Last month, I published an update to my 2011 Forrester Wave™ on talent management because the human resource management (HRM) market has experienced tremendous consolidation and many top-rated vendors have become part of other very large organizations. I defined “talent management” as encompassing performance, learning, succession planning, and career development. When I published my current Wave in March 2013, I continued to call it the “Talent Management Wave.” This has caused confusion, because in the past two years, the word “talent management” has morphed to include recruiting, which also has seen incredible growth and change. As the Wave is a deep dive into more than criteria and focuses on 10 vendors, I could not include recruiting within the parameters of the Wave. Recruiting is also very different, with many integrations with small boutique vendors that provide important services. But the questions kept coming: “Where is recruiting?”

I decided that the title, not the content, was the problem. Therefore, this Wave has a new, more representative, title: “The Forrester Wave: Learning And Talent Development, Q1 2013.” This title better describes my effort to showcase the suite vendors that own both performance (often including succession and career development) and learning applications and have devoted tremendous energy and resources to unify the two applications (with various degrees of success). Ideally, this means that a manager can identify an employee knowledge gap and, right from the performance app, select the best learning opportunity that will address the gap, and the activity or course appears on the employee’s individual learning plan. These applications look and feel like one application.

For Christmas, my daughter Sarah gave me a book of photos of last summer’s family trip to Cape Cod. Each page was beautifully designed with descriptions of the events captured in the photos: the great lobster feast . . . the trip to Martha’s Vineyard . . . the day at Old Silver Beach playing in the water. Each page was a different color and had graphics appropriate for the theme conveyed by the pictures. How did she do this? It was a photo book with backgrounds, layouts, and embellishments that she had customized just the way she wanted them. It was template-based and Sarah rearranged pictures, added captions, and chose preset layouts. Tools allowed her to easily organize the page. There’s even spell check and autofill to instantly arrange pictures on a page.

As I read through the book for about the 10th time today, I thought, “This is what we need in online learning simulations!” Subject-matter experts need to be able to create interactive and adaptive game-like simulation activities through easy-to-use tools that use templates with many design options. We know that when learners engage in a simulation, the retention of learning is much longer because they have been involved in learning by doing. Examples include nurses learning how to use a defibrillator to save lives, machine operators recertifying their skills by operating the machine in simulated activities, or bank management training through a suite of simulated psychological activities.

Today’s top career sites do more than list jobs available. The best ones give a glimpse of what it’s like to work at the company, communicate the company values, and introduce the company brand. These sites use multimedia to communicate messages about the company culture, the people, professional growth opportunities, and more.

Join me on Friday, September 21, 3012 at 11 am Eastern Time for the Forrester webinar, Create An Engaging Career Website To Pique Candidate Interest. In this session I will talk about the essential components to include in a career website, the effective use of video to communicate messages, and the important connections with social media sites. I’ll show many examples of effective websites.

Register now. Bring your best questions. I look forward to talking with you. 

The rumor circulating for the past few weeks has now been confirmed: Oracle is buying Taleo, a global talent management vendor, for $1.9 billion. This is just another — albeit important — acquisition in the strategic talent management space. All companies must have core HR systems in place, but now it’s equally important to look at the strategic part of HR: the performance, succession, career development, and learning components as a layer resting on top of the core. Companies want to retain, develop, and reward their employees and need these applications in place for efficiency and effectiveness.

With this acquisition, Oracle gets a vendor with these talent management components in a pure SaaS deployment model, which provides ultimate flexibility. However, the offerings in the suite are not equally robust. Taleo is known for its recruiting app; to become a suite vendor, it added performance, which has gotten mixed reviews, and learning, which is not best in its class. Learn.com, the vendor Taleo acquired for learning, works OK for the midmarket, but its functionality does not hold up well for large global and enterprise customers.

Oracle can’t buck the SaaS tide any more. SaaS is the preferred deployment model for talent management, and the large ERP vendors like SAP (finalizing its acquisition of SuccessFactors) and Oracle are now joining the movement. Oracle offers Fusion, but a lot of work still needs to be done to develop this into a full SaaS talent suite. Once this deal closes, watch and see how Oracle positions the Taleo offerings with Fusion Talent Management.

Boris Evelson and I have published research entitled “Use HR Analytics To Optimize Talent Processes.”

The premise: HR analytics have taken on new importance as companies work to find, develop, and retain top talent. Using analytics requires asking the right questions that address key organizational pain points and determining the metrics and best practices that will move the company toward greater productivity. We anticipate that this report will help guide HR professionals as they focus on analytics to support recruiting, performance, and learning.

HR faces a challenge of proving its value in helping to set business priorities. Data from technology solutions now give HR the opportunity to become a valued business partner in determining the appropriate metrics to help the executive suite and people in other lines of business make important talent management decisions. The tactical role of advertising for and finding employees, negotiating the hires, and bringing employees on board is no longer enough; HR must become a strategic business partner.

We recommend that you start with solid foundational components including data sources, data extraction and integration processes, master data management (MDM), and an HR data mart as the official HR data repository. Once that’s in place, you need to build queries, reports, and dashboards. Medium-size organizations may use a packaged solution, but large global enterprises with many business units will have to assemble these components.