Candidate’s Experience, Recruiter’s Delight – It is all about Taleo (Oracle’s recent talent management acquisition)

Some statistics first …

• The USA will need 22 million new college-educated workers and is likely to see a deficit of 3 million workers with post- secondary degrees (Source: Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements Through 2018, Georgetown University Center of Education and Workforce)
• Before the end of decade, China will see a shortfall of 70,000 executives capable of leading global expansion (Source: “A leadership draught”, Human Resource Executive On-line)
• It takes 10 years to train personal in complex skills. Without workforce planning strategies by 2020 many managers will not be able to fill critical professional strategies (Source: Global Talent Risk – Seven Responses, World Economic Forum)
• 70% of German companies report challenges finding the right people (Source: The Global Talent Index Report: The outlook to 2015, The Economist Intelligence Unit)

Are they good enough to understand why a Company such as Taleo exists in the first place and why someone like Oracle should acquire Taleo – a leading Cloud-based talent management solution?

So what Taleo does do? It is an end-to-end online web platform to handle requests for staffing (Requisition management), do CRM (Candidate Relationship Management), Provide a great multi-touch-point candidate experience, and facilitate onboarding talents in your Organization.

A tool to facilitate the above may not make sense for an Organization that hires couple of tens of people single-handedly managed by one or two recruiters but think about Global Organizations with several hundred thousand of employees, adding couple of thousands of employees every year facilitated by tens of recruiters across the globe, the need for such tool would be very clear. This large Organization not only needs a tool like Taleo to save cost in recruitment but also to make the whole hiring process effective and efficient to hire the right talents at the right time.

As far as the individual modules are concerned, some of the noteworthy features are below

Requisition Management:

This basically handles the first step in hiring process. Facilitating the creation of requests, Approval of requests by Managers via simple to complicated workflow depending on your Organization’s needs and posting your jobs in a single click to numerous Job Boards, Social Media Sites and Agents / Agencies in a single click. All these integrations with external job boards, social media sites etc. come pre-packaged as part of the application, and I am sure With the acquisition of “Select Minds” by Oracle, these social integration features are sure to get strengthened further

CRM (Candidate Relationship Management):

On recruiter’s side the tool provides a web platform to perform an automatic “match and find” the right talent from talent database on the basis of job characteristics (you can create pre-defined rules to do this matching and identify the Ace candidates in a database of several thousands of candidates), facilitates deep manual search across multiple attributes of candidates to narrow down a select set of candidates for the posting, facilitate the pre-screening process with the help of pre-configured disqualification questions, and pre-screening questions, Schedule interviews with the right person in the Organization on the basis of candidate/interview’s availability and do a background check with several well-known background verification partners like ADP, Ernst & Young, Accurate, Skill Survey, Hire Right, etc if you decide to hire the candidate. One interesting feature that delighted me is a built-in resume parser that parses the uploaded resume and creates the candidate profile details automatically in the database without a need for recruiters to spend hours of time in building the candidate database.

As far as Candidate Experience is concerned, Taleo comes with a fully configurable/ pre-packaged job portal that can be plugged into your corporate website where candidates can browse through job postings, apply for a basket of jobs (like a mini shopping cart), track the status of the application throughout the process and get notification on the status change of application through multiple modes of communication. The steps involved in applying for a particular job posting are fully customizable depending on the nature of job posting. Needless to say there is a mobile app that facilitates the access of the portal via mobile and tools like resume parser makes your life easier in getting the job forms pre-filled without you spending any-time filling in the required information.

Candidate On-Boarding:

Once a candidate is offered a job (facilitates an iterative negotiation process to gain acceptance of the candidate), there is a separate full configurable/pre-packaged “On-Boarding” website where the candidates can log in understand more about the company, submit all pre-requisite for joining in the electronic form to facilitate employee verification, submission of proofs of claims if any made during interview process (certificates, degrees), etc over the web in an effective and efficient manner saving the recruiter’s time and providing a great experience to the new talents who are getting on-board to your Organization.

As far as integration to your other corporate systems is concerned, Taleo provides “Taleo Connect,” an advanced integration platform that provides seamless configuration-driven on-line/offline integration via multiple modes like web services, batch jobs, etc., cutting down your development/integration time drastically.

Needless to say, Oracle has great plans to put together an integrated suite covering all HR management needs by integrating Taleo with Fusion HCM pretty shortly.

In net it is implicit that hiring is more and more becoming a marketing function these days with the demand for capable right talents growing at a rapid pace; hence a need for a tool like Taleo to facilitate it in a cost-effective way is mandatory, and not optional for Organizations.

Write to me for any additional info on Taleo.

Venkatesan Sundaram
Senior Director, CRMIT

Originally Published on Venky’s Blog