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Secret Weapon in the "War for Talent"

CFOs need top people to establish themselves and their departments as performance drivers within their companies. Modern CFOs are engaging in the “war for talent”, but not just with pay cheques and job ads. The clever ones are searching for and finding secret weapons in the cloud.

FOCUS ON: Cloud Computing,

“War for Talent”: this rather martial-sounding term is one way to describe the increasingly fierce competition for professionally qualified staff. The reasons are obvious as there is an acute shortage of skilled workers in many industries. In addition, a change is currently underway in the labour market and the up and coming intake, sometimes referred to as “Generation Y”, will no longer be swayed solely by traditional incentives such as a company’s prestige, a company car or bonuses.

“But what’s all that got to do with me?” you might be asking. “That’s why we have a human resources department.” As Michael Schnetzer, head of the German division of the Hackett Group, confirmed in an interview on FINANCE-TV, this is precisely where many CFOs are wrong. He explains: “Many CFOs complain about the backlogs in finding top talent for their finance departments. CFOs need to give HR a clear assessment of their needs so that recruiters can find the right people for the job.” Currently, as Schnetzer added in the interview, there’s a communications gap between the finance and human resources departments in many companies.

The software giants are investing billions

To overcome this issue, more and more companies are starting to use software solutions that handle the full range of human resources tasks, in order to create a communications platform which is shared by HR and the various departments in the company. These solutions provide the basic structure, which can be adjusted over time, for covering all aspects of human resources management, including needs analysis, talent management, staff qualifications and continuing education. The “war for talent” is being fought on each of these fronts, not only by the size of salary offered on monthly pay slips.

Given how critical an issue the shortage of skilled workers will be for the future of almost all businesses, it is no wonder that the major software vendors like SAP and Oracle have expanded their portfolio to offer their customers integrated solutions in personnel management as well. The seriousness with which they are taking on these tasks can be seen in the sums they have invested: both have spent billions acquiring SuccessFactors (SAP) and Taleo (Oracle).

Besides the top dogs, other smaller players are trying to position themselves in this lucrative niche of the software market, including specialists such as P&I, rexxsystems and Veda. Many of the HR solutions on the market are available in cloud versions, which in turn reduces the drain on IT budgets.

The “real” performance drivers for CFOs

CFOs benefit in two ways from using such a solution: not only will they be more able to identify and communicate their own personnel needs to HR, but also other departments in the company will be better able to recruit the “right” people. And that’s exactly what CFOs need to see happen as they transform their position from focussing purely on the financial to being what some are calling the Chief Performance Officer. If the company’s performance is supposed to be the most important measure of your work as a CFO, then you have a good reason to add an examination of such a platform to the agenda of your next meeting with HR and have IT start looking at potential solutions.

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