Talent quest
Guy Gauvin is executive vice president of global services for Taleo, a business software maker that helps companies recruit, assess and improve their workforces – its products are used by over 3,800 companies, including Qantas, ANZ, Westpac, the NSW government and Telstra. On a visit to Australia, he tells Business Spectator's Isabelle Oderberg:
Isabelle Oderberg: Could you just tell me a little bit about this new product that you’re launching. I understand you’re operating through a cloud system. Is that correct?
Guy Gauvin: Yeah, that’s correct. So, actually we’ve launched two new products. One of them is called Taleo 10, so that’s our tenth version of Taleo, our suite of products, which brings a whole lot of new features and many of our modules, new user interface with Web 2.0 technology as well as enhancement in our performance module, our recruiting module, and so on.
The other part to your question is related to what we call Talent Grid. Taleo Grid is cloud computing for talent management. Talent Grid has three main components. The first one is what we call Knowledge Exchange. It’s like Facebook for talent management. It’s basically for users, for all of our customers, a portal, a platform where they can exchange best practices; where they can share content; they can network with peers from the same industry; verticals on different topics. That's what we have put together for them all around talent management.
The second pillar is what we call Solution Exchange, which is a little bit similar to what I just mentioned, but for our partners' community; basically connecting all of our Taleo partners that are supplying different services around their solution; background checking or assessments, for example. Through that portal, they are able to share the information for our customers. They could have at their fingertips all the information they want to have on each of our different partners’ solutions; being able to compare them; being able to enter into contact with any of our solution partners.
And then the third and last pillar of the Talent Grid initiative that we’re launching is what we call Talent Exchange – and you can think of Talent Exchange a little bit like a marketplace for talent, based on the Taleo candidates that our customers have. The way it works is that at an aggregate level today all of the four thousand-plus customers of Taleo have about 170 million candidates, roughly speaking, at an aggregate level. With that talent market place, we’re giving the option for our customers, and it’s clearly an option – you can opt in or opt out, to basically propose to candidates in their respective talent pool to be pushed in that talent market place. Again, each candidate, really importantly, will have the option to opt in or opt out clearly, but then what it brings is the power of this talent market place, talent exchange that all of our customers are going to have access to as another source of talent.
IO: So, I don’t understand why a company that uses your service would be putting up candidates for other potential employers. Is that essentially what you’re saying?
GG: Yeah, that’s one way to put it. It’s a valid question. I’ll give you some examples. When you’re in an organisation that is posting different requisitions, different opportunities, you may have people that apply that reside in a country that you will never do business in and you know you will never be in a position to, let’s say, bring the people to your country. So, in this scenario, the candidate does not reside in a targeted country that will be in line with you as an employer. It could be a specific set of skills that you will never require because it’s not what you’re looking for, but again, as you know, some people are trying sometimes to knock at the door and find ways to get there. So in those circumstances, and clearly there’s a lot of volume of candidates that are qualified that way, the organisation is going to have the option to do just that in some other cases. So, that’s one example. Another example; it could be in tough economic situations like what has happened over the last year, you sometimes have to do some redeployment in some organisations. We want to offer their former employees options and make it more streamlined and easier for their former employees to find a job in other places, so again, it could be used in that same fashion.
There are clearly opportunities, a huge amount of opportunities for organisations to obviously to keep the talent, keep the candidates that are important to them, which will be the vast majority. I think you and I are in sync on that, but there’s a subset of the talent pool that each of our customers has that does not work, is not a fit for them today and will never be a fit, down the road, and that’s what we’re saying. It might not be a fit for them, but it might be a fit for one of our Taleo customers on the other side of the world, or on the other side of the street in a totally different vertical and that’s what we want to enable if that makes sense.
IO: Does this product mark any kind of shift, in a globalisation sense, in the job market; where we’ve got different markets converging and different geographies converging as well?
GG: Yeah, that’s a valid point, a really good point, absolutely. I think it’s in line with what’s happening to the job market place, yes.
IO: Now you're usually based in Canada. What are the differences that you’re seeing in the atmosphere in the job market across various geographies?
GG: Yeah well, I think that obviously the North American market, and probably even more so the US market place, have been hit pretty hard over the last 12 to 18 months in terms of employment, which to various degrees across the globe has been the case. But probably not as much as the US and they can certainly see that and feel that and when I read a newspaper this week here in Sydney, saying that the economy in Australia, even though it has been impacted to a certain degree, has not suffered as much, the same thing from an employment perspective. From region to region and country to country, from the different visits in Europe and here and, you know, across the North American market, clearly the US has been hit the most.
IO: And what is the demand like for these sorts of products in the midst of the downturn?
GG: The demand for Taleo products is still extremely high and here’s why. The challenge we had in the economy over the last couple of years certainly slowed down the growth in many verticals and actually, obviously, lay-offs happened and so on. But one important thing that we often forget is that there’s still turnover in organisations, so when the economy is great, turnover could be, in certain verticals, around maybe 20 per cent. One employee out of five will quit their job during the current year, so that when the economy is good, it might be the case.
When the economy goes bad like it has been over the last year, there’s still churn, there’s still turnover. It goes down, but it doesn’t go down to zero. Maybe it went down to 10, 12, 15 per cent. So, if you say that you have, let’s be conservative, 10 per cent of churn instead of 20 a year or two ago – I’m not saying those are real stats, I’m just giving you that as an example – when you have an organisation like, I don’t know, HP that has over 100,000 employees, if they have a churn of 10 per cent, even if the economy is stuffed and they’re not growing, they’ll need to hire and find 10,000 people this year.
So, you see that even if the economy is not growing and organisations overall might not experience growth, they still have to cope with that employment challenge, which is to hire people and replace people. If you don’t have the right platform to be able to do that, and even more so when you have more volume of candidates on the street and so on, you want to be able to get to the best talent quickly. If a year ago you had 100 candidates applying for a job, today you may have 200, because there are more people looking for opportunities and so on. If you don’t have a solid platform that will quickly identify the best talent within that group, then you’re going to lose the best talent.
The CEOs, the senior leaders, truly now understand better than ever the value of attracting, finding great talent and retaining it. So in a nutshell, basically, even if the economy has been tough, for Taleo as you saw if you look at our results from a financial perspective, we’re still growing in double digits, we’re still expanding our margin, so we’re extremely solid financially because we’re still selling our solution because there’s a lot of demand. There’s real value that we can provide to our customers.
IO: Thanks for your time, Guy.
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