New HCM Trends of 2012

Aberdeen Research Group’s most recent Human Capital Management Trends 2012 report, conducted during the final two months of 2011, examines best-in-class talent management strategies and the technologies used to deploy them in practice. The study works to show common characteristics among best-in-class companies and their attempts at creating greater organizational efficiency through the use of fewer resources. It also showed that a result of better HR and talent management practices led to a better organizational fit for new employers, resulting in an increasing in the average quality of new hires.

The study involved close to 300 organizations, each categorized into one of three performance tiers: best-in-class, average, and laggard, based on a set of specific performance criteria. Best-in-class organizations were identified as those where 81 percent of employees reported that they were “highly engaged” within their organization; 71 percent of key jobs have an existing successor, and who experienced a 13 percent over-the-year improvement in hiring manager satisfaction.

The several common characteristics demonstrated by best-in-class organizations included: an above average understanding of business objectives and a commitment to align talent initiatives with those objectives; an investment in cutting-edge technology for the improvement of both talent and workforce management; and a organization-wide demand for better data access with the goal of streamlining HR and talent management processes in order to generate improved efficiency.