Predictions: Capital & Consolidation

The turn of the century, from the year 2000 to 2001, was a milestone event, with expectations of big happenings. Well, what did happen in our industry, and what’s coming up? This article revisits two main trends in recruiting that iLogos Research observed in 2000, and considers how they will unfold in 2001. It’s not just human resources anymore… Contrary to a popular notion, your role as a recruiter is not solely to become a recruiting marketer or sales person. Instead (congratulations!) you are becoming a manager of capital ? human capital, that is. HR is no longer noted for its administrative work. Today we deal with capital, not resources. In 2000, Wall Street made its entry in this field not only with heavy investments, but also with the recognition that corporate value today resides more in intangibles. Among those, current employees are now perceived as a key element, along with the ability to attract and retain talent. In 2001, HR people ? I mean Human Capital experts ? will start to achieve more impact on the company. More CEOs, CFOs, and other senior executives will require metrics in order to quantify requests from analysts and start to seriously manage their most valuable asset: people. Strategic corporate decisions will include the consideration of human capital variables. To do your job, you need to be ready to learn to speak a new language ? the language of Human Capital metrics. This e-volution will be possible thanks to the clear understanding that more automation is needed at the level of the acquisition of this capital. Automation will expedite and enhance the processes. More specifically, metrics measurement and tracking is made possible today thanks to the application of technology. Human Capital solutions will slowly become as indispensable to the corporation as the accounting package! To arrive there we will need new standards to appear on the technology side (like the HR-XML Consortium), and on the reporting side (like staffing.org) to help companies build and standardize. Standards will need to reflect the changes:

Consolidation Of Industry Solutions If 2000 was the year of the consolidation of job boards and the reign of Monster.com, in addition to the death of the client/server hiring management solution; 2001 is the year for consolidation of HMS solutions. As the market returns to reality, investors’ realism will put a stop to many solutions that have invested in chasing an unrealistic gain of market share with end-to-end vaporware. Nevertheless, end-to-end is a very important concept to understand. At iLogos Research, we prefer to call it integrated Recruiting Supply Chain. It centers on understanding the issues around the question “How can you become a strategic contributor if you have to spend 80% of your time on administrative issues?” Web integration allows for the streamlining of many processes and provides for the use of key benefits of new technology such as permission marketing, self-service, one-click posting, streamlined approval processes and more. Integration & Implementation In 2001, the new buzz will become integrated HCM solutions, to solve human capital issues. It sounds lofty and attractive. Of course the implementation will remain a real challenge for 2001. But a major building block for allowing this to become a reality will start to appear for many organizations. That is, the birth of an enterprise standard skills database. Dealing with a dynamic skills database is a crucial step to take in order to optimize the discrepancy existing today between the supply of skills and the demand for skills. Finally, new fads will appear, like wireless and broadband video, but truly useful applications will not emerge from there for next year. 2001 is the year for all companies to catch up with the new buzz of e-volution in an integrated way and start to use truly global and shared solutions to benefit their processes for deployment of talent. <*SPONSORMESSAGE*>