Taleo and Peoplesoft Recruitment

For a very brief while I got to work on the implementation of Taleo recruitment application .It happened fortuitously.

Senior team member, who was coordinating the regional rollout under the stewardship of Implementation lead based out of the Corporate IT Team, went on a extended marriage break.So she requested me to proxy for her during this hiatus.

I gleefully accepted this opportunity, as it not only provided me respite from the rigmarole of production support job ,it also puts me in vantage position to compare Taleo’s staffing piece with Peoplesoft 8.8 Recruit/E-Recruit/E-Recruit Desktop Manager (which was among the multitudes of PS modules which I worked in my previous Organization)

During this 30 day period, I was introspecting on general terms on why organizations have adopted, what is commonly known as “Best of Bred” application strategy -where they have opted for pure-play players providing exclusive solution in only that area ,with only tenuous ability to plug in with the Core System of the organization

Based on my limited worldview, there are several compelling reasons for implementing Peoplesoft Recruiting Solution.Peoplesoft has made staffing integral part of their HRMS strategy .The recruiting product line in Peoplesoft is built based on strong best organizational practices which has been a consistent cornerstone of all their HR product line.(Even giving allowance for sales gibberish, that Peoplesoft has consistently expanded the product frontier is beyond dispute).

For any organization that has successfully implemented Peoplesoft Core HRMS - recruiting solution comes with in-built integration with the Core HRMS .This can be leveraged tremendously to tighten business process linkages, technology infrastructure consolidation and optimize the Peoplesoft expertise available in the organization.The transaction orientation of ERP’S ,with most of them evolving from being ‘department ‘software could be held against their ability to meet collaborative nature of processes like staffing .However PS 8.8 had conquered many of these barriers

During this period I did a quick exercise of understanding lacunas in PS 8.8 Recruit suite

-Many tables that Recruit application use are set up as part of the Core HRMS Configuration. Hence there will be significant challenge in arriving at a fine balance between Internal “HR Language” and external community friendly language. For example- Locations/Job Code/Job Functions need to be configured with lot of consideration

-Multiple Approvers for job requisition is not supported in Peopleosft.We have only three role players defined in the system-Originator/Approver/Recruiter

-The applicant facing functionality that is available through Peoplesoft E-Recruit is not very friendly/elegant and can be a very tedious, sometimes hostile experience for the applicants. This may serve as impediment in encouraging more resumes getting channelised through the career site .For navigation enhancement would be required for cross applications

-Resume Processing functionality (extracting key data elements from a candidate's resume and automatically populating those fields in the application) is not available as part of the core product offering. It requires separate licensing

-No delivered functionality for supporting resumes from Staffing Partners/agencies who would typically constitute a major recruitment channel of any large organization

-No Provision of creating candidate files and better sharing of candidates with other users by creating configurable folders outside the context of a requisition

-The Delivered Recruit Workforce reports may not support the complex reporting requirements of the organization. Several custom reports needs to be required which may require significant time

-No “Job Agent” feature which would provide for applicants and employees to notified via e-mail when applicable job openings are available (or did I miss it)

-No Provision for Multiple Attachments (only one attachment per application) which is very restrictive

-Minimal user-end system configuration required for certain functionalities to work-for example Hi NT or W2000 is required for Resume Processing

-Peoplesoft has no recommended security strategy for hosting the e-recruit application on the Corporate Career pages for external login. So organizations have to evolve their own methodology for secure access to the external applicant facing e-recruit application


I understand now that PS 8.9 Talent Acquisition and Candidate Gateway address many of these issues and there is sudden spurt of interest in this product. It would be great if these interests translate to big wins.

I still believe that it makes real sense to have Core HRMS and major portion of the Talent Acquisition and Talent Management piece from the same Vendor.And today only Peoplesoft and to same extent SAP might be providing this complete solution. I think the advantages that accrue, in ease of implementation and slightly superior functionality, from point solutions can be offset by the tremendous value that integrated HRMS solution from the single vendor

The only disadvantage that PS perpetually suffer is that in many big organization, the running version is not the most recent version .And firmly entrenched view that upgrade is virtually a new implementation makes them take the simpler route of buying Point solutions