Assistance needed with looking at what system would match Company A and B and why.

You are a consultant supporting two different businesses on a consulting assignment where they are asking you to review two Talent Management systems to support their respective businesses and make a recommendation as to which of the systems they should chose to support their needs. The company has created a short list of systems from which you are to select two to assess: Workday HCM, IBM Watson Talent - Kenexa, SAP SuccessFactors, Skillsoft SumTotal, Oracle Taleo, and Cornerstone. Given the business situation of each company as outlined below, decide on which of the systems you would choose for each and outline your reasoning to support your recommendations.

Company A the company is a small business with 120 employees all located in the same office building, however they anticipate growing to over 500 employees in the next 3-5 years. They have a website, but have not yet really developed an intranet portal to deliver HR services. They outsource payroll to ADP, and have a small company that administers their benefits. The learning needs of the organization are mainly training needs for new supervisors that are taking on people management responsibilities for the first time. They are growing rapidly due to a recent product just launched, and they anticipate greater needs to develop their workforce in the future, both in technical and leadership skills.

Most of the recruiting they have done up to this point has been through employee referrals. They have placed a few ads in the paper, and even bought a posting or two on Monster for some of their hard-to-fill technical jobs, but this is not going to work for them as they start accelerating their growth. They recently hired an HR person with a great deal of recruiting experience, and she has suggested the need for an applicant tracking system and some employer branding. She even is talking about social media as a method to source and connect with candidates. The company expects to hire about 110 people this coming year, and see that number rising in the years ahead based on the initial sales of their new product.

The company just started to do performance appraisals for their workforce, but it is done on Word document templates and all manually tracked and filed. This isnt a big problem for them since they are relatively small at this point, but with the growth, they want to start looking at online options that will better automate this process. Succession management is not a great concern at this point for this young organization, but in their initial investigation of systems, they have been learning about systems capable of supporting this function, as well.

All of the storing of information around the above processes is done manually. Any metrics that they do have requires working with several spreadsheets to get the data and the analysis is done manually. The organization does not have a great deal of data they can get to easily to help them make decisions around their human capital. They are looking forward to some expert advice from your consulting.

Company B the company is a large, multi-national organization with 35,000 employees. Just over half of these employees are located outside of the United States, with offices in Europe, parts of Asia, and Latin America. The company headquarters is located in St. Paul, Minnesota. Over the years, Company B has invested in a number of systems, but has not done a good job of keeping up with the system upgrades available, managing their processes so that the systems are really supporting them the way they should, or training their employees and managers on how to use the systems when they were hired or took on new roles within the company. They are currently on PeopleSoft (Oracle) as their HRIS solution. It has become apparent recently that there needs to be a more systematic review and approach of their HRIS and applications so that they can more effectively manage their human capital. The leaders of the company have been coming to HR recently looking for data around the workforce that can help them in making some critical decisions related to the talent they need today and in the future. The company just hired a new head of HRIS who has a strong background in HR processes and systems. He has suggested the company work with you to help them in deciding which of the two systems would be the best option for them in addressing their system needs.

The HR organization, working closely with management is about to launch a new initiative for leadership development that will integrate with their succession planning and 9-Box exercise. They have decided that they need a new learning or T&D system (or module) to support this new initiative. This will support their leaders globally and needs to provide them with data that will drive decisions around who are key leaders, where they have leadership gaps, and what are the development needs to make sure the organizations leadership pipeline can satisfy their leadership needs to accomplish the organizations strategy. Their current systems to support this are not integrated and dont work well together. They also realize that they have been myopic in their vision of Training and Development, and need to see the bigger picture what jobs they currently have, what skills are required, how they feed their leadership pipeline, how changes in their business is impacting their training needs, and how to better plan for the talent they will need today and in the future.

The companys new head of talent management also wants to make sure any system decisions made have the capability to offer 360 degree assessments as part of their performance management and development processes. In speaking with the head of talent acquisition, they also think there is a possibility of using this to measure quality of hire, getting assessment data on new hires after 6 months. Their current performance management system is an online system that provides adequate support, however, the user interface is not friendly, and there are many complaints from managers and employees, and some parts of the organization are not using the system, and have developed a manual process outside of the normal process they are expected to follow.

The recruiting system supporting talent acquisition is the one bright spots for the company when it comes to their HRIS applications. Several years ago, the company had invested in Taleo, considered one of the leaders in applicant tracking systems, and the organization did a very good job of implementing the system to work well with their recruiting process workflows. The one area they do feel a need to better develop for recruiting systems is integrating their activities in social media. Taleo has recently developed social recruiting capabilities, but is it the best solution for them? When they are looking at their other systems needs, can they find other options that may be a better solution for them?

One very important aspect of any new system supporting Company B is its ability to support them in all the countries in which they operate. The system definitely has to have the capability to be localized and have different languages in its configurations. The company also wants to have a more integrated approach to Talent Management, so the solution they decide on needs to be able to pull data from the various functions so that the company can use the information to make effective business decisions in regards to their human capital. They are asking you to help them assess the two systems they are considering for this major investment.