HR Technology is evolving at a rapid pace. The market is consolidating, new innovative solutions are cropping up left and right and traditional solution providers are reinventing themselves to respond to certain gaps in the market. Buyers are making stronger demands from their technology providers and talent management providers are responding in a big way.

After attending this year's HR Technology Conference, we noticed several trends in this market including mobile, global expansion and various ways to align talent management with the overall business strategy. What does this mean for customers and prospects? To start, organizations can find what they are looking for without having to sacrifice innovation, integration or functionality especially in the area of talent acquisition. Organizations now have options especially when it comes to creating a positive candidate experience. Secondly, the decision making process to invest in this technology is much more complex. In many cases, the sales cycle is taking two or even three times as long. The market is dynamic and it is hard for many organizations to keep up.

We want to help. Below is some information on some of the leading providers in the space. How have these providers expanded over the past year? What can you expect from these provides for the remainder of 2010? Here is a preview:

• Innovation: If you are confused by the video interviewing market, you are not alone. With misperception around video resumes and new solution providers announced every month, few providers do video well. Hirevue is the exception. They offer much more than video interviewing. They offer an interviewing management system based on validated assessments (thanks to a partnership with Previsor) including mobile solutions, interview workflow, rating scales, interview templates and scheduling.
• Analytics: Reporting dashboards allow both hiring managers and recruiters to view the entire interview activities within an organization and offer an immediate ROI. Rio Tinto is one example of a company that reduced travel costs by over 40%. If you are not thinking about video interviewing, you might want to reconsider.

• Deep Domain Expertise: Identifying only one or two areas where Previsor has excelled over the past year is nearly impossible. As a true leader in pre-hire assessments, they continue to demonstrate product leadership, market visibility and a deep understanding of their customers’ needs. In fact, they have increased the number of candidates they have assessed by 54% this year. They have even been selected by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to reform government hiring.
• Job Simulations: Job simulations have been gaining popularity this year. Previsor now offers customized job simulations with 3D animation for a realistic job preview.   

• Positive Candidate Experience: Jobs2web is one of those solution providers responsible for influencing how organizations conduct recruitment. No longer simply a Search Engine Optimization tool, jobs2web offers a complete front end solution for talent acquisition professionals to transform their recruitment marketing strategies. Through corporate career sites, social networking integration, targeted branding to job boards, mobile applications and a talent community, they seem to do it all. Essentially, they have spent the past two years figuring out how to arm organizations with the tools they need to create a more positive candidate experience and the analytics they need to put this plan into action. Judging by the accelerated growth (over 180 enterprise customers) both through direct sales and partnerships, they are clearly achieving this goal.
• Analytics: jobs2web has devoted a considerable investment in their analytics capabilities. By leveraging information from a talent acquisition system, they provide the data that talent acquisition professionals need to show the business where they are spending their sourcing dollars and what results can help drive these decisions.

• Innovation: If you asked us how Kronos ranked in innovation a few years ago, they would have fallen short. With a monopoly over the hourly space, they did not face the same pressure to go the extra mile with user experience or areas such as social networking. Today, this has all changed drastically. Kronos has become one of the most forward-looking solution providers in the space. In talent acquisition alone, they have introduced a new UI, sourcing analytics, multiple ways to engage passive candidates including social networking integration not to mention a solution for salaried hires. Beginning in Q1 2011, Kronos will have a complete mobile solution for their workforce management and workforce acquisition solutions including GPS functionality, access to schedules, and many other use cases.
• Global: Kronos plans to move aggressively into the global market by continuing to open offices around Europe and Asia. We are likely to see Kronos take an even greater leadership position in talent acquisition and appear in more and more global enterprise deals.

• Mobile: ADP is leading the HRMS market with their mobile solution. They have taken a broad view of this area by designing these applications for target audiences. They have launched their mobile solution for payroll, benefits and time and attendance and plan to launch mobile for the full talent management suite in 2011.
• User Experience: ADP is a force to be reckoned with in the talent management space through the Cornerstone OnDemand partnership and acquisitions of Virtual Edge in 2006 and Workscape earlier this year. They have expanded their portfolio actively and as a result, have invested in a fully integrated user experience with more of a user centric view and seamless data flow.

