One of my pet peeves over the last year has been ATS systems calling themselves talent management applications. Anyone reading my posts knows this bugs me to no end. Gartner's eRecruitment white paper clearly states a difference between Talent Acquisition Suites (TAS) and Talent Management Suites (TMS).
They state that Peopleclick, Taleo and Virtual Edge are all TAS vendors. Kenexa, Recruitmax and Workstream are all TMS vendors. Not to toot my own horn, but this matches well with my lists for ATS and TMS.
Talent Acquisition Suites/Talent Management Suites: In addition to vertical-market depth, we also expect to see more competition based on product breadth. TASs that merge e-recruitment and service procurement (that is, contingent workforce management) will be one level of differentiation. PeopleClick and VirtualEdge are good examples of vendors that provide TASs. In addition, there are vendors that are providing even broader suites of products — talent management suites — which expand into performance management, career development, succession planning, learning and compensation management. Kenexa, Recruitmax (via its acquisition of CCH/KnowledgePoint) and Workstream (through its various acquisitions, including, most recently, Kadiri) are good examples of vendors that provide broader suites of products. We believe customers prefer these integrated suites more than niche e-recruitment solutions, all else being equal. The integrated suites can leverage common capabilities, such as competency management, workflow and reporting/analytics. In addition, there are reporting and analytics, which are not easily replicated. For example, if an enterprise wanted to find a correlation between high performers and sources of talent, it would be harder to pull data from separate e-recruiting and performance management solutions than it would be from an integrated solution. Customers should understand not only how their e-recruitment vendor can support their e-recruitment requirements, but also how it will participate in the broader suite markets.
