Jeremy Sisemore – Page 11

The $4.3 Billion War for Talent – Part One

07/29/2014 by Jeremy Sisemore

Article Written By: Michael Brown of HCL Technologies

Michael Brown is Global Head of HCM, HCL Technologies.

Companies look to spend record sums to manage HR processes and talent. Human capital management applications might just be the answer, but CXOs harbor concerns about integrating cloud solutions into existing landscapes.

For the last five years, human resources (HR) departments across the globe have been challenged to acquire and retain talent. This trend shows no sign of abating. There are a number of business factors impacting human capital management (HCM) as a whole, and particularly the HCM application landscape in a big way. A recent study by Aberdeen Group shows the following HCM trends and top HCM priorities:

Design HR systems to improve business outcomes

Today the face of HR is often a portal, rather than a person. Almost all firms now provide universal access to HR services through technology and web-based applications; dramatically changing the lifecycle practice of human resource management from acquisition to retirement. Organizations must determine what technology will enable a transformation of their HR practices and market or extend their Talent brand.

HR has a second transformation coming. This is being enabled by best-of-breed talent management solutions delivered from the cloud. This evolution into a more technology-based function with cloud-based HR and talent systems is providing improved business outcomes by addressing the following HR needs:

Reduce HR administration and compliance costs
Locate, retain, engage and develop global talent
Improve service and access to data for employees and managers
Provide real-time metrics to allow decision-makers to spot trends and manage the workforce more effectively
Enable the HR and talent functions to transform and become a more strategic partner for the business.

The current HCM application landscape

Many of the HCM systems in large companies’ legacy enterprise applications suites are not only limited in functionality, but must also support an outdated, architecturally-constrained software model. At the same time, the application landscape is being influenced by the following factors:

Cloud HCM and user experience
Today’s users want a simplified user interface (UI) that is modern, intuitive and streamlined. Cloud applications bring to the surface frequently performed tasks, work across platforms and require hardly any training.
What is required is a consumer-grade UI that should champion the themes of simplicity, mobility and extensibility to set the simplified UI apart.
Talent management and Big Data analytics driving cloud adoption
The topic of Big Data, HR analytics and predictive analytics has been given a lot of press lately, and rightfully so. It affords HR leaders an opportunity to show the direct impact of their processes and initiatives on business outcomes.
The dream of one system for both core HCM and talent management applications
For years, HR customers dreamt of a cohesive and integrated HR system with the best of both worlds: core HR and talent management functionality provided in the same system. Providers of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions have been promoting the promise of an integrated end-to-end HR suite.
Integration with legacy applications
In a recent global CXO survey commissioned by HCL, integration into existing landscapes was by far the biggest implementation issue faced when it comes to cloud deployments. Many organizations lack the integration skills needed to integrate HCM cloud solutions with legacy application landscapes as well as to manage the associated complexities.

According to recently published research on HR technology buying trends, the market is hotter than ever. As companies start a new war for talent, this $4.3+ billion market continues to explode with growth. In fact according to research conducted by Deloitte on behalf of Bersin, 57% of companies plan to make a major new HR software purchase in the next 18 months; of these, 20% indicated that they will replace their talent management applications with an integrated suite and 14% indicated that they are looking to replace their human resources and/or information management system.

Watch for part two next Tuesday!

How can a customer navigate the HR software market to ensure that it receives the best-fit solution for its organization? In part two of this series, we will talk about why it’s important to take a holistic view of HR processes and how to work with a trusted IT partner to create a tailored HCM roadmap.

Michael Brown is Global Head of HCM, HCL Technologies.

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SAP Leads the Way to Industry Cloud

07/29/2014 by Jeremy Sisemore

WALLDORF — SAP AG announced plans to bring industry solutions to the cloud by combining its unrivaled expertise in industry-specific business processes with the technical creativity of its global ecosystem and broad customer base. To meet this goal, SAP has created a dedicated Industry Cloud organization, led by Simon Paris, in which the company’s historic industry strength will be used to develop prescriptive, industry-based cloud road maps that will help simplify and transform businesses.

SAP plans to co-innovate with customers and partners to deliver industry-specific solutions expected to rapidly proliferate across the 25 industries SAP serves. In the industry cloud model, partners and customers are envisioned to co-innovate with SAP on industry cloud offerings. These industry cloud solutions are anticipated to offer customers specialized, next-generation business processes and intuitive interfaces that can be easily and quickly deployed across a public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure, depending on which model best serves the customer’s needs. These industry cloud solutions are intended to run on SAP Cloud powered by SAP HANA via SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, a fully managed, subscription-based cloud service used by customers today to run mission-critical SAP applications and manage vast amounts of Big Data all on one real-time business platform.

