Enterprise Talent Management

You Need to Know about Enterprise Talent Management

To stay competitive, you must leverage every resource available to your organization and optimize its contribution towards achieving objectives. Research and experience have shown that developing a workforce with talent and skills specifically targeted to your business objectives will directly impact your companys success. People are the most valuable resource in any business, yet most companies do a poor job of hiring and leveraging their human assets. Managing human capital has become a predominant concern in business today. CEOs, from the Fortune 50 to the high-tech start-up, are placing a new emphasis on the quality and impact of their people, at the same time their CFOs are seeking to reduce the cost of acquisition and management of such an intangible asset as talent.

Given the huge potential impact to your business, why are you waiting to optimize the quality, speed and effectiveness of your recruiting and employee management processes?

ETM is a Business Strategy and Software not just a Buzzcronym?

Enterprise Talent Management is the evolving professional discipline of integrating and automating the individual business processes recruiters and human resources managers perform on a daily basis while identifying, recruiting and managing people. By applying powerful process management tools and integrating information about candidates and employees, the human resources professional ensures that the organization can easily track and report on its candidates, their progress in the hiring pipeline and their growth as employees within the organization. ETM system assures that the right talent is acquired in a timely fashion and used for the right position.

Resumes, Employment Applications, Offer Letters, I-9 Forms, Performance Reviews ... all are either faxed, emailed or mailed, and inevitably end up in paper format. After reviewing the information, you file it along with thousands of other documents. This paper process is fraught with black holes. Manually scheduling interviews and coordinating calendars creates delays that jeopardize access to the best candidates. The chances of resurfacing a candidate you hoped to track as a fit for future openings" are slim. The glowing performance review on a star employee is forgotten when that individual begins working for a new manager. Data contained on paper becomes meaningless once the paper is away from your eyes. It cannot be easily searched, categorized, analyzed, reported on or leveraged for future value. Effective use of ETM eliminates this scenario.

How Does ETM Work?
Enterprise Talent Management is analogous to the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) principal, only applied to your human resources functions. Think of the problem in manufacturing terms. Raw materials (candidates) need to be identified, acquired and converted into finished goods (employees) that in turn must provide value to the customer (your shareholders/owners). To optimize the end product, the raw material must be of high quality and it must arrive "just-in-time" to avoid the cost of spoiled or excess inventory. The manufacturing process must be highly integrated, efficient and minimize waste. In the employment industry, our raw material is the talent pool of millions of potential candidates and our manufacturing process is recruitment, selection, hiring and employee management.

There are various sources for the raw materials" of recruiting: retained search professionals, contingency recruiters, temporary agencies, contract recruiters, resume data banks, job posting sites, classified advertisements, outplacement agencies, college campuses, employee referrals and internal postings. The Internet, in particular, has spawned a seemingly unending stream of recruitment related sites. Employers are literally drowning in the choices. Cutting through the noise to find only what you need, when you need it and at the lowest cost is harder than ever. Turning it into a quality finished product at the speed demanded by todays market is then an overwhelming challenge.

As for the production" process itself, most corporate human resources departments and professional recruiting firms still operate in a mostly manual and very disjointed fashion. Although email has become the method of choice for document exchange, it has merely replaced a paper document with an electronic one. The process itself still requires a great deal of manual handling. An effective Enterprise Talent Management system should enable documents to free up the data they contain so that it can become structured and truly useful information. You can then automate the complete recruiting, hiring and employee management lifecycle, with easy and immediate access to information about potential candidates as well as employees.

Why Do I Want It?
Allowing everyone in an organization to access or contribute to information about candidates and employees, at appropriate levels of detail and security, can have an enormous effect on hiring and retention. More specifically, by applying an integrated ETM approach, you will improve the speed and quality of your entire process: candidate generation, resume search and prioritization, standardized interviews, interview process management, applicant tracking, large recruiting projects, updating of employment records, vendor management, and much more. You can even automate your internal recruiting and succession planning process, actually fulfilling an agenda where few companies succeed. All the workflow rules and information are standardized and automated via the ETM framework. The same processes that took days to execute can now happen in a few minutes.

Where Do I Get It?
Here is where software comes in. Human Resources and recruiting software comes in many shapes and sizes, but few offer a complete solution that covers the entire ETM spectrum. The marketplace for these solutions is still young. Most software vendors that claim to have complete solutions are in reality only bit players. You can choose to cobble together several software vendors, but that promises to be an expensive, high-risk undertaking. Fully integrated ETM solutions are currently available from only a handful of software providers, so it is important that you do your homework carefully.

There are robust client server applications that are quite expensive but very functional. There are web-based applications that are inexpensive, but much lower in functionality. There are also a few hybrid systems that offer the best of both worlds. In addition to the demo the sales individual will do for you, be sure to require that you have the opportunity to actually play with the system for several hours. Also, verify that your software provider possesses experience in recruiting and employee management to ensure the success of your implementation.

For additional information on this topic, or to learn more about VelocityHRTM and our other innovative solutions for Enterprise Talent Management, please contact us.

ThinkWorks, Inc.
365 Northridge Road
Suite 400,
Atlanta, GA 30350
(800) 589-3587
www.think-works.com
E-mail: Info@think-works.com