Our goal is to move beyond ‘vendor’ status to become trusted advisors and consultants with our client companies. So – how do we get past scenarios like the ones outlined in this video?
How many of you have ever encountered situations like these? Clients essentially asking you to work for free, or wanting to ‘test out’ your services with a promise to pay next time, or even haggling your fee to an unacceptable low. Forming strategic relationships does require some negotiation, but this must happen on both sides of the table. Sustainable relationships involve both parties benefiting (known in nature as a symbiotic relationship), not just one (known in nature as a parasitic relationship).
How have you or your company gotten past these types of scenarios? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Taleo officially joins the ranks of the repositioned today, declaring that its “next era of talent management” shall henceforth be known as “Talent Intelligence.”
In a word, what that means is analytics, or, if you prefer, metrics.
What’s so special about that, you may be asking, that it merits more than a mention? If it was merely a rebranding of talent management (and it is partly that), it probably wouldn’t. However, it is part of an industry-wide effort by vendors to educate employers, especially those with a “C” as the first letter of their title, to the value that lies within their HR systems.
Where the first wave of TM products were positioned as electronic assistants, providing easy storage and retrieval of employee records, products have now matured so far that they can be valuable tools in managing the business.
As Taleo’s VP of Product Marketing Ashley Stirrup said last week, companies spend billions ($100 billion according to the Taleo demo) buying and operating their ERPs, CRMs, and SCMs. When it comes to people management, Taleo says the spend is 2 percent of that.
With the pie chart showing those numbers up on our WebEx screen, Stirrup observed, “It really highlights how little companies know about their employees.”
One reason for that is that except in a few areas — sales comes to mind immediately — quantifying performance is difficult. Another reason is that it has only been the last few years that the software systems have become sufficiently sophisticated and integrated to allow managers to extract relevant employee information and link it to operational and production data.
HR hasn’t done enough to promote these capabilities and show the CFOs and CEOs how to use the power of these systems to advise their business decisions. For that matter, line managers and directors barely know about this. In fact, there’s a better than even money chance that most HR professionals themselves don’t know how to use their systems for business intelligence.
So it’s going to be up to the vendors to do some educating if they want to move that 2 percent to 3 percent.
Stirrup and Duncan Egan, Taleo’s senior director of marketing/Business Edition, offered some examples of how to use Taleo Insight, the analytics product the company has available for users of its Business Edition.
A recruiter could pull the last 10 candidate offers made to see what was finally accepted and use that information to counsel the hiring manager. Fortune 500 customer DaVita, a dialysis provider, used Taleo Analytics (the enterprise version of Insight) to reduce the time to hire nurses, saving $12.1 million.
While those examples focus on recruitment (Taleo knows who reads ERE), other uses abound. Workforce planning, for instance. More than a few high tech firms have been caught by surprise when key employees became fully vested and announced their departure.
That’s not likely to be the kind of thing many HR generalists are going to see — and flag — as a critical business data point. Which is part of the reason (no doubt there are others) that SuccessFactors began calling its HR products “Business Execution” and Kenexa launched a 2X platform and a trademarked “ X e = s.”
Rudy Karsan, Kenexa’s CEO, said as much at the company’s analyst day last month. Six of Kenexa’s biggest new customers came from directly pitching top executives on the data and business intelligence capabilities of its TM products.
Now Taleo, which HR tech columnist Bill Kutik said has been muttering about talent intelligence, is shouting about it.
““It’s a staggering reality that most companies know more about their laptops and copiers than they do about their people,” Mike Gregoire, CEO and chairman of Taleo, says in the press release announcing today’s evolution of the company’s talent management strategy.
“That’s a woefully outdated strategy. CEOs need to think completely differently about their workforce. ”
Talent Insight, the analytics package for the SMB market, comes with 40 pre-built reports, derived from what user focus groups said were most helpful. More will be added. It’s permission based, so the C-titled can pull any report and even create custom reports. Downstream, users get access to information according to their need and pay grade.
Egan insisted that Talent Insight was not merely a stripped down version of the enterprise product. “It’s a separate product,” he said, coming out of a separate work group at Taleo. The emphasis was on usefulness and usability.
“We strived to make it as easy to use as Facebook or Amazon.com,” Egan said. That’s certainly a wise approach, considering that the product’s target — companies with fewer than 5,000 employees — is only a generation or two removed from the filing cabinet.
When I asked Egan and Stirrup what the takeaways should be from the demo, the pre-built reports and crossplatform capability of Taleo Insight made the list, as did its intelligent report builder capability.
Someone, I don’t recall who, summed it up even better: Taleo Insight — and for that matter, the industry’s entire effort to reinvent itself — “gives you the past, present and future of your workforce so you can make better and smarter business decisions.”
One of the things I like about Jobvite is that the company keeps at it. Now no one in this sector can rest on their laurels. The competition is just too keen and the market too volatile for any vendor to take a day off. But Jobvite watches the trends and thinks out to what parts it can add value.
For sure, there are plenty of others doing the same in their own corner of the recruiting business. Jobvite just seems to be a little quicker. And it manages to work with the spirit of the trend.