“Working in industries with highly specialized challenges, we will focus on our customers’ most relevant business problems and then work creatively and collaboratively to develop industry cloud solutions,” said Paris. “With SAP’s proven integration, consistency and coherency across all lines of business, mobile, analytics and technology, we are primed to deliver the deepest and broadest industry cloud solutions in the world, offering tremendous value to our significant customer base, our-ever growing number of new SAP customers and the global SAP ecosystem.”

Cloud-Based Momentum Climbing Across Industries

SAP has already achieved notable success in leading the way to the industry cloud model, including in the following industries:

Chemicals

To better serve the chemical industry, SAP has launched a “chemical-company-in-a-box” solution, offering pre-configured enterprise resource planning (ERP) for chemical manufacturers in the cloud. Supporting industry-specific requirements, SAP is partnering with Qnovate with plans to develop chemical-specific functionality for the SAP Cloud for Customer solution, and is already delivering a cloud-based service for product safety and hazardous materials management with the SAP EHS Regulatory Documentation OnDemand solution.

Financial Services

In corporate banking, SAP has developed the innovative SAP Financial Services Network, which helps simplify transactions between corporations and financial institutions. The network offers multiple services over one single channel while supporting the deployment of new services. Customers like Visa, Inc. and Citibank N.A. use SAP Financial Services Network to help reduce payment rejection rates and provide enhanced visibility to corporate treasury.

To enable insurers to quickly offer the right insurance offerings to clients, SAP has introduced the SAP Circular Authority for Insurance application, a cloud-based solution for tracking, interpreting and analyzing Insurance Service Office (ISO) circulars. The intuitive user experience provides quick, concise insights into circular changes while helping to reduce overall regulatory management efforts and costs.

In the area of fostering new innovation in the banking and payments industry, SAP has become a global sponsor of the SWIFT 2014 Innotribe Startup Challenge, a year-round program that offers up-and-coming entrepreneurs the opportunity to showcase new concepts and products to leading global financial institutions and early-stage investors. This initiative supports young companies dedicated to bringing new and innovative solutions that can help transform the industry and improve people’s financial lives around the world.

Healthcare

In healthcare, SAP HANA is increasingly the co-innovation platform of choice for select personalized care startups, including Vancouver’s PHEMI, which has introduced a Big Data Services Platform that lets healthcare organizations offer value-based services like personalized medicine, population health management, business intelligence, research registries and more.

Higher Education & Research

To support education, SAP has undertaken multiple design thinking sessions with universities worldwide to develop a next-generation cloud-based student information system (SIS). SAP intends to offer higher education institutions the best of both worlds: access to a redesigned SIS built for cloud, mobile and 21st-century students and administrators as well as the ability to extend and take advantage of existing SAP investments.

Industrial Machinery and Components

The convergence of the classical world of machines with the internet, referred to as “Industry 4.0” or “Industrial Internet,” has created a host of new opportunities. SAP is working with leading manufacturers to build solutions based on SAP HANA Cloud Platform for predictive maintenance and service in a co-innovation approach. With this type of solution, companies are envisioned to be able to significantly improve their service model and ultimately move toward a usage-based business model with their customers.

Professional Services

Transforming the bid management process for project-based professional services customers through the cloud, SAP for Professional Services solutions link the bid management sales process directly with project execution. The offerings are designed to help firms to win more deals, improve profitability and secure execution against project plans by integrating SAP Cloud for Customer, the SAP Jam social software platform, the SAP Commercial Project Management application and business intelligence analytics capabilities developed specifically for the professional services industry.

Public Services

For social services, SAP has become a Code for America Brigade sponsor in 2014, partnering with the developer community and connecting the grassroots skills and energy of more than 3,000 volunteers worldwide to SAP technology and innovation, including free developer access.

Retail

For customer insight, SAP has launched the SAP Customer Activity Repository application, a retail data repository powered by the SAP HANA platform that serves as an underlying foundation for all operations. This enables retailers to leverage the true potential of omni-commerce as well as the demand for the personalization for the individualized shopping experience. Recent efforts have been made by SAP partner gicom, which is working to provide one of the first solutions built on SAP Customer Activity Repository.

