HR Service Matters

By: Mike Smith

One of the hottest areas associated with HR Services is talent management.  I say “associated with” because talent management must reach out directly to employees for feedback (for likes of reviews and self-evaluations) and up-to-date employee profiles to be effective.  I say “hottest” because there are numerous software and SaaS alternatives (40+ providers) to choose from and the market is still growing.  Both Gartner (Magic Quadrant for E-Recruitment Software) and Bersin Associates (Talent Management Systems Customer Satisfaction 2010 report) have produced reports in December 2009 so there are plenty of current technical and practical opinions to review.

In looking at the Josh Bersin blog which has an overview of the Bersin Satisfaction Survey, I noticed that while the functionality of the alternative solutions is high, the overall satisfaction level is low.  The link to the summary is below:

http://www.bersin.com/Blog/post/2010-Talent-Management-Systems-Satisfaction-Results.aspx

The survey reports that buyers like the features, but struggle with the implementation and integration with other related systems.  As we consider the overall delivery of HR services within our own organizations, I wonder if our employees also struggle.  Could it be that the portals we provide employees to access our HR services are not well integrated with the underlying HR systems?  Maybe we should survey employees regularly about their satisfaction level with HR services.