Beyond Integrated Talent

Management
How to Future-Proof Your Next
Talent Management System

White Paper

White Paper > Beyond Integrated Talent Management

The State of Integrated

Talent Management
Integrated talent management is here to stay. Gartner has
placed integrated talent management suites on the slope
of enlightenment in their Hype Cycle curve1, entering
early mainstream with widespread customer validation.
Organizations have been upgrading to integrated talent
management suites for more than a decade2 some by
adding individual modules from their existing learning or
talent vendors, others by moving to end-to-end integrated
talent management suites.
The business challenges that triggered this wave are
significant: lack of a single view of talent; inconsistent,
manually aggregated reporting; poor data quality; increasingly
costly maintenance. And most of all, a poor experience
for employees, significantly restraining adoption of these
systems thus, limiting the productivity, skill development,
engagement and retention benefits that can accrue from
integrated talent management processes and systems.

Companies with poorly

integrated systems have
lower scores on retention
and employee productivity,
similar to those who have
no systems in place at all.3
Bersin & Associates
The market for integrated talent management solutions in
2014 was an estimated $3.4 billion, growing 17% per year.4
The rewards for deploying these integrated solutions have
been significant, with Bersin research measuring the following
talent and business improvements.5
Hiring 87% greater ability to hire the best people
Leadership development 36% higher ratings

Employee engagement 29% higher engagement ratings

Retention 17% lower voluntary turnover
Revenue 20% increase in revenue per employee

Two Flavors of Integrated Talent Management

It is important to distinguish between the two flavors of
integrated talent management suites as you formulate your
systems strategy going forward aggregated and unified.
Aggregated suites are those that were either created
through acquisitions or were built independently of each
other. Either way, they end up using external integration
that is, middleware (with APIs or web services) to connect
and pass data between the modules. Think of it like custom
integrations. The most notable aggregated solutions are
from ERP companies who started with core HR systems
and added individual talent modules through acquisitions or
built them over time, but with different teams and sometimes
different data models. The key is that they were not designed
with a holistic view of talent management in mind, so they
dont accrue many of the benefits of a unified platform.
Unified suites are those that were created from scratch
with a unified strategy, unified user experience and unified
data model.
There are significant advantages to the unified approach,
including:
Consistent user experiences across every talent module
Compatible processes to support these modules
Complete view of the organization and its talent
Single repository of data that flows seamlessly from
module to module
Fluid, efficient upgrade paths, driving faster innovation
and value
One-stop reporting and analytics capability
In the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant evaluation, Gartner
found that client satisfaction was 14.6% higher with
unified solutions than aggregated solutions.6

Is Integrated Talent Management Enough?

The Game Has Changed
Much has changed since the beginning of the integrated
talent management movement. The makeup of the workforce
has changed dramatically, with a mass exodus of baby
boomers at leadership levels and a mass inflow of millennials
at almost every level. (In 2015, 48% of supervisors and above
in the U.S. will be at retirement age and more than 50% of
U.S. workers will be millennials.7) And these millennials are
bringing very different life experiences and expectations into
the workplace, including how they interact with technology,
look for information and learn.

A Nexus of converging forces

social, mobile, cloud and
information is building
upon and transforming user
behavior while creating new
business opportunities.8
Gartner

At the same time, technology has advanced in several

interrelated areas, offering new and better capabilities to
address talent-related challenges. Mobile is changing the
way people communicate, connect, play and work. Social
connects people to their friends, their workmates and
new career opportunities. And Cloud enables access to
information and functionality from anywhere in the world.
Together, these forces are creating opportunities for HR to
profoundly enhance how they enable, empower and engage
their workforce.

Integrated Talent Management Satisfaction Today

What grade would talent management customers give
their integrated talent management suites today? That, of
course, is what Gartner measures with its Magic Quadrant
evaluation process.

Gartners 2015 Magic Quadrant study reports that

satisfaction scores for talent management suite products
averaged 5.25 on a 7-point scale. The biggest gaps between
importance and satisfaction were:
1. Reporting Access to consolidated
data for reporting and analytics
2. E
 ase of Use For both employees
and managers
These gaps spell opportunities for significant
improvement in functionality, ease and
impact.

