Claire Schooley

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 […]

My colleagues and I talk often about social collaboration and its tepid adoption. The fact is that it’s hard to get employees to use a tool unless they see a real use for it. This is certainly true in learning. Most of the learning management vendors have some kind of social offering. The uptake depends […]

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 […]

The data shows that 70% of corporate change efforts either totally fail, have lukewarm results, or the change never becomes an integral part of the company culture. As I talk to clients about their change efforts, what’s worked and what hasn’t, some clear patterns emerge. Change is not an event — it’s a process. You […]

  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 […]

I’m thrilled to see “people” talked about as a major focus of business. Company executives recognize that people are critical to sustainable organizational growth. Talent is now a C-level priority. People development is a responsibility of all managers and leaders, not just the HR department. Great to hear! Vendors see talent management as a hot […]

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 […]

ERP vendors are showing strong interest in the HRM SaaS market. They are either attempting to build a solution (as Oracle is doing with Fusion) or looking to acquire HRM functionality (as SAP is about to do with SuccessFactors). Talent applications — including offerings like performance, succession, and learning — are not easy to build. […]

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 […]

Change management from the people perspective is too often a forgotten component of business process transformation. Organizations focus on getting the new processes right and putting technology components in place — but helping people who will implement the new processes accept and even embrace change is usually an afterthought. Some organizations — small and medium-size businesses […]

You read that number right: seventy percent, a dramatically high rate of failure. It could happen to you unless you take into account that any business process change is strongly related to personal change — that means your people — and this is often the component that gets shortchanged. Organizations fail to realize the impact […]

Today Taleo announced the acquisition of privately-held, Europe-based Jobpartners for $38 million (€25 million) in cash. With this acquisition, Taleo strengthens its European presence in talent management, as Jobpartners has a presence in 50 countries and 28 languages and is also a talent management vendor. The deal is expected to close in early Q3. Jobpartners has […]

A major announcement in the human capital management (HCM) world occurred on April 26, 2011. SuccessFactors, a top vendor in performance management, announced its intention to purchase Plateau Systems, a leading learning management system (LMS) vendor. Although both vendors have competing products in the talent management space, Plateau had something SuccessFactors needed: an LMS. With […]

Think of how often you hear the term change management in relation to a new business process. What’s your reaction? Is it “More of that high level stuff that sounds good, but . . .” or is it “Give me something concrete that I can really use to help my staff understand this new process […]

At Forrester, we think of strategic talent management as made up of four pillars: Recruiting, Performance (including succession and career development), Learning, and Compensation, which sit on top of the core HR system that manages employee records and transactions. These four pillars of HRM (human resource management) have taken on critical importance in the past […]

A New York Times article, “What Is It About 20-Somethings?” written last summer has stayed with me as I continue to talk with clients about the Millennials and how they approach work life. This article talks about the new growing-up phase of today’s Millennials as a distinct life stage called “emerging adulthood” and relates it […]

I attended the Taleo customer conference last week in Chicago where CEO Michael Gregoire in his opening session speech boasted about Taleo’s recent acquisition of Learn.com, a $26 million private learning company that Taleo had just bought for $125 million. (Wow!) He admitted he had never been pro learning management systems but that Taleo’s customers’ expressed […]

In this podcast Claire covers the three most common types of relationships in workplace mentoring and goes on to discuss the benefits to the mentor, mentee, and organization. She cites two major companies that have succesfully implemented large scale mentoring technology implementations. Critical components for successful mentoring programs are discussed and the podcast is closed […]

Forrester has a new book coming out soon entitled Empowered written by two Forrester analysts. Its focus is on the power of social technologies in the hands of the general public and what this means for businesses. Although the book concentrates on sales and marketing, the implications for learning are huge. Empowered challenges businesses to […]