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Performance Management

Published June 2009

Mastering Management in a Digital World

  Deanna Hartley

A little more than 10 years ago, many talent managers — recruiters, in particular — vehemently resisted the new frontier of talent management: leveraging technology solutions, such as Monster, to optimize the recruiting process, explained Dan McGinley, managing partner at Quovis Inc., a consulting firm specializing in recruiting and talent acquisition.

Such individuals, however, were forced to either jump on the technology bandwagon or run the risk of becoming obsolete. Today, it has become necessary for talent managers to adapt talent management processes and embrace a variety of tools — including social networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace — to remain competitive.

"All the other business units we support are in continuous improvement mode: Everybody's trying to improve their process, save money, streamline things," McGinley said. "HR departments need to [follow suit] if we're going to be a partner at the strategic table."

Even though talent management has entered the digital age, it has taken about 10 years too long, said Al Campa, chief marketing officer at Taleo, a provider of on-demand talent management solutions.

"So much of what companies do in terms of their business processes are automated, but talent management is the last frontier. A lot of companies are still using manual processes for performance management, succession or development; spreadsheets for compensation; and paper resumes for recruiting," Campa said. "Companies have now started to embrace the efficiency gains, cost savings and productivity boosts they can get with the talent management system."

From an HR perspective, there's a unique opportunity to leverage technology to enable talent leaders to successfully manage an organization's workforce, explained Frank Ricciardi, vice president of global account services at Cornerstone OnDemand, a provider of on-demand, integrated learning and talent management solutions.

"The need to adapt to the digital world comes down to the age-old adage of: 'If you can't measure it and monitor it, then you can't manage it'. This is true of projects, technologies or processes and, in this case, people," Ricciardi said.

"[While] automating [processes] was the primary objective for the last decade, what's relevant now is the data: how and when the data gets used on a real-time daily basis. That's the key to leveraging technology in talent management," he said.

Technology and the Talent Manager
Organizations often turn to vendors to implement technology solutions to improve or enhance talent management processes such as recruiting, performance management, learning management, compensation and succession planning. But vendor involvement beyond the implementation phase typically is minimal.
"Once the system is deployed, customers run the process themselves," Campa said. "Customers can track their own metrics once it gets deployed; [although], we sometimes help set up the [metrics, such as] quality of hire, time to hire, cost to hire, workforce engagement [and] productivity measures."

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