White Paper > Beyond Integrated Talent Management

Next Wave in Talent Management

With the advances in technology and the increased appetite
for more engaging experiences from employees and more
impactful results from executives, organizations have an
opportunity to create much greater leverage from their talent
management investments going forward. The following five
capabilities carry great promise to do just that.

1. E
 MPLOYEE-CENTRIC ENABLEMENT
Consumerized HR Technology
As noted in Bersins recent report HR Technology
2016: 10 Big Disruptions on the Horizon9 over the past
decade, HR systems have evolved from HR productivity
tools to employee-first enablement tools. These tools
enable employees to manage their own learning and
development, connect with internal experts, collaborate
with peers and chart their own careers.

This shift away from

HR toward the employee as
the user has had a huge
impact on the market.9
Bersin & Associates

A big part of this shift has been driven by the change

in the makeup of todays workforce, especially the
influx of millennials. Armed with smartphones and
thousands of mobile consumer apps, unbounded
video content and social networking, millennials
are expecting work systems to be as intuitive and
engaging as the apps they use in everyday life. And
they are expecting employers to enable them to
develop their skills and take control of their careers
with the systems those employers provide.
As a result, employers are increasingly looking
to talent management systems to provide these
engaging experiences for their employees.

KEY TIPS
1. Make it about their life, not
about your processes.
2. Make it as easy as consumer
technologies no learning
required.
3. Make it engaging fun,
genuine, personal.

2. G
 UIDED EXPERIENCES
Intelligent Recommendations
While employees are looking for consumer-quality
solutions at work, they want to be empowered to figure it
out on their own. What theyre really saying is they dont
like being told, but would like to have help along the
way if they need it. This is where intelligence fits in
proactive assistance to help guide employees along their
path to developing their skills and steering their careers.
At the same time, HR professionals are looking to offload
some of their overbearing workload, so they can make
a bigger difference (and still have a life). In addition,
they would like to avert visible problems like high-value
employees unexpectedly leaving.
Luckily, there have been seismic advances in the fields
of predictive analytics and something called machine
learning that can help both employees and HR
professionals reach their goals. (The simple definition
of machine learning is improving the performance of
something by automatically learning from the experience
of using it.) These technologies enable personalized
recommendations for both employees and HR
professionals in some very important ways.

For HR professionals:
Intelligent retention The ability to proactively
predict the risk of a high-value employee leaving
the company, automatically calculate the cost
of replacing that person, and determine the
compensation adjustment that would minimize the
risk of the employee leaving.
Intelligent benchmarking Guided drill-downs
into the companys talent analytics relative to
competitive and industry benchmarks, with
recommendations on actions to improve their
performance.

KEY TIPS
1. Make the recommendations
proactive anticipating
issues or opportunities.
2. Make them personalized
focusing on the specific
needs of each employee.
3. Make them engaging

recommendations that
For employees:
Intelligent development Personalized
recommendations for each employee to develop their
skills, including courses to take, content to read and
experts to consult.

are increasingly helpful

over time.

Intelligent career planning The ability to

explore different career paths, see how the paths
link up to their long-term goals, and get tailored
recommendations on areas they need to develop to
maximize their chances of reaching these goals.

White Paper > Beyond Integrated Talent Management

3. E
 ND-TO-END MOBILE HR
Mobile-First Practices and Systems
Mobile is one of those topics that grows in importance,
scope and impact every year. The growth of mobile
platforms smartphones and tablets combined to
account for 60% of total digital media consumption in
the U.S. in 2014.10 Even more surprising, mobile apps
accounted for 85% of that consumption.11
Mobile transcends mobility its truly personal, and
even more important than your wallet. For instance,
people are more afraid to lose their mobile device than
their wallet or keys.12 People think mobile first
especially millennials. For reading emails, Google
searching, sending/receiving texts, checking Facebook,
viewing videos. And, by definition, their mobile phone is
always on, on demand, and within reach, unlike laptops
or certainly desktops.
Providing talent and learning functionality on mobile
devices brings good talent management practices into
the inner sanctum of each employee, manager and
executive. It becomes more top-of-mind, approachable
and personal. As a result, people use talent systems
more according to Gartners 2015 Magic Quadrant
Study,13 employee and manager self-service usage of
talent management applications will grow from 19%
(average across all applications) to 40 to 60% in two
years because of mobile access.
If done right, offering end-to-end native mobile talent
management apps will significantly increase talent
management adoption and usage, on-the-go productivity
and engagement.

