Just missed is also over

Attracting skilled employees, retaining them over the long term and developing them in line with individual career planning is more important than ever. 80 percent of the HR managers surveyed in a KPMG study are of this opinion.

Admittedly, three quarters admit that they have not yet made much progress. Particularly in industries with short deadlines, it is difficult to make progress. Personnel development, for example, often falls victim to supposedly more important issues.

But those who only make short-term personnel decisions have to dig deep into their pockets. Instead of carefully introducing talents to future tasks, an external expert has to be brought in quickly. Whether he actually proves to be the right choice is another matter.

Does e-recruiting deliver what it promises?

This risk lurks in numerous products that providers of e-recruiting solutions also use to woo customers. The promise is that advertisements can be created and distributed via the media in no time at all.

Appointments for interviews can be arranged just a few minutes after applications are received, they say. In fact, there is a lack of substance here. Anyone who does not know what they are looking for will hardly be able to recruit successfully.

Talent management cannot function without precise knowledge of the required competencies. Companies must be able to describe personnel requirements in a qualified manner and make statements about existing competencies and skills that are as precise as possible.

The PACE (Process Aligned Competence Excellence) program, which SAP launched back in 2001, is worth mentioning here. The goal was to define roles for process-oriented consulting as precisely as possible and to analyze existing skills in the company and at partners.

The German University for Continuing Education (DUW) also emphasizes the importance of competency-related information for successful talent management. It advises competency catalogs that define competency profiles for individual jobs and roles, but also interview guidelines and behavioral indicators to determine competencies in applicants.

As the researchers criticize, competency and talent management in practice is hardly strategically oriented and the IT programs used for this purpose are only marginally evaluable and adaptable.

Quality poor

This brings us to the core problem. Many solutions that supposedly support companies in talent management lack quality. Yet there is a great deal of potential in the use of IT.

If processes and IT solutions are dovetailed in line with requirements, time-to-hire and cost-per-hire can be significantly reduced when filling vacancies - whether with internal or external staff.

The ability to leverage such potential is also the hallmark of our proprietary development, HCM4all. It stands for competence-based human capital management and combines many years of experience in HR consulting in the SAP environment with the use of modern cloud technology.

The linchpin of the e-recruiting solution is predefined, cross-divisional competency profiles for over 100 roles. They make it easier for users to create a requirements profile for an SAP architect, for example, because the relevant core competencies are already stored.

In order to define competencies and skills realistically, the solution allows weighting according to "must-haves" and "nice-to-haves". In practice, this is often done carelessly. If you take a closer look, the candidate should actually have more important qualifications than required.

When defining must-have and should-have criteria, HR and IT can exchange views on the solution to reach agreement on the actual qualifications required.

The solution also enables headhunters to enter candidates directly into the system and assess their skills. Applicants can also log in to assess themselves on the basis of defined mandatory and target competencies. The matching technology immediately shows how closely requirements and self-assessment match.

Ultimately, the solution also has internal application potential. It not only supports the development of talent pools, but also records and evaluates employee competencies. Together with their superiors, they can verify the competencies recorded there and expand them through targeted qualification measures.