SaaS-y Talent Management

The leopard in the above photo appears nimble, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.  In this way it parallels Software as a Service (SaaS), the sassy model for software delivery, that is causing significant disruption in the industry and fundamentally changing the way vendors and their customers operate.

That SaaS is causing organizations of all sizes to pounce on new solutions like cats to mice speaks to the nature of business in 2007 – global and fast.  While SaaS is commonly and accurately associated with low-cost, subscription-based software, what makes the new delivery paradigm sexy for large and mid-size businesses alike is the ease with which it can be deployed quickly to users all over the world.  If yours is an organization with disparate offices and staff whose roles are interdependent, the ability to coordinate goals and activities easily across time zones is invaluable. 

Talent management and SaaS go hand-in-hand for this very reason.  Employee recruiting, compensation, performance and development are not local issues of interest to one or two people in an organization.  Who a company hires to run product development in France impacts the engineers it may interview in the UK, Russia, Germany or Australia.  And how much the organization pays a marketing director should correlate to that person’s performance, a point that is difficult to gauge when the director has worked in multiple divisions and geographic regions over the last year.

Advanced talent management systems mitigate these challenges by enabling users from any location to access the data they need, when they need it.  So, the staffing manager can easily determine whether to hire Java programmers to support the new product development manager, and the marketing vice president can track how well a director executed a new advertising campaign, even if he didn’t supervise the director personally.

SaaS-y talent management contributes a number of other business benefits, too.  Companies can eliminate the use of spreadsheets for managing employee recruiting, compensation and performance, a problem that continues to plague even the largest businesses.  Not only are spreadsheets inefficient for handling key talent management processes, but they expose a company to regulatory risks as well. 

As more businesses expand globally, technology solutions that automate and integrate key processes and help companies find and retain top talent will become even more popular.  And that’s why talent management is SaaS-y!

~  Kevin Haugh, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Workstream