Drive Business Performance via Effective Talent Management

Taleo is a leading provider of SaaS based Talent Management solutions providing advanced employee recruitment and performance management tools. With over 4,000 customers around the world, Taleo offers services to small, medium, and large enterprises.

 Solution Highlights: 

• SaaS Talent Management platform that provides strong recruitment and performance management tools
• Configurable role-based tools
• Comprehensive analytics and reporting
• Define global business rules and local processes to manage talent around the world
• Delivered via a robust on-demand Cloud Computing infrastructure with a promise of 99.9% application uptime

Description:  

Taleo Corporation, founded in 1999, has been offering top rated Cloud-based Talent Management tools for over a decade.  The company has grown steadily since then, acquiring a number of other recruiting companies and opening offices in North America, Europe, Australia and Singapore to supplement their San Francisco headquarters.  Today they have 4.100 customers of their Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, with nearly three million users, and an impressive client list including Dow Chemical, Hewlett Packard, and Starbucks Coffee. 

Taleo initially focused on offering SaaS employee recruitment tools and recently expanded into other Human Resource Management areas, with the release of a combined recruiting and performance management application in 2008.  There are two main tiers of offerings; the Business Edition for small and midsized companies, and the Enterprise Edition for larger organizations.

Business Edition Recruit allows users to quickly set up a hiring website; Taleo maintains that you'll get started in an hour and have a site available for potential employees within a day.  The application allows you to create a work flow to control the hiring process from the moment the job request is created all the way through the actual hire.  Job postings can be placed on your company site or easily added to external employment and social websites.  Once job applications are submitted, the system can help pre-screen candidates based on skills and qualifications, online questionnaires and phone interviews, and even help conduct background checks while making sure your staff is compliant with US state and federal hiring regulations.  There's also an API available so that your development staff can create highly specific reports, build custom tools for accessing the system from outside the native interface, or add the application's functions to your existing corporate tools.  A Microsoft Outlook plug-in is available as well, which allows those involved in the hiring process to use many of the applications' features without leaving Outlook.

Once someone has been selected for an open position, the OnBoard tool takes over.  The tasks to turn an applicant into an employee can be guided to the key personnel while the new hire is presented with key information and documentation on the recruiting website or through email.  Every task is tracked to make sure that the employee is ready to go on the first day of work.

The Perform tool builds off of the information you already have about your new employee through the recruiting and on-boarding process to make the review process as easy as possible.  Managers and employees can define goals, rate competencies, and track employee progress and actions easily throughout the year, and employees have access to the information year round to keep track of changes in goals and priorities.  Work flows can be customized to make sure the right process is followed by all employees and necessary approvals are completed, with notification and reminder emails for each step in the progress.  Another Outlook plug-in makes updating an employee's profile only an email away, so that peer reviews can be requested and important developments recorded immediately, without disrupting the normal flow of the workday—there's no need to log-in to the application, just click a button and send a quick message.  And when the time comes for compensation adjustments, the process can be handled inside the Perform module, so that managers propose salary adjustments, bonuses, or stock rewards based on an employee's past reviews in just a few clicks.

The Enterprise Edition expands on all of these modules, adding features for larger organizations.  The Enterprise Performance unit can run multiple review processes based on the user's country or business unit, supports more complex goal management, and adds succession management features to help find internal candidates for open positions.  It also adds career management tools and advance development plans to help employees guide their professional development. The Recruiting module actually breaks out into three separate tools to manage hiring salaried employees, hourly employees, and contract workers.  A variety of add on modules can add connections to staffing agencies, add specialized features for recruiting on college campuses, and give you specialized reporting functions, among others.

Taleo's SaaS offerings are certainly flexible; you can pick and choose between a wide variety of configurations so that you're only paying for the features you need.  But the array of options is somewhat dizzying, and some of their choices seem arbitrary—why are the advanced career management tools only available to Enterprise Edition users, for example?  At the same time, many features that are included in the Business Edition, like compensation management and advanced reporting functions, are listed as optional additions to the Enterprise Edition, and the Business Edition's API availability isn't mentioned at all in the Enterprise version.  The lack of a learning module in either level of the software is a significant gap.

The Bottom Line

There's no denying that Taleo's roots as provider of Cloud-based recruiting services tools still strongly influence the product; the additional workforce management features are not nearly as robust as those offered by many competitors, though their recruiting features are certainly near the forefront of the field.  If you're having more trouble finding the right people than you are with keeping track of their skills and performance once you've hired them, or if you're looking to address a very specific need without buying a system that handles tasks your organization already does well, Taleo’s SaaS offerings may be the solution for you.