A marriage made in heaven: Social Business Software coupled with Talent Management

Business impetus for Social Business Software

Taleo operates in a very competitive, fast-growing marketplace that includes nearly 80 private companies with "point" solutions (such as compensation management) as well very large, global ERP solution providers, such as Oracle and SAP. Taleo is one of the mature providers in this market and has developed an excellent reputation for customer service, support, and product integrity. At its 10-year mark, Taleo embraced a strategic initiative to extend its product value and position the company to take greater marketshare by better leveraging its global community of customers and partners—online.

Solution focus and goals

For its customer community, which was already extraordinarily connected offline, Taleo sought a customer-focused, Web 2.0 platform that would help the company deliver easy-to-access online collaboration. Their vision: leverage their unique scale and network to help customers learn, engage, and extend the value of their investments in Taleo Talent Management. They wanted a robust platform that would help them achieve a number of strategic business goals: build community across their 2.7 million users; provide better customer service; raise awareness of their broad range of offerings; and give them better insight into their marketplace.

Jive Social Business Software at work

The Talent Grid, the world's largest talent community, was deployed as a set of three online communities: the Knowledge Exchange, an online customer community powered by Jive for peer-to-peer conversations; the Solution Exchange, a partner ecosystem that aggregated complementary solutions; and the Talent Exchange, a marketplace for connecting job candidates with companies.

Business value delivered

The first and only talent community of its kind, the Knowledge Exchange was an immediate hit with customers. The Knowledge Exchange delivers concrete business value to Taleo across a number of fronts, including:

• Centralized, ongoing engagement with their marketplace— 10 times the engagement they get on their website as measured by time spent—which increases their ability to upsell and cross-sell.
• A separate space for each user group, which makes it easier for customers to hold discussions and collaborate. Taleo's customer-facing teams actively listen to these discussions every day, which impacts how they think about products, services, and marketing.
• Improved, more cost-effective customer support by facilitating the ability of customers to connect and ask and answer questions among themselves.
The vast majority of questions posed on the Knowledge Exchange are now answered by other customers, complete with an invaluable perspective on their experiences and learning.

The backstory

How Taleo uses Jive to make HR organizations more effective
The efficiency and effectiveness of a company's Human Resources organization has a direct impact on a company's profitability: it is an accepted business maxim that it costs approximately three times more to recruit and train a new employee than it does to retain and develop an existing employee. The Internet and the globalization of the economy have forever changed the face of HR organizations, which have eagerly turned away from inefficient paper-based processes to software solutions that streamline how they hire, develop, and compensate their employees.

But while software has made HR operations more efficient, it has never removed the crucial people component of the business and the nuances associated with managing workforces large and small. Human Resources professionals rely no less on each other today than they did in the past.

Collaboration is part of the HR DNA

No one has to convince the Human Resources business sector of the value of sharing information and collaboration. It's built into their DNA. Taleo's HR customers run user groups around the globe, representing a variety of special interests and geographic priorities. Even though these HR professionals operate in a vibrant, connected community, they still lobbied Taleo for a platform to collaborate online as well as face-to-face.

Taleo initially tried to address the collaboration requests of its customer base with forum technology. However, forum technology was not intuitive enough to drive adoption. Customers who tried to engage via the third-party forum reported that the results to their queries from other customers were "like crickets." Forum technology also didn't serve the company's business goals.

"We realized that we had a competitive weapon—our customers—that we weren't leveraging," says Lisa Hartley, Director of Corporate Communications, Taleo, and Community Manager, Taleo Knowledge Exchange. "We could gain a lot of insight if we had a Social Business Software platform that would allow us to tap into the conversations they were having."

Aggressive growth goals drive strategic initiative

Taleo established its market leadership not as the low-cost provider, but rather as the high-impact provider. The company grows it business and offerings both organically and via acquisitions. Year over year, Taleo typically realizes a 20-30% annual organic growth and 10% growth through acquisitions (like compensation management) that expands their ability to provide a full suite of Talent Management solutions.

To maintain its market leadership and double-digit growth, Taleo embraced a strategic initiative to extend its product value proposition by taking its vibrant "offline" community of customers and partners online. Their vision: leverage their unique scale and network to help customers learn, engage, and extend the value of their Taleo Talent Management investments. Over time this took the form of a three-pronged strategic initiative called the Talent Grid, which is made up of three microsites:

• A Knowledge Exchange for customer-to-customer conversations, information exchange, and collaboration (the subject of this case study).
• A Solutions Exchange to communicate to customers the wealth of partner solutions already pre-integrated with Taleo such as assessments, background checks, and other ancillary capabilities not core to the Taleo solution.
• A Talent Exchange to centralize global job opportunities for Taleo customers and candidates that use the Taleo system.

