<p>TALENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS</p> <p>Talent builds world-class products and services, nurtures customer relationships, invents new processes and improves existing ones. Talent inspires, coaches, and leads. Talent builds an organization’s reputation, and over time companies of all stripes will or won’t become valuable because of their talent. To survive in the knowledge economy over the long term, organizations must become focused on managing talent as their most critical resource, and must turn to modern human resources technologies in order to manage their workforce as carefully as they would any physical asset. <p><i>Talent Management Systems</i> explains the transformation Web-based technologies have brought to workforce acquisition and management. It examines proven and leading-edge best practices that can improve your organization’s ability to expertly attract, recruit, motivate, develop, and retain staff. And it reveals the tactics and strategies organizations can use to remain competitive in this arena, including: <ul><li>Online recruiting</li> <li>Building a career site on the corporate Intranet</li> <li>Specialized recruitment sites</li> <li>Automated screening, sorting, and ranking of candidates</li> <li>Building skill libraries and profiling competencies</li> <li>Online assessment and testing</li> <li>Selecting the right Talent Management System for the job, and choosing a TMS vendor</li> <li>Outsourcing</li> <li>Legal, ethical and fairness concerns in e-recruitment</li></ul> <p>No industry has made better use of Web technology than Human Resources, particularly in recruitment. Some of the Internet’s best known and most successful brands (for example, Monster<sup>®</sup>, CareerBuilder<sup>™</sup>, and HotJobs<sup>®</sup>) are career sites used by millions of jobseekers and hundreds of thousands of employers. Most organizations also understand the advantages of operating a corporate career site and in building their employment brand. <p>However, despite this early and rapid adoption of technology by human resource professionals, most are just scratching the surface of what technology is available and how it can be used to give an organization competitive advantage. By mastering a talent management system, organizations can: <ul><li>Reduce their average time to hire</li> <li>Become more competitive employers</li> <li>Avoid the lost productivity and momentum that arises when a position lies vacant</li> <li>Build rapport, interest, and trust with individuals from the time they apply, throughout the hiring process, during their employment, and even after they leave the organization</li> <li>Manage all aspects of the “total” workforce—external candidates; salaried, hourly, and temporary employees; and even independent contractors.</li></ul>