Sports

In athletic event planning, cloud-based SAP Event Ticketing software helps to generate ticket sales for events across all sales channels, offering an overview of customers and costs to maximize revenue per seat.

For player management, the SAP Scouting solution helps executives, coaches and scouts identify and acquire talent, compare draftees in real time and ultimately help put the best product on the field. The cloud-based solution provides advanced capabilities for both college and professional scouting, offering new insights and the tools to efficiently asses and compare players.

Travel and Transportation

SAP enables travel providers to better connect with their passengers and partners to create a new revenue stream with consumer engagement solutions from SAP. The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) is combining a top-ranked mobile app with the cloud-based SAP Precision Marketing solution and SAP HANA to connect passengers to retailers and event, sport and cultural venues to deliver compelling, personalized offers in real time. STM was recognized as an innovation leader with the Constellation Research SuperNova Award for redefining the passenger travel experience.

“We intend to shake things up for ourselves and the market by asking a new generation of customers to help us solve their next-generation business problems,” said Christoph Behrendt, senior vice president, Products & Innovation, and head of Industry Cloud, SAP. “They can imagine forward-looking industry-specific use cases better than any team of in-house software developers. Industry IT leaders are going to embrace a partnership that brings together their needs with the deep industry expertise of SAP to co-innovate elegant, simple solutions for the cloud.”

For more information, including news and coverage from SAPPHIRE NOW this week, visit the SAP News Center. – See more at: http://www.news-sap.com/

2013 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report by ExecuNet

09/30/2013 by Jeremy Sisemore

ExecuNet_Executive_Job_Market_Intelligence_Report_2013

Click the above link and print the document for easiest view and read. There is lots of great intel on what industries & geographies are hot for Executive Job Growth as well as compensation, sign-on bonus, annual bonus, stock option information to help give you the edge! Want to know what strategies executives are using in their job search, this is a good read.

These Days, Recruiters Are Worth the Money

04/26/2013 by Jeremy Sisemore

These Days, Recruiters Are Worth the Money. Article Written by: Vanessa Merit Nornberg

When it comes to sourcing the right interview candidates, I’ve never been keen to use recruiters. But I recently changed my mind. My company, Metal Mafia, has an excellent candidate screening process, a super training program, and a very successful team of employees to show for it.

But hiring has always been a difficult task for me because each time I get ready to hire, it takes me forever to find the right type of candidates to even get the screening process started.

Despite the fact that I carefully consider where to advertise for candidates–I try to maximize the search dollars and get a good mix of potential applicants–it always takes me a long time to find people suited well to the company, and therefore, even worth interviewing.

I’ve tried everything from placing ads on large job boards like Monster.com, to smaller specialized job boards that cater to sales hires or fashion jobs, to local university boards where I can post for free (or close to it). Each time, I experience the same slow crawl toward finally finding the right person. It has taken me up to five months to find the right kind of hire in the past. So in November when I decided I needed to think about hiring for the new year, I was not optimistic.

For me, recruiters have traditionally been out of the question because I figured they would be a waste of time and never be as good at sending me the right people for the job as I would be in reviewing resumes myself. They’re also too expensive for my small budget. But as I got ready to place my job ads again, one of my senior staff members came to me and offered me the name of a fashion recruiter she knew and thought could help. I was skeptical, but I called her anyway, figuring listening would cost me nothing.

The recruiter convinced me she would do a thorough job, but I still hesitated because of the price. I do not have large sums of money to devote to the hiring process, and by my calculations, when all was said and done, using the recruiter was going to cost me three times as much as my usual techniques. On the other hand, the recruiter would only charge me if she found someone I decided to hire, which meant I was risking nothing, and could always come back to my original methods. I bit the bullet and signed up, reminding myself “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

The recruiter sent me the resumes of 10 entry-level candidates. I screened six by phone, met three in person, and found the right hire–all in a month. The cost suddenly became much less, because I saved so much time in the process, and because I got a pool of applicants who were decidedly better to choose from than in the past. Even more interesting, perhaps, was an insight the right candidate shared with me during the interview process. When I asked why she had chosen to work with a recruiter rather than post on job boards, she said “because recruiters make sure your resume gets seen, while submitting via the Internet is like sending your resume into oblivion.”

If most people these days are thinking like my new hire, the recruiters will clearly have the best selection of candidates every time. Looks like I’ve got an essential new hiring strategy.

