• 50-65% of CEO’s and executives feel that talent management is at the top of their list of concerns; yet 2/3 of employers have no plans in place to do anything about it.
• Long-term planning for talent management does not make sense; because of the dynamic nature of business, and the rapidly changing competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities, aptitudes, etc.) required to meet today’s needs and those in the short to mid-term. Who knows what competencies will be required 10 years out — when most employer business plans only extend 1-5 years out?

An interesting conundrum to say the least. How do we reconcile this paradox of being strategic partners supporting the business long-term goals but without the crystal ball to see into the future? Please share your thoughts on how you’re resolving this dilemma.

Thanks, Paul, for pointing this out to all of us!

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.

As I talk to companies about their frustrations around the inability to make progress with their Talent Management initiatives, the reasons center mostly around lack of data, tools, and infrastructure to provide the information they need. When I hear these types of frustrations, I think about The Hackett Group survey results that show quite clearly: best-in-class companies invest 28% more in their HR technology and infrastructure than average companies. One of Hackett’s latest press releases claims that companies can improve earnings nearly 15% by improving their talent management function.

With studies like these, how do we think can we improve our talent management function without investing in the technology to support the effort? We need metrics and tools to support the business case that investing in people enhances business performance.
In exchanging emails with my colleague John Macy about this, he says

“a) The tools are available for executives to use and progress from workforce analytics to predictive modeling. However, the tools need to be populated with the right information and relevant metrics. Too many use the tools to provide useless information.

b) Money needs to be invested in data integrity so there is a higher level of confidence in the information. The HRMS transactional stuff to collect data has been overlooked and processes are not in place to capture information as it changes in many companies. Poor integration of systems doesn’t help either.”

If “people are our most important asset,” as most executives claim, then at some point they need to put their money where their mouth is and invest in the tools and technology needed to effectively support the people-related activities in our business.