In part one of this two-part news analysis, Oracle’s senior executives explained the shifting nature of the human capital management applications marketplace and the vendor’s rationale for acquiring Software-as-a-Service-based recruitment and talent management systems supplier, Taleo.
In part two, Jason Blessing, the man in charge of Taleo’s product line, explains what the merger is likely to mean in practice for those HR directors that use its software.
The future’s bright now that the future’s Oracle, attests Blessing. On the one hand, he says: “We plan to improve our integrations with Oracle’s core HR systems to really streamline the hiring process and make it easier for our customers.”
On the other, users will be given “more control over the career website experience” later this year, while interaction with job candidates will likewise be improved in order to make it easier for them to apply for positions using devices such as mobile and tablets.
But the vendor also intends to pump more investment into predictive analytics software in an attempt to help HR departments cut their sourcing costs.
“People spend a lot of money on talent acquisition around things such as media, campus recruitment etc,” Blessing notes. “In fact, the annual spend around sourcing is over $15 billion a year. We want to help our customers predict the timing of hiring as well as the best sources for recruitment, so again they can optimise that spend.”
Integration, integration, integration
Part of this optimisation is about building and nurturing home-grown talent, which can be supported by learning and development software, he adds.
“For example, just last week I read a great book on leadership. Our product allows me to propagate that out to my team. I’d like my team to read it,” Blessing says. “Our learning system allows me to put the reading of that book in their development plan and allows the team members in my group to collaborate on that book as they read it.”
But he believes that the value of the learning system is further enhanced if tightly integrated with performance management applications. “This allows your customers to ensure that your employees with the highest potential get access to the right learning content as well as the right development tools,” Blessing says.
He also argues that performance management as an activity should take the form of “an on-going conversation between a manager and an employee versus a conversation that only happens on an annual basis”.
Therefore, it makes sense to integrate performance management applications with talent management packages as well as the core HR system.
“This will enable customers to leverage the information such as goals, competencies, career aspirations to have a much more complete view of an employee when reviewing their performance," Blessing says.
Another consideration is self-service. This functionality is considered to be a means of boosting engagement by ensuring that staff can view their own HR information and control their own HR activities, whether that means changing personal information or updating competencies or their progress in hitting goals.
Future product roadmap
So what can Oracle/Taleo customers expect to see in future releases of the combined offering?
Talent review
Employers increasingly need to attract and retain top talent. But how can they best identify key players and ensure that they are end up in positions with the right roles and responsibilities to optimise their performance?
Blessing says: “Going forward, we will add the ability to do individual comparisons within the visualisation tool. We will also leverage talent pools – a concept that Taleo brought to the table – and recruiting profiles to see what the pipeline looks like for key positions to make sure that employees have an opportunity to participate in talent reviews and make sure they are appropriately slated for new positions.”
Mobile
“By leveraging Oracle’s mobile development framework, we will be able to push more and more key talent management functionality out to tablets and mobile phones as we bring the products together,” says Blessing. “This is going to allow us to better serve the needs of today’s mobile candidates and mobile workforce.”
The vendor intends to provide job candidates with better tools to enable them to apply for jobs from mobile devices. It also plans to release applications that enable employees to access functionality ranging from their own talent profile to learning content while on the go.
Social HCM
Taleo’s previous goal was to integrate social collaboration functionality such as feeds that follow threaded discussions directly into its talent management applications. But the process will now be speeded up by taking advantage of Oracle’s Social Network offering.
“We feel that embedding social aspects into our products can do a few things. It can improve key business processes such as sourcing new talent or teams collaborating around goals and performance reviews,” Blessing says. “This social collaboration will improve both the user experience, the business value of the systems and, overall, the richness of the data being collected in the applications.”
Predictive analytics
Until now, most business intelligence software has focused on answering questions about what happened in the past such as how many requisitions did we fill? How much did they cost and how long did it take to fill them in?
Predictive analytics tools concentrate on what is happening right now and into the future, however, which means that the information on which decision-making is based is more up-to-date.
Blessing says: “We are also planning to expand our investment in workforce predictions. Today, we can provide insight to our customers – somewhat of an early warning system – to highlight employees who could be at risk or those who are likely to be top performers in the future that perhaps we just haven’t identified yet.”
But he adds: “We also plan to go further and tie in recruiting and learning data, again to help predict employee success, and we also anticipate allowing customers to use the tools to help re-engage or redeploy employees on higher value-add assignments, who might be at risk at the company.”
