Taleo Joins Talent Management Battle
Late to the gate, Taleo has finally joined the battling ranks of the real talent-management suite vendors. But its performance-management application may have benefited, since it looks and acts like no other I've seen before.
By Bill Kutik
Taleo has finally joined the battling ranks of the real talent-management suite vendors.
And it may have benefited from its later start. Its new performance-management module -- which also includes goal management and career & succession planning -- looks and acts like no other application I've seen before. Whether that makes it better remains for Taleo's upcoming beta customers, not to mention the entire market, to decide.
The new applications are scheduled to be generally available in January.
Taleo examined at least two potential acquisitions before deciding to build its own performance management 18 months ago. The build-your-own strategy is the same as SuccessFactors and Halogen but opposite from arch-rival Vurv, which has been acquiring new applications. At September's Taleo World user conference, consultant James Harvey, who helped develop the app, unveiled it.
He appropriately focused on what really sets it apart: the new information architecture that shows fundamentally new thinking about these business applications. The user interface was built before the functionality, using Adobe Flex, the technology of choice these days as most vendors are abandoning AJAX to use it.
This allows for its coolest feature, a TalentCard on each employee, which can be turned over in an interactive org chart revealing all their vital statistics -- performance reviews, goal plans, etc. -- on the back, just like on a baseball card. An entire department can be lined up showing the same data points, a process that requires a report in competing applications.
Of course, the TalentCard is based on a much larger "person profile," whose detail can also be easily revealed. The idea of a person profile has caught on with nearly every vendor doing talent applications -- from SAP, Workday and Oracle (including the new Fusion applications) to SuccessFactors and other suite vendors.
The fact that differently structured person profiles will be in so-called "systems of record" as well as central to add-on talent-management applications portends a lot of future conflict. The question may shortly become, "Which vendor's person profile does your HR system use?" Like the older and easier question of, "Who generates your requisitions -- your HRMS or your applicant-tracking system?" But bound to be much knottier.
The product's information architecture allows navigation similar to Workday's. As a manager, you can stay on one person and navigate across all the processes (Workday's breakthrough idea) or take the more traditional route of staying on one process and navigate through a variety of people.
By using a Microsoft Office plug-in, Taleo's performance management may enable the Holy Grail of that application: continuous feedback on employees throughout the year, rather than a head-scratching attempt at remembering the good, the bad and the ugly at annual review time.
Using a department or project network modeled after LinkedIn, a manager can ask for e-mail feedback from anyone in the network. The feedback e-mails are tagged to go automatically into the employee's profile.
"The hope is that 90 percent of a performance review will be a manager reviewing the feedback given at the time something actually happened throughout the year," Harvey says.
Later, Taleo hopes to take feedback from BlackBerrys as well.
A similar collaboration is possible in succession planning, where everyone in a network can propose successors. The application will also allow for conceptual searches of both the candidate and employee databases looking for likely employees. "Succession really should be proactive staffing," Harvey says, "and eventually we'll generate a req from succession."
Despite these innovations, Taleo wisely decided not to take part in "
The Industry's First Integrated Performance & Recruiting Shootout
" at the HR Technology Conference® on Oct. 11 in Chicago. The four contenders that are taking part -- Authoria, HRsmart, SuccessFactors and Vurv -- have had performance management for a longer time.
For Taleo, it would be like showing a newborn baby; albeit, a very cute one.
HR Technology Columnist Bill Kutik is also co-chairman of the 10th Anniversary HR Technology Conference® & Exposition in Chicago, Oct. 10 through 12. Registration is still available at
www.HRTechnologyConference.com
. He can be reached at
bkutik@earthlink.net
.
September 24, 2007 Copyright 2007© LRP Publications
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