ERE.net

Talent management vendor Authoria (profile; site) has been acquired by private investment firm Bedford Funding for $63.1 million.

The deal leaves intact Authoria’s management team including founder and CEO Tod Loofbourrow, who said that the acquisition “brings us an investor well matched to the size of the market opportunity before us.” Bedford will inject an additional $8 million in working capital to accelerate Authoria’s expansion.

The price is half the $128 million that Taleo (profile; site)  paid for Vurv (profile; site) just six months ago. Both companies had similar staffing levels, but Vurv’s 2007 revenues were around $40 million, while Hoover’s, the business reporting service, estimated Authoria saw about $17 million that year.

Vurv was probably also in better financial shape. Since being founded in 1997 Authoria raised some $100 million in venture capital, including $58 million raised by Hire.com, a company Authoria acquired in 2005. It evidently also had some debt, since Loofbourrow pointedly notes in the announcement that “Bedford Funding will provide us with a debt-free capital structure.”

Jason Corsello, writing in his blog, The Human Capitalist, called the deal a recapitalization observing that existing investors shareholders, which include senior management, as well as the VC firms, would probably only receive “only a fraction of the investment and value.”

Even so, he is encouraged about the company’s prospects for the long term saying it “creates a much cleaner structure for the company to really attack the market as the first vendor that can truly bring together talent acquisition/recruiting with the rest of the talent management suite.”

Carly Simon did question the idea of using a performance profile as a means to determine competency in her hit song, You’re So Vain. However, in this case I’m referring to the other Carly.

On September 16, 2008, Carly Fiorina (the former CEO of HP and McCain supporter) made the statement that none of the president or VP candidates had the experience to be the CEO of a major corporation. The McCain team wasn’t too pleased with her remarks, and she’s been taken off the tour.

However, her dilemma raises an important question: Are the skills and abilities to run an international, multi-unit corporation comparable to those needed to run the U.S. government?

The answer to this becomes quite clear once you prepare a performance profile for each job.

For background, a performance profile is not a job description listing skills, abilities, and experience requirements. Instead, it describes the performance expectations for the job, describing what the person must do to be successful. It’s filled with action verbs like build, create, develop, initiate, solve, design, etc., not passive verbs and statements like “have” and “be responsible for.”

For example, a performance profile for a sales rep selling plumbing products in Peoria might state “achieve and sustain the monthly quota 90 days after successfully completing the sales training program.” The job description for this same job would state something like, “must have 3-5 years b-to-b plumbing parts industry experience.”

As I have ranted on these pages many times before, the continued use of traditional job descriptions is the primary reason companies can’t find enough top people to fill critical hiring needs. Everyone agrees that skills and experience don’t predict future performance. This is the core problem with job descriptions.

Past behavior doesn’t predict future performance, either, if the person is doing different work. This is the problem with behavioral interviewing. The use of behavioral interviewing in combination with traditional job descriptions only makes sense when the person is doing essentially the same work in the same culture with a similar supervisor.

A performance profile overcomes all of these impediments by emphasizing the performance expectations of the job and the environment, not the skills required to do it. The assessment involves comparing the candidate’s actual accomplishments to these requirements.

There are typically 6-8 key performance objectives for any job, whether it’s entry-level or executive management. Once completed, a performance profile can be turned into a compelling ad describing the projects, challenges, and opportunities.

keep reading…

Why should a recruiter care about talent management programs? If you don’t have a good answer, consider this: the talent those systems help a company manage is talent you had a hand in bringing on board.

With the increasing awareness of CEOs and HR executives that quality of hire is part of the evaluation equation for recruiting programs, how those hires are performing is a metric no recruiter can afford to ignore.

“When recruiters can be measured on quality, some recruiters will simply be better than others at bringing in high impact, more productive, and longer tenured employees,” said Dave Lefkow, CEO of consultant talentspark and a veteran recruiter, in an article more than three years ago.

Comprehensive talent management systems do more, of course, than assess and track employee performance. Coupled with succession planning modules, they can make identifying promising internal talent a snap and in doing so encourage internal recruitment. The more sophisticated of these systems can also flag employees who are at risk of leaving, spot talent shortages and replacement gaps, suggest and track training, and lots more.