Long, exacting vendor selection process

Taleo Solutions Exchange and Talent Exchange were both developed in-house. The Taleo Knowledge Exchange team also looked at building their own solution for the Knowledge Exchange using Drupal, free open-source software. However, after hearing anecdotal evidence of other companies spending up to three-quarters of a million dollars and 6-12 months to create their own online communities, Taleo decided that inhouse development was not a fit because of the investment and time requirements.

Subsequently, the team evaluated community software, leaning heavily on Forrester's Wave report and Gartner's Magic Quadrant. (Taleo itself has the highest standing in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for e-recruitment software.) After narrowing the search to four vendors, the team put each vendor through an exhaustive review, which put Jive and one other vendor at the top of the list.

"Jive got our final vote because they had a strong, flexible platform—the operating word here is flexible—that gave us a lot of branding flexibility. And the fact that its capabilities were proven was an important factor," says Didi D'Errico, Vice President of Corporate Communications and executive sponsor of Knowledge Exchange, "because we didn't know what we didn't know."

The team looked hard at the platform technology and took a lot of time over the customer references. "In the end, we decided to go with what we felt was the most robust technology platform vs. some of the service bells and whistles from the other vendors. That turned out to be Jive Software."

Soft launches pave the way for the hard launch

The Knowledge Exchange, powered by Jive Social Business Software, was in beta for five months, first piloted to a 200-person Western User Group to ensure functionality and, in phase two of the pilot, adding a cross section of other users: one global company, some international folks, some senior executives, and a handful of Special Interest Groups.

"Our initial goal with phase two of the pilot was to add maybe 200 more users," says Lisa, "but word of mouth from the phase one users resulted in a waiting list of excited customers. We had 650 active users on the Knowledge Exchange by launch. We were aiming for 100-150 initially."

The usability of the software, reports Lisa, was a big driver of early adoption. She tells the story of one of the early pilot managers, an HR manager who set a goal for her team to visit Knowledge Exchange once a week. "She was shocked—and pleased—to find out that many were visiting the site every day!"

Taleo began rolling out the Knowledge Exchange, soft launching it across the country in the regional user group meetings (Denver, Chicago, New Jersey, and Toronto). "We would go to their face-to-face RUG and SIG meetings, promote Knowledge Exchange and its value to them, and register users right there," says Lisa.

The hard launch came later in the year at Taleo's annual user conference in Las Vegas. The word of mouth was so positive about the site that they nearly doubled community participants in the first week. Surveys done after launch suggested that 90% of the users felt the Knowledge Exchange met or exceeded their expectations.

"When we talked to our early Knowledge Exchange customers," says Didi, "we learned that they were using the community even more deeply than we'd imagined. Some even said that they began to go directly to the Knowledge Exchange with day-today operational or strategic questions—and were amazed with the quick and thorough replies they typically got from this new, extended set of go-to experts from other organizations. This was beyond what we were hoping for."

In the first five months after launch, the Knowledge Exchange attracted 2,300 users across the spectrum of HR executives, middle managers, and systems administrators. The engagement metrics for Knowledge Exchange are high: visitors spend an average of 9-10 minutes on the site, which Lisa says, is 10 times the engagement they get on their website, something the team hadn't expected in such a short time frame. Their expectations were exceeded in other areas as well.

"Although our focus for the Knowledge Exchange right now is on how we can use it to serve our customers' needs," says Lisa, "it's really a value-add tool for internal consumption as well. While we haven't measured it and can't provide hard numbers, it is very clear that our customer account managers are getting a drop-off in calls. And that's because our customer base is getting most of their questions answered by peers—and what used to be one question asked 62 times by different people can now be answered once and accessed by all."

Some of those questions are quite esoteric. "Has anyone ever used this software in the Turkish language?" was a question recently posted. "What are the pros and cons of launching a global career site: should you instead create a geo appropriate site in each region?" "Has anyone used Monster in India—if so, any cultural challenges we should be prepared for?"

"What also exceeded our expectations was the willingness of people to share and the lengths they would go to be helpful. To one inquiry about how to do better analysis on candidate data, one community member actually provided a detailed example— complete with a set of code he'd generated! And the selfreferencing aspect was beyond our wildest dreams," reports Lisa, who shared some of these customer comments with us:

• "The site is addicting! I'm sure you've already gotten a ton of great feedback, but I had to share with you first-hand, because it is impressive and a very useful tool for Taleo users."
• "I love that Knowledge Exchange gives us a platform to keep us informed."
• "Really functional, in some cases it is more functional than the 'big name' social networks in terms of discussing and the depth of information being discussed."
• "The KX has already saved us 5 support calls at my company."

Extending the community's reach

Taleo has plans for extending the reach of its Knowledge Exchange with Single Sign On integration with Taleo's core product solutions to make access even more a part of every day for Knowledge Exchange users. "We want to make it seamless for our customers who have a question or an idea while working in our Talent Management solution to pose the question in Knowledge Exchange without logging into the community," says Lisa.

Learn More About Jive

Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.

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