For instance, 18 months ago Jobvite launched an app for Facebook and LinkedIn that made it possible to match a job to an employee’s friends and contacts. That employee’s friends and contacts could also opt-in to match the job to their friends and contacts and, well, you get the idea. Jobvite Source, as it is branded, is a lot truer to the spirit of social media than simply tweeting jobs.
Today’s announcement by Jobvite is no different. The company has streamlined Jobvite Source adding extra functionality to its integration with social media. Now, a recruiter, hiring manager, or an employee can customize Jobvite Source to post only some jobs to each of their social networks. An automatic scheduler is available to time the posts.
That can be a useful feature for an individual, but it’s even better for recruiter and company pages. No one need lard up their Facebook wall or LinkedIn profile with a continuous stream of job ads. The scheduler lets you target as well as time and limit the posting of openings.
Targeting of the Jobvites has also been improved so that now a recruiter can match job openings to employees, rather than sending an opening to the entire workforce.
Jobvite Source will also distribute jobs across some 300 social networks and the like. And the Jobvites can be redistributed via Twitter.
The analytics may be the most crucial piece of everything Jobvite does. Regardless of how many times a Jobvite job is posted, reposted, forwarded or retweeted, the source is tracked. So a recruiter or hiring manager will know what network, blog, referral or what have you produced the best results.
There’s a free version of Jobvite Source called Jobvite Share that can do many of the things that the commercial version discussed here does. It’s limited, though, in the number of channels and contacts that can be handled in one sitting. The commercial version automates practically everything.
In the world of recruiting technology, there’s not much difference in the core functions of one ATS from another. All of them need to receive, parse, store, track, and retrieve candidate information. If they can’t do that much, use Excel and a filing cabinet.
So where these systems differ is in how well, how fast they perform these functions and how easy they make it on recruiters and hiring managers to use them. Then come the features everyone uses like job req approvals, posting, redistribution, candidate ranking, EEO tracking, and the features some people use like calendaring and CRM for relationship building, talent pool creation, third-party vendor integration for background checking and assessments and so on.
In 2010, even the free ATS’s (think MrTed’s SmartRecruiters or Zoho Recruit) offer many or most of those features. So why would anyone pay for a recruiting management system?
I can think of a few. And so has BrightMove, which last month released the latest version of its ATS. The company doesn’t attract a whole lot of attention, probably because it’s been focused on staffing and on the smaller end of the corporate market.
Don’t let that fool you into thinking BrightMove isn’t right on top of things. The new release is heavy into social media, offers a comfortable level of work process customization, and emphasizes analytics to a degree that rivals that of enterprise systems. The other front-of-the-class features include a background prospecting tool for staffing and RPO firms that matches hot prospects to advertised jobs on corporate sites and on-click candidate research.
I took an hour-long demo Friday with BrightMove founder and CEO Dave Webb, and COO Mike Brandt, who drove. There was plenty to like about the new version and plenty of reasons for even a small shop to come up with the modest monthly fee. (As with all SaaS HR technology, pricing is per user and varies. But figure on around $100 a month with discounts for volume and contracts.)
But what especially impressed me were the analytics. I can’t imagine any recruiting operation that wouldn’t benefit from knowing which source provided the most number of placed candidates. Then layer on the cost of acquiring those candidates and compare it to all the other sources.
Useful? I think so. Even more though would be to do that same analysis by candidate skills. In the first analysis, I would expect Monster and CareerBuilder to yield the greatest number of candidates and placements. That’s just a function of their reach. But let me narrow that down to specific skills and I might just find that referrals from other placed candidates is an even better bet.
“We really opened this up, ” Brandt said. Not every manager or agency owner is going to need or want to do the same kind of deep diving into the data that I might (I actually find it fun), but BrightMove makes it possible for them to do as much as they need. As Brandt said, analyzing the data in various ways makes it possible to “come up with a new way” of focusing the business.
“This is where we really feel like, man … we can really help them make a difference in what they are doing,” Brandt added.
Were the analytics the only gee-whiz feature, BrightMove would certainly be worth trying out, especially since you can do that for free without giving up what you have now. However, the social media tools aren’t to be overlooked.
BrightMove has job posting and candidate research features specifically for social media. The company has correctly read the interest in reaching the denizens of those sites, even though there’s only faint evidence at this point to show social media recruiting is as effective as, say, posting to a job board. (Before you write those nasty comments, go read the Source of Hire study study just released by Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler).
Nevertheless, the service is there and it can be used for reaching passive candidates and building profiles of candidates.
Being small, BrightMove clearly is trying harder. The company brought out a version of the ATS for RPOs which it brands BrightMove Quantify. That’s the one Brandt demoed. There are also flavors for staffing and corporate recruiters.
Because it’s small and getting notice can be a challenge, BrightMove announced a couple months ago that it would credit back 25 percent of the month’s fee to any customer unhappy with the support and service they get. BrightMove has also been forming partnerships, most recently integrating TalentHook’s spidering capabilities into the ATS.