KEY TIPS
1. Make mobile talent
management a forethought,
not an afterthought.
2. Simplify your user
interactions to fit into the
mobile interaction paradigm.
3. Take user experience
advances from mobile into
your web applications.

4. R
 EAL-TIME EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK
Peer-to-Peer Recognition Systems
One of the most hated topics by employees and
managers, and one of the most popular to bash,
the annual performance review is an idea well past its
prime (if it ever had a prime). Accountability is critical,
of course. And bonus pools still need a way to be
equitably distributed. But waiting a full year to give
employees feedback is both unreliable, dis-engaging
and unprofitable.
Its unreliable because people (managers) are
biased by the most recent events they observed with
employees a psychological trait called the recency
effect.14 Its virtually impossible for a manager to have a
balanced few of an employees performance over a full
year.

Its dis-engaging because employees feel that the

performance review process does not adequately
reflect their accomplishments over that year. Plus,
their brains are wired to protect and defend in
the face of perceived threats to their self-esteem.15
It is unprofitable because each day an employee
remains on a less effective path (at whatever goal
they are pursuing), they are sacrificing the value
they could be driving from the more effective path.
An important way to address these challenges
is to make performance management part of
everyday management with regular feedback and
coaching from first-line managers. Augmenting
coaching, peer-to-peer recognition applications
can provide real-time feedback from managers,
team members and any employee at your
company. This feedback is automatically captured
in the employees performance appraisal. Plus, it
contributes to a strong culture of teamwork and
acknowledgement.

KEY TIPS
1. Train first-line managers
to be great coaches.
2. Require regular check-ins
and coaching sessions, at
least monthly or quarterly.
3. Launch a peer-to-peer
recognition system to
augment direct manager
coaching.

White Paper > Beyond Integrated Talent Management

5. F
 RICTIONLESS COLLABORATION
Built-in All-Process Collaboration

KEY TIPS

The world is flat. Operating on a global scale is the norm,

with talent and competitors coming from anywhere in the
world. Teams are located remotely, dispersed around the
globe in different time zones, making it difficult to meet
face-to-face, join in-person training or exchange timecritical information with peers. All these factors produce
friction on talent management activity and effectiveness.

1. Make it effortless to create

The problem is that introducing a variety of collaborative

tools to address these challenges that are not tied to
employees business processes and objectives means
more places for people to have to go to find and share
information, becoming a barrier to getting work done
efficiently and making life more complex for employees.

3. Ensure personally relevant

An effective collaboration solution should unify the various

modes of knowledge exchange, creating a single place to
share information, expertise and training. By doing this, it
should speed up business processes, making it simple
to connect with others and removing friction for every
person in every process.
More importantly, the right solution should provide a
personally relevant experience for each user curating
and surfacing the most important content, connections
and training for each user based on their role, goals,
career aspirations and team dynamics. By doing so,
a frictionless collaborative process can significantly
improve the experience and impact of every talent
management process, including learning, recruiting,
performance management, compensation and
succession management.

a class, discussion group or

team meeting, on the fly.
2. Unify the customer
experience for all talent
management processes.
content is automatically
surfaced for each employee.

Conclusion
The evolution from individual talent processes and systems
to integrated, cross-departmental talent solutions has reaped
sizeable benefits by automating talent workflows, simplifying
user experiences and reducing turnover. With the technological
advances in mobile, social and predictive analytics, HR leaders
now have significantly greater opportunities to drive talent and
business results, leveraging their time much more productively
in the process. By following the Key Tips in this paper, HR
professionals will be able to derive the following benefits:

More engaged employees

Employee-centric enablement using consumerized
HR technology.
Personalized, guided development experiences through
intelligent recommendations.
More personal, consumable learning and talent
experiences with anytime mobile access.

