’s not just your first impression that’s important. It’s also their first steps and what gets done once a new person starts the job that sets the path to higher productivity and retention.

Novations Group offers symptomatic findings in a survey of 2,000 HR executives that help explain why significant percentages of employers lose a staggering 25–50% of their new hires in the first year. Only 29% train hiring managers in onboarding. Their lack of retention, churn, and high cost of hire add unnecessary costs to the talent line simply because they lack automated tools and programs.

The first 90 to 100 days can make or break an employment relationship. And for HR executives, that same first impression time is an opportunity to shine. Mercer’s paper, Your first 100 days as Chief Human Resource Officer: Make a good first impression for lasting success, offers the insights needed to build a lasting foundation connecting HR goals and talent to those of the business.

Every endeavor has a process – a process with distinct steps and a flow. In recruiting that process involves stakeholders both inside and outside of your organization: corporate recruiters and HR staff, hiring managers, and outside suppliers such as job boards and background checking. Then of course don’t forget the applicants and candidates.

The flow of information and data through the steps and among the stakeholders determines the efficiency of the process. Why faster? Faster is better due to candidate obsolescence risk. Good talent does not wait around when your hiring bureaucracy moves at a crawl.

Why better? Better is better for sure. Hiring quality talent who become productive, high performing employees is the ultimate desired outcome of the process.

Why cheaper? Cutting costs in any process makes it more optimal. For example, cheaper can be accomplished through a process that mines candidates from a proprietary corporate talent pool, instead of sourcing anew for every requisition.

You can learn more in our upcoming webcast, High Performance Recruiting Processes: Faster, Better, Cheaper. I’ll be joined by Thom Brockbank, Director of HRIS from Sutter Health and Chris Tratar, Director of Solution Marketing, Taleo Corporation, for an hour of insights based on the Taleo Research white paper Make Your Recruiting Process Faster, Better, and Cheaper. It’s on February 13, 2008, 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. PT / 12 noon to 1:00 p.m. ET.

Although it has been labeled as a disruptive emerging technology since 1999, recent articles and studies underscore that a Software as a Service (SaaS) has earned its proven track record as an established force between the lines.

McKinsey’s Delivering software as a service cites the lower barrier to entry and economic advantages to both vendor and customer: “since software as a service delivers fees over time rather than large up-front license purchases” and “reality of ongoing relationships with customers rather than periodic upgrades.” They also put SaaS on their list of Eight business technology trends to watch.

Phil Wainewright’s blog posting Eight reasons SaaS will surge in 2008 points out that software is all about services now that the Internet provides the proven network that services oriented architecture (SOA) has promised all along.

Even Wall Street is bullish on SaaS in an uncertain economy as Fortune’s story titled Tech stocks for tough times proclaims.

So why SaaS now? Why talent management now?

Because a talent management solution delivered on demand as a service provides four levels of winning for everyone involved in organizations of all sizes regardless of the economic climate.

Users Win
You may wonder what the new Datamonitor report called Decision Matrix: Selecting a CRM Vendor in the Pharmaceutical Industry discussing the rapidly growing trend towards on demand CRM has to do with talent management. It’s another validation of the superior user experience offered by SaaS that’s similar to any other web experience: "End users of such products are more satisfied with customer support and services provided by SaaS vendors rather than by traditional vendors," Datamonitor stated.

IT Wins
On demand solutions require no software license purchase or costly maintenance. Secure, configurable, best practice processes run on the Internet. Users access the system on a web browser—anytime, anywhere—without creating a hassle for IT. THINK IT lists the Top Ten Reasons Why On-Demand Services Will Soar in 2008 and describes the advantage to corporate IT departments: “Now, a growing proportion of IT people see managed services and SaaS as a way to out-task mundane work or overcome complex application/technology deployment and maintenance responsibilities.”

HR Wins
With SaaS delivery, HR becomes the strategic enabler of talent processes for managers and employees. Innovative technologies empower business-centric talent management that can drive a new level of business value: Performance 2.0: Empowering the Next Level of Business Results.

The Planet Wins
SaaS is green and eRecruiting delivered on demand is much greener than traditional paper processes or on-premise solutions that create redundant computing environments:
“Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications running in a multi-tenant environment…tend to be greener than on-premise software and servers. Multi-tenancy delivers more efficient power utilization per customer resulting in a smaller carbon footprint…helping reduce carbon emissions instead of powering more servers.”

