With over 4000 talent acquisition customers and a strong financial track record, Taleo continues to reign as a market leader in recruitment technology. Every other solution provider we met with this year, listed Taleo as one of its top competitors. One reason is Taleo’s ability to respond to the demands of its customers through strategic partnerships and product innovation. Today’s leading organizations are looking for more collaboration…finding that link between the social networking phenomenon and talent management. In fact, we found that the majority of organizations are dissatisfied with their solution provider’s ability to integrate with social networking. Taleo is stepping up to the plate in a big way.

In the spirit of creating an open community, Taleo offers its customers access to the Taleo Talent Grid. 

The Taleo Talent Grid was announced last year, and now is coming to life.  This strategy, which represents the next wave of SaaS solutions, opens up Taleo’s applicant tracking and talent management software to enable easy access to third party applications, tools, and candidates themselves. 

The goal of the grid is to give customers the entire range of tools, information, and support they need to source, recruit, and assess, and manage their talent candidates. The Universal Profile allows candidates to create descriptions of their skills and past experiences to share with employers using the grid.

With more than 2.9 million users, 175 million candidates, and 70 technology and consulting partners, Taleo customers can now tap into each other’s resources and the resources of partners to enable a complete talent acquisition solution.

The Talent Grid includes three components:

1. Solution Exchange for Taleo partners – an open “AppStore-like” environment where Taleo partners can easily publish and share their third party applications (e.g. sourcing tools, assessment tools and systems, candidate sources, job boards, and more),
2. Talent Exchange for organizations to reach active and passive candidates – an open candidate-sharing network which enables any Taleo customer to share their candidates with others, creating a business-to-business job network,
3. Knowledge Exchange for information sharing and social networking, a place where experts can share their best practices with each other.

If we think about SaaS (Software as a Service) business solutions, the Taleo Talent Grid is the third step in providing a truly on-demand service.  Not only does Taleo provide software and services, they now allow customers to tap into a complete network of third party solutions, data, content, and information.  (Read “How SaaSY is your HR Software Vendor for more information…http://www.bersin.com/Blog/post/How-SaasY-is-your-HR-Software-Vendor--What-does-SaaS-mean-to-you.aspx).

We believe the Taleo Talent Grid is a brilliant next-step in the evolution of talent acquisition systems and solutions.  Although still in its infancy, Taleo Talent Grid will likely prove to be beneficial to customers, partners and an ever-changing talent acquisition market. 

For more information on the Taleo Talent Grid and other talent acquisition solutions, please read our soon-to-be release industry study Talent Acquisition Systems 2010:  Vendor Solutions and Best-Practices, coming out in the next few weeks!