Vanessa Merit Nornberg: In 2004, Vanessa opened Metal Mafia, a wholesale body and costume jewelry company that sells to more than 5,000 specialty shops and retail chains in 23 countries. Metal Mafia was an Inc. 500 company in 2009.

Why Hiring B Players Will Kill Your Startup

02/20/2013 by Jeremy Sisemore

Written by investor Jon Soberg

B players and C players are far worse than D’s and F’s. In fact, in my experience, B players are the worst hires you can make.

Before getting into the details, it may be useful to level-set and explain what I mean by these employee stereotypes (although there have been some differences of opinion over the years.)

A player: Fully self-sufficient and takes initiative that positively impacts the company.
B player: Does some things well, but not fully self-sufficient, and not consistently strong.
C player: Just average, and does not excel in any area.
D player: Poor performer, and shouldn’t last long if you are a half-capable manager.
F player: Should be out…like yesterday.

Good Enough is the Enemy of Great

When you have someone on your team that you think is doing well enough, you will likely trust them with mission-critical tasks like hiring or pushing code. This will impact the entire evolution of your company. If you entrust important decisions to someone who is just “good enough,” you will watch the opportunities pass.

This is why hiring B players will kill your company. The work will be good, but not great. They will deliver on time most of the time, and hustle sometimes, but not always.

Let’s say you are in a startup, and you have a B player as your vice president of sales. The person will close a good account, but won’t consistently beat targets. If they go head-to-head against a competitor with better salespeople, this person (and potentially the whole startup) will lose. If you’re an early-stage startup, you are walking dead. Raising the next round will be like selling against a stronger competitor — you won’t ultimately win.

I have built multiple engineering teams from the ground up, and I always started with an anchor rock star. The engineer that everyone wanted to work with, and whose work was so solid that he or she made everyone else more efficient and effective. I’ve been asked before how many engineers it would take to replace someone like that, and the correct answer is that there is no way to replace a person like this. Even if I could hire 10 B player engineers for the same price, I would never do it. The product quality would suffer and the time-to-market would slow; you simply can’t replace skill with numbers.

Lessons learned

My opinions on hiring and people haven’t come by accident. I’ve got scars from my career (and I’ve seen it from many angles — founder, executive, consultant, investor). I’ve made some pretty bad hires along the way. The really bad hires are the easy ones — it is obvious when someone fails or is clearly the wrong fit. You wonder what you were thinking, but at the end of the day, you can reverse these mistakes quickly and efficiently.

I have needed to fire a fair number of people as well, and I will say this is one learning from my experience — I have never felt that I fired someone too soon.

At one of my startups, I fired my entire QA department and made the engineers do all their own QA. The result: better quality product, released faster. The QA department had become a bottleneck, and they weren’t doing quality work. The engineers weren’t happy, the product management team wasn’t happy, and the product suffered. I saw the release cycles slowing down, and saw some of the tension between the QA and Engineering departments. As I dug in, my conclusion was one I had not originally wanted to see — I had a B player at the top of the QA department, and the rest of the department was B and below. It was killing us. My biggest mistake was not recognizing it sooner.

When I was a little boy, my uncle used to tell me “he who hesitates is lost.” Those are words to live by.

I have plenty of individual examples as well, and the toughest ones are always the ones who are doing fine. Managers often blame themselves. Is the job not well-defined? Does the person have enough support? Maybe they just need more time, and they will improve. It isn’t easy to find great people, so why let the decent person go hoping to find someone better?

There is an opportunity cost to keeping someone when you could do better. At a startup, that opportunity cost may be the difference between success and failure. Do you give less than full effort to make your enterprise a success? As an entrepreneur, you sweat blood to succeed. Shouldn’t you have a team that performs like you do?

Every person you hire who is not a top player is like having a leak in the hull. Eventually you will sink.

Jon Soberg is a Managing Director at Blumberg Capital, where he invests in early stage companies, specializing in FinTech, SaaS, and eCommerce. Prior to joining Blumberg Capital, Jon has been a serial entrepreneur and senior executive in multiple companies including Ditech, Broadband Digital Group and Adforce, which had a highly successful IPO.

A CFA Charterholder and adjunct faculty in the Wharton Marketing Department, Jon earned a B.S in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College, an M.S. in Engineering from Northwestern University, and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing from the Wharton School, where he is a Palmer Scholar.

SAP Leads the Way to Industry Cloud

2013 Executive Job Market Intelligence Report by ExecuNet

These Days, Recruiters Are Worth the Money

Why Hiring B Players Will Kill Your Startup

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