London Business School Professor Doug Ready’s work caught our attention with the publication of The Wall Street Journal article, How to Fill the Talent Gap. He is also the co-author of an outstanding Harvard Business Review article, Make Your Company a Talent Factory.

In a terrific ten-minute video, Prof. Doug Ready further articulates his view of Talent Management: "The Perfect Storm". He covers growth, emerging markets, what Taleo customer P&G is doing, and his take on functionality and vitality.

As he states: Stop losing out on lucrative business opportunities because you don’t have the talent to develop them.

The wisdom is there. Read…view…learn…and act.

The strategic challenge of using talent as a business performance driver has flirted with market dynamics since McKinsey’s coining in 1997 of The War for Talent. Initially focused on management talent and best-and-brightest leadership, McKinsey has arrived at a more holistic destination a decade later with the cogent article: Making talent a strategic priority. Two studies revealed two key findings:

“…respondents regarded finding talented people as likely to be the single most important managerial preoccupation for the rest of this decade.”

“…nearly half of respondents expect intensifying competition for talent—and the increasingly global nature of that competition—to have a major effect on their companies over the next five years. No other global trend was considered nearly as significant.”

And a probable cause.

“…executives must blame themselves for their current talent woes.”

Good talent management programs are approved by top management and administered by HR. Great talent management programs are sponsored by top management, engineered by HR, and driven by everyone in the organization. But that requires a total talent mindset and tools to make unified recruiting and performance an everyday affair.

The prescription?

“…organizations can’t afford to neglect the contributions of other employees.”

For C-level leaders, this begs for a change in their mindset. Look at the language that leaders use for people: talent, our most important asset, human resources, human capital, and largest expense. Which name would you use?

When HR looks at people, they see people in roles contributing to the success of the organization. I doubt many CEOs consider themselves to be the largest item in the largest expense line of their companies. They most likely think of themselves as talent.

Now if they see the whole company as an aggregation of talent, they’ve taken a giant step and cleared their thinking to drive talent management success and higher business performance:

“What’s needed is a deep-rooted conviction, among business unit heads and line leaders, that people really matter…”

Top to bottom, we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

When people discuss whether or not there is a renewed war for talent, those who are on the front lines and see the action are usually the best sources. Ask those in IT who are recruiting to fill positions.

Computerworld.com ran the article 8 New Weapons to Fight the Talent Wars in '08 with the subhead: “Luring hot prospects will require creative approaches in the coming year.” We agree with the need to be creative. Here are four ideas that caught our eye and why:

Social Networks. Finding a higher quality pool of applicants is just one of the advantages of using social networks.

Global Thinking. You need to look worldwide for talent in emerging markets, so you need a truly global online talent solution.

Business Vision. Digging deeper into candidate skills and qualifications that include business savvy requires four-tier automated prescreening and assessments.

Imagination. Perks, flexibility, and a green recruiting and employment brand provide the differentiation you need to win top candidates.

Two more sets of forward looking views are noteworthy as 2008 begins. WorldatWork Highlights Key Predictions for Human Capital Management in 2008 and Beyond’s first two predictions of eight combine to validate the process and technology investments that companies need to make if they want to achieve the next level of business performance:

1. The successful organization of the future will excel at acquiring, organizing and strategically deploying global resources.

2. There will be increased global connectivity, integration and interdependence in the economic, social, technological, cultural and political spheres.

The Herman Trend Alert: 2008 Workforce/Workplace Forecast also calls out eight factors in the coming year. Four caught our immediate attention:

1. Recruitment in a Tightening Labor Market
3. Retention in the Face of Increasing Choices for Employees
4. More Employers Will Focus on Metrics
6. Lack of Succession Preparation

Without innovative recruiting and sourcing solutions, time to fill and recruiting costs are predicted to increase as the war for talent tightens the labor market. Retention of key employees is more than worth the investment in formal internal mobility programs. Increased efficiency of automated performance management processes also delivers consistent performance metrics. In many companies, formal succession plans will become not just a stretch goal for HR, they will be considered a basic operational requirement.

And finally because a little humor is a welcome way to start a new year, read CareerXroads Tongue-In-Cheek Predictions for 2008. Happy New Year 2008!