If your company doesn’t have a talent management system now, it could very soon. The market for these is growing strongly as if in inverse proportion to the U.S. economy. Authoria (profile; site) had a 93 percent growth in bookings for the first half of this year over last. Pleateau, whose recent release of its Plateau Talent Management 5.8 Service Pack 5 prompted this article, reported 2007 revenues that were 58 percent higher than the previous year. The 450 attendees at its user conference last week was the largest turnout in the company’s history.

During a demo of the new release Frank Leff, Plateau’s Pre-Sales Product Consultant, observed that companies can easily assign fields to individual employee profiles, identifying such things as source of hire, recruiter who had the req, and whatever else might be useful. He, and Dennis Gullotti, Director of Product Marketing, showed how easily a recruiter could find in-house talent before having to go outside the company.

But as we watched the demo unfold, we saw how easy it would be to identify the recruiters whose hires were making the biggest impact. Plateau’s competency comparison, intended to identify potential successors and assist with skills gap analysis, could also be used as a quality-of-hire metric.

Is that happening? Absolutely, Gullotti told us. People are “coming out of the talent management silo,” he said. As systems like Plateau’s are increasingly linked to other enterprise software, “We,” he said, meaning HR as a whole, “are connecting the recruiting silo to the performance silo to the other systems.”

That’s closing the feedback loop that will inevitably make quality of hire as important and common a metric to be weighed as time and cost to hire are now.

There’s more trouble for Workstream (profile; site), the Canadian-headquartered talent software and services vendor. Already wrestling with an almost certain delisting of its stock because of its low price, Workstream is now appealing a second NASDAQ delisting notice it received because the company has not filed an annual report.

Workstream issued a press release today saying it had appealed the latest delisting order. That gives the company some breathing room while NASDAQ reviews the matter. Workstream could avoid delisting by filing its annual report, Form 10-K, as required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Workstream is required to file 90 days after the end of its fiscal year on May 31.

Why the report has not been filed was not explained in the press release and company CFO Jay Markell could not be reached.

Company officials reported in July that Workstream’s fourth quarter ended in the black, the first time that has happened in the company’s history as a publicly held corporation. It reported an EBITDA of $516,000 for the fourth quarter ended May 3 compared to an EBITDA of ($4.5 million) for the previous quarter and ($1.3 million) for the fourth quarter last year. Only sketchy numbers were released then, however, with the company explaining there was some sort of analysis underway of its accounting for goodwill.

Nevertheless, delisting is almost inevitable for the company. In November 2007 the company was notified that it would be delisted by the NASDAQ exchange because its stock price had fallen below the $1 a share minimum. The company got an automatic extension to Nov. 17th., but with the stock trading around 16 cents a share for the last few months, Workstream will be dropped by NASDAQ. That will make it difficult for its shareholders to sell their stock. When they do, generally through private transactions, fees will be higher than when the shares are traded through an exchange.

Earlier this year, Workstream was courted by payroll processor Empagio, which made a bid to acquire the company. Though unsolicted, Workstream and its board endorsed the merger, which would have created a new company with Workstream shareholders owning 25 percent. The deal eventually fell through.

Besides its software business, concentrated in on-demand compensation, performance and talent management in its TalentCenter 7.0 released last year, Workstream also owns 6FigureJobs.com and Allen and Associates, a candidate focused career management firm.

I first met John Williams when I went to work for a large financial services firm. He had been at the company for over a decade and was a top performer.

Whenever I mentioned his name, many would respond, “Oh, John! He’s always helped me out when I had a problem.” Or, “He’s one of the best-connected people I know in the company. If you need something, he’ll know where to go to get it.”

He was smart, helpful, and connected, and that’s the formula we all preach about how to succeed.

Yet, John languished in a dead-end job that was 80% clerical. He was passed over for promotions and new opportunities because everyone assumed he was happy where he was and he never sought new positions. He did not manage up well, nor did he want to. He was hoping that he might be recognized for his skills and abilities.

