My team and I were very excited to attend SAP HR 2010 last week in Orlando. Each year, SAP HR proves to be a great event for us as we connect with the right people in the SAP/HR arena. However, this year was especially interesting for us as Nakisa was featured in over ten sessions throughout the event (the majority of which were volunteered by customers and partners without our solicitation). Each day in Orlando, our booth was constantly visited by individuals saying things like ‘I just came from a talk that highlighted Nakisa. How can I learn more?”.  As the attendees met with us, they were very interested in the demos of our latest release and our video presentations on Advanced Competency Management. It was great to touch base with the different conference participants and to demonstrate our commitment to providing innovative solutions in talent visualization and management.

I invite you all to get to know us better through our videos, and by following our posts on Twitter. For those of you who were unable to attend SAP HR in Orlando, we have posted some information on the seminars in our VIP Zone.

Until next time, remember to Visualize What Matters Most™.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the show You’ve Got Talent where budding entertainers seek to win a contest by unveiling their hidden talents before a panel of judges. Contestants have to pass through several auditions before a winner is chosen. This process reminds me a lot of how some organizations recruit talent from within. The HR department posts a job and prospective employees “audition” in hopes of winning the “talent contest”. This process is reactive rather than proactive.

With a talent visualization system in place, organizations can clearly see and then map employees’ skills to job openings without undergoing a time-consuming series of interviews in order to “discover” the right candidate. Organizations owe it to themselves to adopt a talent management system so as to visualize the “hidden” talent in their midst.

Until next time, remember to Visualize What Matters Most^TM.

I came across an article called Optimizing Talent as Organizations Flatten in the latest issue of Talent Management.  In mapping out the ‘Talent Life Cycle Model’ the article illustrates how the productivity of a role drastically drops with a sudden vacancy. This drop in ‘employee contribution’ is due to ramp-up time of the new hire.  Building on the ‘Talent Life Cycle Model’, it makes sense that effective succession planning can help avoid the downtime associated with a new hire, by enabling succession ‘bench’ employees to ‘ramp up’ in advance.  However, an obstacle to effective succession planning is the lack of connectivity with the other talent management activities (employee reviews, development, career planning etc.).

Best practice organizations understand that organizational competencies are the critical building blocks that connect talent management activities. With competencies used as the standard for measuring both human capital and roles, organizations can clearly identify talent gaps and match the best-fitting employees to fill those gaps. By enabling in-house mobility and bypassing ramp up involved with hiring and training new talent, talent deployment is then optimized to maximize employee contributions sooner rather than later.

Nakisa has produced a video that further discusses the benefits of advanced competency management. I encourage you to check it out on YouTube:

Advanced Competency Management

Until next time, remember to Visualize What Matters Most™