• Semantic Search: For the past year, we have been writing about the “death of job boards” and the need for the traditional job boards to reinvent themselves…guess what, Monster has. Monster’s 6 Sense solution set has the potential to shake up the talent acquisition market by moving recruiters away from keyword searches that offer no engagement between candidates and recruiters. Instead, through semantic search, they open up the pool of candidates and then rank them based on a defined skill set. Monster will be announcing 6 Sense later this year and we can expect a big splash. Oh, did I mention talent analytics to give organizations a snapshot of their workforce based on all of the data they have been collecting?

• Business Intelligence: After investing heavily in both their technology platform and their competency and assessment content, SHL is well-positioned to provide organizations with an action plan for the potential of their future workforce. They have recognized a large gap in how organizations view their employees. It is not just about past performance and current performance in today’s competitive environment. More importantly, organizations need to predict future performance. SHL is working with customers to help understand the potential of their workforce.
• Global: SHL currently has 15,000 customers worldwide (20%) in North America and continues to expand in this market.

• Product Leadership: Peopleclick Authoria has always been ahead of the game. Last year, when the rest of the market was still trying to make heads or tails of social media, they launched their mobile solution. As many providers are considering CRM functionality this year, they launched a comprehensive contact management solution back in 2007. Clearly, they set the pace in talent acquisition.

• Core HR: Heartbeat has successfully launched SilkRoad into the HRMS market with over 30 customers including Regis Corporation. Their first customer will go live this November and SilkRoad is receiving considerable momentum in this area. They offer tremendous thought into their data model and flexibility options. They have also established a new partnership with Fidelity as a preferred payroll provider in order to round out the suite. As more and more providers are looking for one platform for all of their talent needs, SilkRoad provides a complete HCM solution with a strong system of record and a complete talent management suite. Over 30% of organizations indicated they would be willing to sacrifice functionality for integration on one platform. With SilkRoad, they can have both.
• Global: Long viewed as a North American provider, SilkRoad is actively expanding in Asia Pac and Eastern European markets.

• Partnerships: If you ask any Talent Acquisition System provider for their list of top 10 partners, you are likely to find TalentDrive on that list. TalentDrive offers companies a way to search through resumes and to drive people to career sites with 11 million records. They have developed an easy to use API that can be integrated within 24 hours. Their entire business model is centered around partnerships and in the past year, they have added twenty-three talent acquisition systems, innovative talent acquisition tools, and recruitment advertising firms

• Vertical Expertise: PeopleAnswers has been helping retail organizations prepare for the holiday hiring surge and manage resume overload including Belk and Macy’s. With customers expecting to hire 100,000 seasonal employees, PeopleAnswers’ customized performance profiles match job candidates with the best position.
• Quality of Hire: Pre-hire assessments is one of the best (and in some cases, only) way to truly identify quality of hire. One component of this key performance indicator is turnover. PeopleAnswers’ performance profiles have helped Tenet Healthcare reduce turnover of their nurses by 47%. In 2011, Tenet Healthcare is implementing PeopleAnswers throughout 49 hospitals around the US for all corporate, administrative and executive positions. Tenet’s story is remarkable and something we plan to cover in an in depth case study later this year.

• Unified Talent Platform: With the launch of Kenexa 2x unified talent platform, this solution provider is emerging victorious in more and more talent acquisition deals, including retail giant, Walmart, supporting all of its 2.2 million employees. What sets Kenexa apart is its integrated talent management approach that provides equally strong software and services to customers. Integration is at the heart of the 2x platform. After several acquisitions in the talent acquisition space over the past five years (including BrassRing and Webhire), Kenexa 2x now bridges together recruitment, mobile and onboarding solutions through a spectrum of integration support from self-service to full-service. Performance, assessments and analytics are slated for the next six months, which will provide a seamless view of the individual throughout the organization.

• Growth: To summarize Stepstone in one word…growth. They are gobbling up global market share with the acquisition of MrTed and continue to look for ways to build out the talent management suite and expand their global footprint. They are experiencing over 50% organic growth and have acquired 8 new customers in Asia this quarter alone.

With the launch of our talent acquisition practice area, we will be covering this market extensively as well as the technology options available to help organizations make better hiring decisions. Our 2011 Talent Acquisition Systems report will cover many of the providers listed above. We look forward to hearing from you.