The investments companies make in recruiting, training, and retaining talent can be one of the largest (if not the largest) expense on their balance sheets. Today, however, most companies have uncertain strategies toward attainment of the right people for business success and equal challenges in adopting the pay-for-performance strategies needed to develop and retain them. Consider a company contemplating a corporate acquisition. Its management carefully examines the proposed transaction against its own company's future needs, how it will integrate the new enterprise with existing resources, how the target firm has performed historically, and what costs will be incurred to fully integrate it into the parent organization. For competitive advantage, organizations should apply the same intensity to recruiting the right people. Candidate and source information, for example, should be gathered and analyzed against real staffing needs, and the information acquired during search and recruiting processes should be retained, analyzed, and used to manage human capital more strategically.

ACCESSIBILITY WHERE NEEDED: Integrating employee data and other information across the entire HR spectrum provides organizations with significant advantages that include the following:

• Performance reviews are more reflective because supervisors have the historic precedent of relevant pre-hire information, such as job history, training, awards, and interviewers' observations.
• Compensation planning and management can align initial offers with market data, ranges and pay relation to other employees who serve in similar roles.
• Career Development activities create a path toward immediate success in the job for which the individual is hired plus creating a path toward future career growth.
• In-house recruiting can be more effective because everyone involved in hiring has access to career and performance information concerning prospective internal candidates, regardless of location or current position.
• Succession management is easier because more extensive and current information about each manager and employee available to planners.

The last point is particularly relevant. Good succession management identifies, in pure business terms, the needs of the organization and how people map to those needs. Doing succession management correctly means knowing when you have a candidate capable of filling a role immediately, short-term or long-term. By integrating the succession management process with recruiting management, organizations can avoid promoting an individual who is next in line from a raw succession standpoint, but is simply not ready for responsibility. Doing so is bad for the individual and bad for the organization. In these situations, organizations need the right mix of internal candidates and external applicants to make the best business decision.

How can you make good decisions when in many cases the recruiting and performance data needed to make those decisions exists only in decentralized files? For example, how can geographically dispersed organizations who may even utilize different systems and strategies make aligned and integrated decisions? In decentralized process, this effort is time consuming and difficult if undertaken at all. And because of effort required only rarely does pre-hire information become a permanent part of an individualfs performance record. It is this complexity and the scale of addressing the challenge in traditional manual intensive methods that often cause organizations to turn to outside recruiting resources for assistance (or compromise on the outcome of the search). It is never a corporate initiative to cut corners.it happens because people run out of time.

Situations like these quickly make clear the substantial additional value of being able to seamlessly access pertinent employee data during any phase of the talent  management process.

OPTIMAL RECRUITING EFFICIENCY: A major drawback of traditional staffing and HR management systems is an inconsistency between the parameters used in recruiting for a position and those against which the supervisor later measures the employee's performance. Ideally, the criteria established to assess performance in a position also would be used in recruiting for it. When such information is easy to replicate from performance management systems to job requisitions, managers save valuable time and recruiters know more about what type of candidates to pursue.

Automated processing and systems integration also simplify the logistics of managing job requisitions, resumes, interviews, reference checking, and other tasks that add cost and increase the risk of error when done manually. Semi-manual systems that use incompatible or otherwise non-integrated applications do provide limited improvement. Seamless access to employee information.whether the objective is staffing, compensation management, performance review, coaching, training, or succession planning.facilitates strategic talent management and increases manager and employee acceptance.

Another major advantage of fully-integrated talent management systems is the comprehensive analytical and reporting capabilities they provide. Rather than just reporting simple recruiting statistics, they enable HR managers to compare recruiting data with actual job performance. For example, managers can learn whether employees hired through a particular source or with certain qualifications under-perform or outperform others.and these reports may be gleaned by individual or in aggregate fashion to illustrate underlying business trends.

MAINTAIN CANDIDATE POOLS: Being able to rapidly find and attract top talent whenever the need arises gives companies a strong competitive advantage. This is especially true for jobs that require skilled, hard-to-find talent, such as engineers and nurses. Frequently, during a search, individuals surface who are clearly desirable and interested in the organization, if not quite the right candidate for the current opening. Having an active pool of such candidates can save time and expense in future searches if companies periodically engage such individuals and inform them when appropriate opportunities arise. Truly integrated talent management systems facilitate this process and even enable interested hiring managers to participate at their discretion.

As mentioned above, our opinion is that part of a successful succession management strategy is both uncovering and identifying and developing internal candidates as well as identifying when openings should be filled by external talent. From the organizationfs standpoint, this helps ensure continuity of business operations and a realistic picture of capacity and bench strength. From an individual standpoint, this means investments in individual employees.a reason for retention on its own.

More subtle, but just as important, a full picture of succession management means avoiding the promotion that should never happen that places him or her in a position too early, one the organization should be looking externally to fill. The converse is a similar problem never giving top individuals to job openings within the organization for which they are eminently qualified. How many organizations lose their top people by not simply helping them identify opportunity?