Author: joshbersin

Have traditional Human Resources Practices Become Out of date?

Have traditional Human Resources Practices Become Out of date?

In preparation for our IMPACT Annual Research Conference in April, I have been actively studying our research over the last year. What we have discovered (and I will be discussing this in detail in my keynote), is that today’s business environment requires a complete rethink of many of the traditional practices of HR.

Let me ... Read more»

Saba Announces PeopleCloud and Acquisition of Human Concepts

Saba Announces PeopleCloud and Acquisition of Human Concepts

This week Saba made two major announcements.

First, the company introduced a bold new product offering, Saba PeopleCloud, an integrated new “work environment” which pulls together corporate social networking, knowledge sharing, real-time collaboration, web conferencing, and all of Saba’s formal learning technology in a brand new platform.

Saba essentially invented the market for corporate learning ... Read more»

Why you should come to IMPACT on April 10-13…

Why you should come to IMPACT on April 10-13…

We are all getting excited about our upcoming research conference IMPACT 2012:  The Business of Talent®.

There are seats left, but the conference will likely sell out (as it has in prior years), so let me give a few big reasons to take a few days of your valuable time and come to the ... Read more»

Cornerstone Acquires Sonar6:  Talent Management for SMB

Cornerstone Acquires Sonar6: Talent Management for SMB

Today CornerstoneOnDemand announced the acquisition of Sonar6, an innovative small provider of highly graphical performance review and succession management tools for small businesses.

An SMB Play

As Cornerstone described the acquisition to us today, this is all about SMB (Small and Mid-sized Business). Cornerstone defines the SMB market as companies with less than 500 ... Read more»

SAP’s Bold Move with SuccessFactors: Lots of Work to Do

SAP’s Bold Move with SuccessFactors: Lots of Work to Do

This week SuccessFactors and SAP announced their integration plans. Simply stated, the combined companies plan to move all their strategic talent management investments from SAP HCM and Business ByDesign into SuccessFactors, and build Employee Central (SuccessFactors’ central directory product) into its core cloud-based HRMS offering.

This is a bold and somewhat risky strategy. Let ... Read more»

The Integration of Talent Management Systems Comes to Forefront

The Integration of Talent Management Systems Comes to Forefront

The talent management systems market has been under quite a bit of stress lately.

In the last 90 days we have seen SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, followed by Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo, and then the smaller Kenexa acquisition of Outstart and PeopleFluent acquisition of Strategia.

And while all this is going on, CornerstoneOnDemand... Read more»

LinkedIn is Disrupting the Global Recruiting Market

LinkedIn is Disrupting the Global Recruiting Market


Last week LinkedIn reported amazing financials (stock jumped almost 20% in one day). The company reported 105% YTY growth in quarterly revenues to $167.7 Million, putting the company on a 2012 plan of $860 Million.

But the real story is the huge jump in revenues from LinkedIn’s recruiting services (“Hiring Solutions”). Revenues in this segment ... Read more»

Oracle buys Taleo

Oracle buys Taleo

I guess we saw this coming. Today Oracle announced plans to acquire Taleo, the largest provider of recruitment software, for $1.9 billion. The company positions this as part of Oracle’s strategy to build a “comprehensive, cloud offering to help companies manage their HR operations and employee careers.”

This is a very smart move, and one ... Read more»

Kenexa Acquires Outstart: Getting Serious about the Corporate Learning Market

Kenexa Acquires Outstart: Getting Serious about the Corporate Learning Market

This week Kenexa, one of the largest and most successful HR and talent acquisition consulting companies, announced the acquisition of Outstart, a pioneering company in the market for e-learning tools, learning management, collaboration, and mobile learning solutions. This represents a major move for Kenexa, putting the company firmly into the market for training tools, ... Read more»

The LMS Market Remains Hot with PeopleFluent Deal (but not as hot as Facebook)

The LMS Market Remains Hot with PeopleFluent Deal (but not as hot as Facebook)

The LMS market remains very hot, and so does Facebook (below). Comments on both.

This week Peoplefluent (a $100M+ talent management software company, built from the combination of Authoria and Peopleclick) announced the acquisition of Strategia, a small but very successful enterprise learning management systems company. Strategia was a Canadian enterprise LMS company with ... Read more»

The End of a Job as we Know It

The concept of a job, as we know it, is starting to go away.

Over the last few years I’ve been speaking with many corporate business and human resource leaders and hearing a common theme: we need our organizations to be more agile. We need to redesign organizations so we can learn faster, communicate ... Read more»

Getting Bullish on SAP in the HR Marketplace

Getting Bullish on SAP in the HR Marketplace

SAP, the world’s largest application software company, just announced the best revenue and earnings growth the company has made in many years. The company’s quarterly revenues grew by 12% to over $3.4 billion Euros and profits rose by 23% to $1.6 billion. And now that the company has announced its plans to acquire SuccessFactors for ... Read more»

The Business Case for Talent Management:  Steve Ballmer Agrees

The Business Case for Talent Management: Steve Ballmer Agrees

Talent management makes money.

If you are trying to build a business case for a corporate talent management program, here is some astounding data:

Of the 700+ organizations we studied in 2010 and 2011, only 7% told us that they have a “strategic talent management” program. We defined talent management in four levels of ... Read more»