Walking around the floor of the HR Technology Conference in Chicago this week, it is clear that one of the biggest challenges in understanding and evaluating Talent Management software is the sheer number of vendors offering solutions – all wrapped in considerable hype about being the “latest-and-greatest, most-comprehensive, state-of-the-art solution” on the market.
The fact is there is no silver bullet – there is no single vendor that provides all of the functionality now being grouped under the umbrella of Talent Management: Recruiting, Performance, Succession, Compensation, Learning, Career Development, and Workforce Planning.
To help companies sort through it all and make sense of the Talent Management market, following are few excellent resources you should look into:
Gartner Group just completed their 2007 Talent Management Market Scope which provides an excellent review of 30-some vendors and how they stack up against one another.
Bersin and Associates recently completed a survey of another 28 Talent Management vendors and evaluated the degree of functionality of each vendor across the different Talent Management domains.
CedarCrestone just released their 10th annual HR Systems Survey on HR service delivery and technology adoption in the industry.
These surveys cover the top 30-40 vendors, and there are literally hundreds more niche players, each with different strengths and weaknesses. One thing is clear: the market is quite fragmented, and consolidation is inevitable. You have only to look at the Recruiting industry – and most recently the Business Intelligence industry – to see examples of consolidation underway.
If you’re in the market for a new piece of talent management software, I would encourage you to not only look at your current situation, but also to focus on your future needs and how well those match with the future development plans of the vendors you’re considering. Too often we focus on fixing our current pain points, rather than, in the words of Wayne Gretzky, “skate to where the puck is going to be.” If you focus only on your current pain points, you’ll constantly be behind – by the time you’ve fixed those, everything will have changed and you’ll still be playing catch up.
This ability to address both current and future needs is what distinguishes a “great” solution from just a good one.