Author: joshbersin

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


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

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

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 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

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

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»

Dream Job for World-Class Instructional Designer Available

Are you a great instructional designer looking for an exciting new opportunity?

Would you like to help design cutting-edge, market leading instructional content for a global audience?

Are you looking for the opportunity to learn and apply new media and blended approaches to a new library of learning offerings?

If you answered yes to these ... Read more»

Yikes. Training spending up 9.5%, highest increase in 3+ years! A renaissance.

Wow.  After more than three years of decline in spending, corporate training budgets just jumped up 9.5% last year.  (Just released, 2012 Bersin & Associates Corporate Learning Factbook®).  Good news for corporate HR teams and business leaders in general.

This is a huge increase, bringing the average spending per employee to over $800, or ... Read more»

We are Greater than Me: Building an Agile Organization

Late last year I attended two major talent and leadership conferences in Stockholm. At these events I had the opportunity to meet with various HR leaders at Electrolux, Ericsson, Logica, BT, Maersk, Grundfos, Unicredit, Bertelsman, and others. What I learned is something important that we are building into a broad research framework I plan to ... Read more»

Talent Management Software Vendors get a C+ in Customer Satisfaction

We just completed a year-long research study on the customer experience with talent management software. Despite the sky-high market valuations for these companies and the growth rate of the market, these products are not fully meeting customer needs. In fact, among the 1,146 companies we surveyed, their average overall satisfaction is 3.65 on a scale ... Read more»

Salesforce.com to Acquire Rypple: Major New Entrant to Cloud-Based Talent Management Market

Today Salesforce.com announced plans to acquire Rypple, a small but growing provider of social performance management software. In addition, the company announced plans to build out a set of human capital management products called SuccessForce (quite a stab in the eye to SuccessFactors), built on the “social enterprise” which Marc Benioff (CEO of Salesforce.com) has ... Read more»

My Conversation with Paul Sparta: Update on Plateau, SAP, and SuccessFactors

Today I had a chat with Paul Sparta, the founder of Plateau and one of the key product leaders at SuccessFactors and now SAP.  Paul, who’s current title is Chief Integration Officer, shared some important thoughts with me which I felt were worth publishing.

1.  As a result of the acquisition, the SuccessFactors ... Read more»