There’s some serious movement in the hosted and integrated point solutions arena. Mostly I’m talking about Workstream, Kenexa, RecruitMax and Authoria. All of these solutions are offering portal oriented employee talent solutions. Each of these 4 vendors are also organizations I like a lot.
What is an integrated talent management point solution? Well, first of all, realize you still need an HRMS. The goal is to decrease your ongoing expenditure in the HRMS and minimize implementation expense by limiting customization. If you have a point solution (aka “best of breed”) then the chances you’ll need to customize the solution decrease dramatically. We all know that (for example) SAP and PeopleSoft recruiting is not ready to go out of the box for most organizations. So an integrated point solution in the talent space should/may include (1) talent acquisition, (2) new hire onboarding, (3) performance management, (4) compensation management, (5) learning management, (6) succession planning, (7) analytics, (8) ESS, and (9) MSS. This is probably not a complete list. Here’s how they stack up:
Kenexa: 1, 3, 7, 8, 9
Recruitmax: 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 9
Authoria: 3, 4, 7, 8, 9
Workstream: 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Note that none of these vendors has really expanded to full LMS or LCML yet as it’s too big and at this point is really a project of it’s own. It should obviously be included as part of the overall talent management strategy, even though the systems implementation may be a separate sub-project. As per a previous post, you may ask why Taleo is not included in this list. Taleo is really just an ATS and does not include other components of TM.
Not only are these integrated portal solutions offering some of the best functionality out there, the hosted model with a monthly fee per employee is often more cost effective. As a subscription, there isn’t the huge sunk cost of software purchase, no investment in infrastructure, not IT staff to depend on, and no upgrades.