While some might say he lacked ambition, what John really suffered from was a lack of self-confidence and an equal lack of encouragement. I worked with him and his boss, and we eventually found a position with more responsibility where he thrived. He sought out mentors from his network and he learned the key elements of the job in weeks. In the past, whenever we hired an outsider person for this type of job it took months for them to fully understand the intricacies of the job and who to go to for advice.

keep reading…

We have been bombarded for a decade with news reports, articles, stories, and books about the looming talent shortage about to overwhelm our industries, businesses, and economies.

Taken at face value and looking at traditional work styles and jobs, there is some validity to these stories. Human resources people, recruiters, and some business people will affirm the shortage anecdotally. But it’s hard to find real examples and real numbers.

Certainly, anyone trying to hire a surgeon in North Dakota, a Starbucks barista in Oklahoma, or a stock broker in Alaska may have to look long and hard. But if you are looking for these folks in urban areas or places with significant populations, the number of qualified applicants increases substantially.

After all, it has never been easy to attract skilled professionals to rural areas, and it has become even more difficult as people leave the country for large cities. Rural parts of the world are emptying into cities — especially those located in coastal areas or those with significant educational and cultural activities.

Richard Florida’s books on the Creative Class point out in stark numbers and colorful graphs and charts the shifts in population away from some less desirable (and often semi-rural) cities and toward others that offer the lifestyle and engaging employment desired by the emerging creative class.

Sure, thousands of baby boomers are poised to retire over the next decade or two and, yes, there are somewhat fewer young folks behind them; but is that really going to be a problem? And will the number of boomers who choose to retire reach the predicted numbers?

Studies I have seen indicate that boomers will most likely defer retirement for some time because they have not saved enough to make retirement possible or because they remain healthy and want to continue working.

We will most likely also need fewer people to reach the same productivity levels of today.

The nature of work has changed dramatically. Today only about 2% of Americans grow food or work on farms. This is truly amazing considering the amount of food produced and exported. Farms have grown much larger and are more automated. Completely automated, GPS-guided tractors cultivate fields that used to take a dozen men and several dozen horses to plow.

keep reading…

Now here’s a curious tidbit from a totally unscientific poll that has us scratching our head: Half of all entry- and middle-level workers think business casual dress hurts productivity.

That alone surprised us, since we have this sense that most lower-level workers are in their 20s and 30s and came of age at a time when casual was already the norm.

The corker, though, is that this self-same survey had bosses saying casual attire was perfectly fine. Only 40 percent thought it hurt productivity.

Remember we said this was an unscientific survey. Conducted by FPC, a national franchise search firm, the survey had 9,105 responses collected anonymously from workers who visited the site. Researchers and pollsters can legitimately argue that it is not random and self-selecting.

Caveats aside, we would have guessed that the bosses were the ones ready to go back to suits, skirts, and ties. And though a bare majority (51 percent) of the workers said going back to formal business attire would be a step backward, our guess would have been something like 90 percent would feel that way.

Interestingly, only in chemical, biomedical, and pharmaceuticals did workers and bosses agree that casual attire hurt productivity.

“. . .we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn.      It is shocking to find how many people do not believe  they can learn, and how many more believe learning     to be difficult.”
-Frank Herbert, Dune

This quote from the well-known science fiction novel Dune underlines the difficulty many people have in learning. Learning means change, examining what we are now doing, and being open to explore what we could do differently.

Very few of us have ever learned to learn and most of us live in fear of learning. This fear has roots in embarrassment, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, our society’s worship of “book” learning over experiential learning, the desire to be like everyone else, the need to be liked, and many other needs and fears.

Children have the wonderful gift of total trust that they can, through interaction with their environment, learn. They experiment, test, challenge, and in the process, learn. Their natural curiosity and excitement over piecing together the world as they discover it is a wonderful thing to witness. Yet, somehow as we go through our formal schooling that innate belief in our own ability to learn, and most of our curiosity, is taken out of us.

Our organizations reflect this as well. Only a few are true learning organizations that invent the future and do so regularly. One that comes to mind is Apple. Perhaps fueled by Steve Jobs and his seeming less-ruthless focus on perfection, it remains youthful and exciting, even now that it is into middle age. It has programmed into itself the ability to take risks, be bold, and go where others are afraid to go.

