How Global is your Talent Management Platform?

As more and more Talent Management vendors claim globally capable, it is increasingly becoming difficult for organizations to assess the level of globalization & localization enabled by these vendor platforms. Depending on architectural maturity, different Talent Management vendor platforms may have varying degrees of support for multi-language, multi-currencies, local compliance and data security. What really matters is the ability of Talent Management platform to support a combination of all of these to enable business agility and visibility.

For example, consider a global Compensation scenario where a centralized compensation department in headquarters administers the overall job families, levels and codes. However, the salary structures and grades are defined at country level to ensure alignment with the local market trends. However, a line manager managing a global team should have cohesive visibility to overall team performance along with the country specific guidelines for pay awards. On the same token the county level data protection policies mean the HR Administrators in one country should not have access to personal data of employee in other countries. In addition, the country level aggregated metrics may be visible to the authorized senior executives for benchmark purposes.

Figure: Planning Tool for Global Line Managers; Courtesy: Workstream (see disclaimer in side layout)

To support this complex use case the Talent Management platform should
1. Enable line managers with a cohesive Pay for Performance tool to manage global teams. The platform should have capabilities to define and administer team hierarchies.
2. Support capabilities to define salary grades and compensation guidelines by country/division
3. Support for country level segmentation for HR data administration
4. Role based dashboards and analytics enforcing data segmentation and hierarchical business rules
5. Business rules for sharing summary/aggregated information and insight
6. Support for local compliance reporting

It is imperative for organizations to thoroughly evaluate the true global capabilities of vendor platforms prior to selection, to avoid surprises later in implementation.

Power of Metrics in Preparing a Compelling Business Case for Talent Management

As Meg Bear indicated in her blog, a compelling business case is critical to get the buy-in for launching Talent Management 2.0 initiatives. While the faltering economy created awareness of efficient Talent Management strategies to attract, engage, develop and motivate talent, the challenge often is how to quantify the business value from TM investments for a winning business case? One approach is to begin with end in mind – once you deploy the solution what specific tools it will enable to achieve business goals?

Figure: Most Commonly Used Talent Management Metrics Courtesy: TM talent management magazine July'08

To start with, above are some high-level categories of commonly used Talent Management metrics. Decompose these categories into actionable metrics that will enable HR organization to contribute to business goals. You can apply the insight from Cathy - for example, in Cost to hire category think about measures that will help you to measure the effectiveness of new hires. What percentage of new hires got “above/exceeded expectation” rating in first six months review? What percentage is below average? How these barometers enable you to decide sourcing plan of action? What would be the estimated financial impact of these proactive strategies?
By clearly articulating the actionable insight that the Talent Management solution enables and how business strategy is hinge upon this insight, you are on your way to get the executive buy-in for the winning business case.

Talent Management 2.0 as a Hedging Strategy to Recession

Despite of global economy slowdown worries, two Talent Management vendors with dominant presence in online Recruiting space reported record revenues this week. StepStone, covering 13 European countries, reported quarterly revenue of EUR 30.9m (approximately $48m) driving year-over-year growth of 30%. Corollary to this, Taleo, with 13% revenues outside North America, reported quarterly revenue of $38.8 million, driving year over year growth of 25%.

Chart: DOW & TLEO Courtesy: Yahoo Finance

This growth pattern is essentially a manifestation of prevailing need for efficient Talent Management practices in difficult economic times. The plummeted budgets and reduced headcounts are driving the perennial need to find few talented people that can do more with high quality and at reduced cost. More than ever, now it is imperative for organizations to leverage technology to reduce recruiting/sourcing dollars, enable operating synergies, and reduce time and cost to hire. Hence the continued market demand for these leaders in E-Recruitment space.