Category: Talent Management

Why you should love your Virtual Workforce

Why you should love your Virtual Workforce

Today’s workforce has changed tremendously.  It’s younger, more specialized, looking for better work… and it’s virtual.

By the year 2014, 47% of US workers will be under the age of 35.  And these younger workers are just as smart and hard-working as we baby-boomers are.

Yet today entry level positions are very hard to find.  ... Read more»

IMPACT 2012 Quick Wrapup

IMPACT 2012 Quick Wrapup

IMPACT 2012 was amazing this week.  For those of you who couldn’t make it, let me give you a few highlights:

The conference theme was “Building Business Agility” – and throughout the conference more than 450 HR and L&D executives attended sessions on how to build global programs, drive employee engagement, create continuous learning programs, ... 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»

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»

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»

We are Greater than Me: Building an Agile Organization

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

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

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

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»

BersinBasics Pioneers a New Way to Learn the Fundamentals of Talent Management

BersinBasics Pioneers a New Way to Learn the Fundamentals of Talent Management

We all know that talent management is a hot topic in business today.  SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion demonstrates how important this market is to businesses around the world.

But ultimately it isn’t software that drives business results: it’s the practices of talent management that matters.  Our research shows that companies which ... Read more»

SAP to buy SuccessFactors:  Major Shift in Talent Management Market (updated)

SAP to buy SuccessFactors: Major Shift in Talent Management Market (updated)

This weekend SAP announced plans to acquire SuccessFactors for approximately $3.4 billion (almost 10X 2011 revenues).

Just last week we delivered a webinar on trends in the Talent Management Systems market, and discussed the fact that this market is rapidly becoming commoditized and that the big vendors were starting to make a major impact.  Listen ... Read more»