Recruiting remains a transactional and traditional function for most of us. Not much learning, and consequently change, has taken place despite huge changes in how organizations design, manufacture, and sell their products and services.

Talent remains local. Competencies reflect yesterday’s needs. Sourcing is still a reactive process based on templates designed in the past. And hiring happens the same way it did 50 years ago.

If you want to be a mover and shaker in this profession, you have to learn to learn. You have to take some chances and do things differently.

keep reading…

This week I will keep my column short and devote it to discussing a few books that I have read over the past few months. These books will fuel your creative juices, maybe get you a little angry, or at least motivate you to look at what you do differently.

They are all written by well-known authors who have explored similar topics before. But what is interesting to me is that every one of these books is centered on people, talent, and how talent will be used, organized, or deployed over the next few years.

Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty by Peter Cappelli

Peter Cappelli is known to ERE Expo audiences as he has spoken at the Expo and is frequently quoted in the press on talent issues. He is a professor at the Wharton School  at the University of Pennsylvania and frequently writes and speaks about talent issues.

In his recent book, Peter looks at talent as a supply-chain issue. Just as we take great care to ensure that we have a reliable source of raw material or parts for manufacturing, we need to do the same with the people who invent, design, manufacture or deliver, and sell our products and services.

keep reading…

As we passed the summer solstice here in the Northern hemisphere a few days ago, we completed our journey through half of 2008. It’s been a year where the economy, political environment, and nature itself have all stressed the rhythm of our daily routines.

Change most often occurs when systems are stressed and have to respond in order to survive. It is at the intersection of pain, technology, and economics that new products and services arise.

At first, these changes are frightening and require both learning and daring to adopt them. But once accepted and woven into the fabric of daily routine, they become indispensible. This was the case with applicant tracking systems and career sites on the Internet. And it is still evolving.

So far this year, I see at least four major trends emerging. There are probably more than four, but these are the ones I can make sense of and that seem big enough to warrant being called trends.

keep reading…

Do you know my friend MJ? You should, because that will almost certainly be you someday. But more on that depressing reality later.

Let’s start with MJ’s reality first. He is 45, brilliant, accomplished, and well-spoken. He is politically savvy, knows the right things to say in all situations, and even looks the role of a corporate executive. (Truth be told, he is almost as strikingly handsome as I am.)

He is technically up to date, communicates well, and has all of the requisite educational credentials. There is only one small problem. He can’t get a job.

To quote Ron Jenkins, “Something is wrong here; something is terribly wrong.”

If there is a war for talent, why can’t a highly skilled, amazingly talented overachiever who lives in a major metropolitan area find a job after one year of searching?

What expectations, position profile, ATS, political ramifications, compensation structure, communication protocol, workforce planning initiative, talent acquisition strategy, or lord knows what else has broken down so miserably, so totally and completely that all of the companies that are warring for talent have not hired MJ?

If the war for talent is as portrayed, companies engaged in this war should be beating each other with sticks to hire MJ. So, why can’t MJ get a job and how does it relate to this war on talent? (Please don’t tell me he needs to do more social networking or I might just have to get on a plane and slay you.)

We have heard for endless time of the war for talent. I remember the war on poverty, but we lost that one. We have a war on drugs but that seems to be a losing proposition as well.

But a war for talent? I find that to be an interesting war because there seems to be no winners, no losers, and little set out to define specific battle plans or terms and conditions for victory.

keep reading…

We don’t usually think of anyone in our profession as heroic, yet there are recruiting leaders who have achieved amazing results.

HC is one of those whose modesty means he remains anonymous. He took over a recruiting function that was stumbling along, filling positions only after lengthy delays. Job requirements were not communicated clearly to candidates, hiring managers assumed the poor performance they got was normal, and senior leaders put all their positions out to search.

The career site was hidden, not engaging, and listed positions as “open” long after they had been filled. There was no sourcing function and no applicant tracking system.

Warning bells were ringing throughout the company, but no one heard them: engineers, the key to this organization’s success, were getting old.  The average age was close to 50 and there was no college hiring program.  Many critical positions were going unfilled for over 90 days and then were often filled with people who left within a year.

