The New Talent Management … oh, let’s call it …. Human Capital Management … 10 years ago, when
IHRM was the go-to conference to go to for HR technology people, every second booth (of the 300+ booths) were selling an HRMS product. Most of them were Abra distributors or implementers. At this year’s go-to Technology conference, everyone was hawking Talent Management (or Integrated Talent Management) product lines. In reality, many of the vendors have portions of a talent management suite but not the full meal deal. And of those who have portions, many of those are not integrated. It really doesn’t seem to matter if you bought various products and combined them (think
Workscape,
Kenexa) or if you developed them internally (
HRSmart), integrating the various components is very difficult. And yet we wonder why many large F1000 firms can’t have an integrated HCM suite that gives them a holistic view of their workforce. It’s just too damn hard.
So while the industry was pleasantly surprised with
Salary.com’s movement in the Talent Management space, this week’s announcement of their purchase of Genesys just further put them ahead of the pack as they now have payroll and HRMS. Although the Genesys platform is old, it is extremely stable, and works. With Kent Plunkett’s vision and craftsmanship he should have no problem adding some marketing muscle and improved integration and interface to this platform, and to be one of the only vendors offering almost a complete suite. The price was a steal (even in today’s depressed market conditions) and will catapult Salary.com into new deals that they may not have seen before, with the exception of
Ultimate, (who has also been buying and integrating various talent management vendors ),Nuview and of course
SAP and
Oracle (who each have their own set of issues).
The end of print as we know it?
Over the last few years several of the major media brands have been taken over by private equity or investors thinking that they knew a better way to leverage powerful brands and traditional print products. Well they were wrong, as indicated in the news that the Tribune Company will declare bankruptcy. In my opinion what these new investors missed is the heart and the passion of the business and the fact that this industry was severely broken.
Of course, 10 years ago, no one expected that the swift decline in print advertising and the move to online, interactive advertising would happen with such a rapid pace. The last recession (2001-2002) saw the birth of Monster, CareerBuilder, Google and Yahoo. This recession we see Monster redefining itself with a new launch Jan 10th, CareerBuilder thinking, “OMG, I am the golden carrot of the Tribune Company and I’m not sure what that means, “ and the job boards being eaten alive by firms like simply hired, indeed, myperfectgig, jobfox and a whole slew of new entries all out to personalize and offer better matching services … Well, many of these new entries may work as the war for talent is put on hold and the employer is put back into the driver seat (temporarily). Employers right now do not need thousands of applicants a day. They need only the top 10 qualified people to talk to about current opportunities. What employers can’t forget is that they do need the 1,000 applicants a day to build future talent pools, and help future hiring needs. Remember, every applicant is a potential hire and a potential consumer of your product and services and should be treated appropriately.
The decline in print and traditional advertising is severe but really at the expense of management of these old-fashioned firms. Traditionally, newspapers have been slow to integrate online advertising and print. Internal salespeople look at online as eating away their traditional revenue. Craigslist, eBay and Kijji have taken a very lucrative classifieds model away from them. CareerBuilder, Monster, Dice and all the others have eaten into their print revenue. Google, Yahoo and MSN are taking away their print advertising one click at a time …
So the question is, what can newspapers do to stem the losses and prepare themselves for the future?
1) Embrace social media and be the hub of it, not the outside
2) Lets users contribute content, editorials, listings, etc… to the website and sell targeted advertising around this
3) Start producing virtual events around specific themes., i.e., small business, work in healthcare, etc.
The exception to the print Dinosaurs is of course, Don Graham from the Washington Post. His experience with BrassRing introduced him to a young smart VC named Jim Breyers for Accel Partners. Jim is also the key investor in Facebook and just appointed Don Graham to the facebook board. So what started over 10 years ago as a very small investment and not a long-term financially rewarding one … from Accel Partners into BrassRing - has opened a lot of doors for both the Washington Post (Don Graham) and Jim Byers. …
The fact is disruptive technology is created in hard times. New models are developed. We started to see this with the simply hired and Indeed's of the world and most recently with MR Teds, when they decided to give away a very well functional ATS (that many firms pay good dollars for in Europe) to go with a percent of the fees for things like background checking. We are still looking for the next facebook for the HCM space. Think about a facebook model whereby you can plug and play your various apps based on your needs and not have to pay for it, provided you enable targeted advertising to your employee base.