More productive, impactful HR professionals

Higher levels of employee adoption, which drives
more self-served processes that will free up HR
professionals time.
Guided HR experiences that anticipate talent challenges
and proactively propose solutions.
With more time and proactive guidance, HR professionals
will be able to think and act more strategically and help
lead their company forward.

Better business results

With stronger employee engagement and more effective
skills development, your employees will drive better
experiences for your customers and, thus, greater
revenues for the company.
With more personalized professional development and a
more collaborative, positive company culture, employees
will stay longer and tell their friends why.

Find out how Saba delivers these

above and beyond capabilities

In summary, integrated talent management practices

and systems are important but not sufficient in todays
fast-changing, competitive world. An integrated talent
management system that leverages the consumerized,
mobile, collaborative and intelligent capabilities outlined
in this paper will enable your company to more effectively
engage your employees, empower your HR teams and
move your customers to buy.

White Paper > Beyond Integrated Talent Management

Additional Resources
S
 olution Video: Introducing Sabas Intelligent Talent Management Solution
C
 ustomer Video: Equity Residential Teaching People How to Fish with Intelligent Talent Management
C
 ustomer Video: Guitar Center How To Use Social and Intelligence to Invent the Future of Retailing
Product Data Sheet: Intelligent Talent Management Featuring TIM, The Intelligent Mentor

References
1.

Gartner, Aug 2015, Hype Cycle for Human Capital Management Software, 2015. http://bit.ly/Gartner-Hype-Cycle-HCM

2.

Gartner, July 2015, Magic Quadrant: Talent Management Suites. http://bit.ly/Gartner-MQ-TM-Suites

3.

Bersin & Associates, October 2012, Integrated Talent Management: A Roadmap for Success. http://bit.ly/Bersin-Integrated-TM-Roadmap

4.

Gartner, July 2015, Magic Quadrant: Talent Management Suites. http://bit.ly/Gartner-MQ-TM-Suites

5.

Statistics in the below bulleted list are from Bersin & Associates research on the benefits of integrated talent management, summarized in
Integrated Talent Management: A Roadmap for Success, October 2012. http://bit.ly/Bersin-Integrated-TM-Roadmap

6.

Gartner, July 2015, Magic Quadrant: Talent Management Suites. http://bit.ly/Gartner-MQ-TM-Suites

7.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Wired.com, The Rise of the Millennial Workforce. http://bit.ly/Millennial-Workforce

8.

Garter, July 2012, Nexus of Forces Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information Is the Basis of the Technology Platform of the Future.
http://bit.ly/Gartner-Nexus

9.

Bersin by Deloitte, October 2015, HR Technology 2016: 10 Big Disruptions on the Horizon.
Download from http://marketing.bersin.com/hr-technology-for-2016.html

10. ComScore, June 2014, Major Mobile Milestones in May: Apps Now Drive Half of All Time Spent on Digital. http://bit.ly/Comscore-Mobile-Usage
11. Go-Globe, June 2015, Mobile Apps Usage Statistics and Trends. http://bit.ly/Mobile-Apps-Usage-Infographic
12. Lookout blog, May 2011, Your Phone Is More Essential Than Your Keys or Wallet. http://bit.ly/Mobile-More-Essential
13. Gartner, July 2015, Magic Quadrant: Talent Management Suites. http://bit.ly/Gartner-MQ-TM-Suites
14. Wikipedia, Serial Position (Recency) Effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_position_effect
15. Psychology Today, November 2012, Why Performance Reviews Dont Improve Performance. http://bit.ly/Psychology-Today-Recency-Effect

10

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Saba delivers a cloud-based Intelligent Talent Management solution used by leading organizations worldwide to hire, develop, engage,
and inspire their people. Intelligent Talent Management uses machine learning to offer proactive, personalized recommendations on
candidates, connections, and content to help your employees and organization lead and succeed.
2015 Saba Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Saba, the Saba logo, and the marks relating to Saba products and services referenced herein are either
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