“The 80s: The decade that made us” – this title from a recent television series from National Geographic Channel hits home.
What’s the significance of this title, you might ask? It’s significant to us for two reasons: (1) The 80s really made us – both Nicole and I were born in the 80s and, (2) the 80s also mark the beginning of Generation Y, or what has become known as the Millennials. As a Millennial, we both are part of the first generation to grow up with a computer in our homes, Internet, a cell phone, cable TV, and social networking. We have witnessed first-hand the impact the Millennials are having on the workplace as their work habits and workplace expectations are very different from those of the Baby Boomer generation who has dominated the workforce for years.
You have probably read or experienced first-hand that retaining Millennials requires more than just a high salary; they are focused on career growth, diverse work experience, flexible work environments, personal and professional development, and the use of technology in the workplace. Competitive pay and benefits are just the price of admission, but retaining the best talent today requires effective employee development, promise of career growth, and robust bench strength planning – placing Succession & Development processes at the center of today’s talent management.
As part of the SuccessFactors product team, we recognize the impact of the Millenials on your organization and are focused on delivering capabilities that enable organizations to implement new ways of identifying, developing, and retaining top talent. Our November 2013 release is no exception. We have released several enhancements to our Succession & Development capabilities that will help you identify, develop and retain key talent across your organization. A redesigned career worksheet and new talent pool capabilities increase employee engagement and make succession planning easier than ever.
Talent Pools (Beta)
The revamped Talent Pools are central to the November release. Our goals while developing the new Talent Pools were to provide an enhanced user experience, add new capabilities, leverage our latest technology architecture, and provide a tool that can be easily adopted. Not only have we made the pools easy to use, but we have also made them flexible. We recognize that pools are a complementary, lightweight approach to named succession planning – something that can be rolled out to managers allowing them to build bench strength. What we have witnessed in the market and heard from you is an emerging tiered strategy around Succession planning – leveraging named Succession planning capabilities for top positions while using more generic Pool based planning for a broader population. The new Pools are a great addition to the Succession & Development portfolio for implementing such strategies.
Figure 1: The Revamped Talent Pools home page demonstrates our focus on enhanced user experience.
The new Pool enhancements also introduce a simple user experience to create Talent Pools from the Pools’ home page and addnominees to the Pool by assigning readiness levels. Users can select an individual to view their nomination details including nominations to other Talent Pools. In addition, managers can take advantage of new features to
extend the Pool usage to development planning, managing high potentials in their teams, project staffing and other related tasks.
Figure 2: A Talent Pool with High Potential users, created by leveraging new Pool capabilities
Another key aspect of empowering managers is providing customers an increased level of permission granularity. Additional granularity helps HR leaders roll out talent programs to their teams without compromising data security and privacy. We have continued this trend in November by releasing several enhancements to our Talent Pools and Succession positions. These permission enhancements allow administrators to design permission models that limit manager permissions to their teams within the application as well as in the reporting framework.
Figure 3: Enhanced permission model limits access to Pools and Positions
The new and improved user experience, advanced permission controls, and support for additional talent managementtasks make the new Talent Pools a compelling tool for managing your bench strength.
Enhanced Career Worksheet UI
The November release also features a new career worksheet user experience. Based on the same design principles as the SuccessFactors home page, and as part of our continuing commitment to provide a consumer-grade user experience, the redesigned career worksheet features an easy to use UI that promotes self-development and helps improve employees’ sense of responsibility for their own careers.
Figure 4: The new and improved Career Worksheet
For more information on the SuccessFactors November release, please visit the SuccessFactors Customer Community.
