If organizations plan to manage people in ways that maximize shareholder value and long-term competitive advantage, they must use all information they acquire about those individuals to maximum advantage. Recently, information technology has made dramatic advances in the HR field. Companies now have access to highly sophisticated software suites that offer a broad range of tools to facilitate every aspect of talent management, from sourcing and recruiting to compensation and succession planning.

Here are a few of the ways we have seen companies apply today's technologies to manage their human resource investment more strategically:

• Reducing costs through process automation, systems integration, and digital communications capabilities that enable focusing limited resources on more important needs.
• Centralizing control of information and processes so policies and procedures are implemented with greater consistency and fewer errors.
• Providing ready access to a broad range of information by those charged with acquiring, motivating, training, and retaining human assets, enabling them to perform HR tasks more efficiently and effectively.
• Displaying in easy-to-use fashion the results of in-depth analyses that help HR management identify opportunities for unifying and improving staffing operations and performance throughout the organization.
• Using automated and ad hoc reporting tools to alert management to trends and impending problems so they can take early action and avoid unnecessary costs.
• Helping establish compliance through reporting, including information required by Sarbanes Oxley legislation.
• Accessing pertinent information from any place at any time enabling employees and managers to perform HR related tasks in a supportive and easy to understand fashion via the web.

In essence, organizations know how they want their strategic recruitment management efforts to work, including alignment with pay-for-performance initiatives. Emerging technologies, for the first time, provide organizations with both the scale to address the recruiting challenge itself while at the same time simplifying integration to related data that improves the overall value of information collected from the day and individual expresses an interest in a job to when he or she is promoted to a new job opening within the organization.