Everything in the recruiting function was reactive.  There was no talent community, no proactive sourcing strategy, and not much awareness of their own weaknesses.

While this sort of recruiting function is not all that unusual, this one was part of a well-known organization that has a high public profile and is considered a leader in its products and services.

Although no one knew it when he was hired, HC was going to turn this situation around. And he did it without firing any recruiters and without a lot of fanfare.

keep reading…

Without a doubt, one of the worst things people have to endure sometime during their career is the pain of working under a horrible boss. Up until now, as an employee under the thumb of a horrible manager, there was little you could do to rid yourself of their tyranny.

However, one recruiting organization has come up with an idea called “sell your boss.” The concept is a simple one that includes a bit of irony. The recruiting firm, yellojobs.com will pay a referral fee (bounty) to an employee if their current boss gets hired away to another firm as a result of their referral.

keep reading…

Steven Hunt, the chief scientist involved in staffing and selection for the Talent Management Division at Kronos, has moved on to a new position, although Hunt will continue to serve as a member of the advisory board for the Kronos Workforce Institute. Hunt, who is an organizational and industrial psychologist, recently joined SuccessFactors in the newly created role of director of Business Transformation Services. Hunt will use his expertise in understanding human behaviors in the workplace to help SuccessFactors’ clients optimize the performance management and talent management software solution.

Below, Hunt shares his reasons for making a career change and his goals for his new position.

ERE: Why did you make a career change?

keep reading…

Last year, when Kenexa bought up BrassRing for a hefty $115 million, a Yankee Group analyst declared it a “kick-start” to consolidation. Now, Kronos has bought Deploy Solutions; Taleo bought WetFeet and consolidation in the competitive field of talent management is well underway.

From almost any angle, it’s a bull market for HR technology providers due to the consolidation that is reducing the number of vendors as well as the expansion of these businesses into global markets and the tightening of the labor supply generally.

Al Campa, CMO of Taleo, puts it simply: “The workforce is not growing fast enough. There’s a talent gap. It gets harder every day to find top talent.”

keep reading…

Patrick Reilly from Resources in Action knows more than most of us about the real cost of managing talent. His approach, derived primarily from work in three major companies, examines talent management from recruiting through selection to executive onboarding and provides battle-tested approaches to re-designing the whole system or focusing on key pieces that are causing problems for your organization.

During this past webinar, he defined the problems, identified costs, and suggested solutions that can help you and your organization move forward successfully.

This is good stuff! You can view the presentation here.

I was in a client meeting recently and had a request from one of the participants. “Help us fool-proof selection decisions to ensure only the ‘right’ people are always hired,” he said.

Instantly, my mind started compiling a list of solutions. Targeted selection interviewing training for all hiring managers. A list of the common interview tendency “errors” such as the halo or horn effect. Competency models with corresponding interview guides to provide additional clarity on the “right” people.

keep reading…

Most of us have read about upcoming workforce trends like decreasing employee loyalty, differing generational expectations, and the impending retirement of the baby boom generation, but surprisingly few organizational leaders are fully aware of how those issues will impact them.

Several of the organizations I have worked with in recent years have discovered aspects of their business that could lose more than 70% of their workforce in the next three years alone.

keep reading…

Sourcing gets all the attention these days. Last week I wrote about new technologies for sourcing talent and our recent recruiting trends survey (results and a summary will be available here in two weeks), which shows that broadening sources of candidates is the number-one focus for organizations of all sizes.

Never before have these words been truer: Finding the right people is difficult. And finding great people takes a strategy, not just more of what you currently do.

keep reading…

Parts 1 and 2 of this article discussed how a tight labor market impacts the importance of hiring decisions and explored ways to adjust selection standards to account for smaller applicant pools. This last section discusses how to deal with the increasing importance of matching jobs to candidates’ work goals.

One of the biggest shifts that occurs in a tight labor market is the degree to which candidates can emphasize different personal goals when considering employment opportunities. In a loose labor market, most candidates are primarily concerned about meeting basic life goals that require having a paycheck. In such a market, companies may get away with an employment value proposition that basically says, “We have money and you don’t, and if you do what we ask then we will pay you.”

keep reading…