Midsize Blog Articles Human Capital Management and Talent Management Dec. 2014 http://blogs.oracle.com/midsize

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Table of Contents

Recruiting via Social Sourcing and Viral Job Sharing 3

Lyft Chooses Oracle HCM Cloud to Adopt Modern Best Practice 5

7 Questions for Tony Kender, Head of Oracle North America HCM Sales 8

People First! The Priority for Midsize Companies 10

Growing Midsize Companies Want HCM Best Practices and Mobile 11

The Fastest Oracle HCM Cloud Implementation Ever? 12

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Recruiting via Social Sourcing and Viral Job Sharing

By Jim Lein, Midsize, Applications Business Group, Oracle

What’s the First Thing You’d Do If You Were Looking for a Job?

A conversation about modern talent sourcing with Richard Atkins, EVP of Certus Solutions

Not that I’m looking for a new job…but if I were, I’d do two things. First, I’d tell everyone I know. Second, I’d make sure all my social profiles are putting my best foot forward. I came to those conclusions after my recent conversation with Richard Atkins, EVP of Oracle Cloud Applications at Certus Solutions. Certus Solutions is the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) Oracle Fusion Applications and Training Partner of the Year for 2014.

I’d take those two steps because I’d want it to be easy for the right company to find me. That “right” company would be one that has adopted Modern Best Practice across their operations, exploiting social, cloud, mobile, analytics, big data, and the Internet of Things to achieve more, faster and with fewer resources.

“Today, progressive companies are winning the battle for best talent by proactively searching their employees’ extended social networks for best fit candidates,” says Atkins. “Gone are the days when recruiting departments spent most of their time writing up job descriptions, posting them on job boards and with agencies, and then sitting around waiting for candidates to apply.”

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Beyond LinkedIn to Social Powered Referrals

Social networks have been the sandbox for recruiters for quite some time but modern talent sourcing solutions like Oracle Talent Acquisition Cloud are taking what once was an art to what is now more of a science.

“Recruiting the best talent is getting more and more challenging so the most successful companies are recruiting all the time,” says Atkins. “Manually searching LinkedIn profiles is certainly better than the old way of doing things but it’s definitely not modern best practice. Referrals are a far more powerful way and that’s where the automation capabilities of social sourcing solutions really come into their own.”

A successful referral strategy starts with encouraging all existing employees to build out their social networks. Once a job profile is created, an automated sourcing solution can be used to first look for employees who fit that profile and send them a link in case they might be interested. Concurrently, that solution will troll through employees’ social networks and find other people that fit the ideal profile. When matches are found, emails are sent to employees who are connected to the candidates, asking them to refer the job to those qualified candidates. And, as Atkins points out, “The automated solution identifies candidates that may be good matches even if they’re not looking for a new job.”

Scary? No…Scary Good

Trolling your employees’ social networks might sound a little scary. But automated sourcing tools are not tyrannical cyber monsters with minds of their own. They can only use information you give them access to.

“You control the automation,” says Atkins. “You determine the keywords and set the parameters. You tell the system how many candidates to return to you. Maybe you start off with sharing one job profile with just a couple of employees and politely nudging them. ‘Hey… we notice that you are linked to these people. They look like they would be great candidates.’”

With Oracle’s Taleo Social Sourcing, once candidates are identified and apply, they are moved more quickly and efficiently through the selection process. First, referrals are assigned to different categories than people who randomly apply. And, since candidates have already been screened via their social profiles and relationships, you can ask applicants to answer just a few rules-based questions that generate talent pools within the system. That helps identify who you would consider to be star candidates.

“It’s viral job sharing that you control,” says Atkins. “It’s developing a recruiting network that builds up within the system on itself. Candidates that apply become part of the network, automatically spreading your recruiting net wider. Everything is tracked automatically, providing analytics about people who are being referred and who your top referrers are. There’s no real limit how far that can go.”

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Lyft Chooses Oracle HCM Cloud to Adopt Modern Best Practice

By Jim Lein, Midsize, Applications Business Group, Oracle

San Francisco has one of those good news/bad news problems. Just about everyone has a job. That’s good news for everyone with bills to pay but potentially bad news if you’re job is to hire and retain top talent.

Such is the situation for Ron Storn, VP of People at San Francisco-based ride-sharing and revolutionary startup—Lyft. Storn was recently an executive customer speaker in an Oracle OpenWorld session devoted to strategies for adopting Modern Best Practice in high-growth organizations. Modern Best Practice exploits new capabilities made possible by emerging technologies—Cloud, Mobile, Analytics, Social, The Internet of Things, and Big Data—to enable organizations to achieve more, faster and with less resources. Lyft’s core business model is predicated on those technologies.

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people facing the dilemma of getting from Point A to Point B simply tap a button on Lyft’s mobile app and a friendly Lyft driver pulls up to the curb in a matter of minutes. For Storn, the challenge of finding talent is a bit more difficult but he’ll soon have help from Oracle’s HCM Cloud solutions.

“Our mission is to change transportation as we know it by building a peer-to-peer transit solution that works with cities to make them safer, more affordable, and better connected,” says Storn. “That now includes providing commuters with a daily transportation option—like Lyft Line—that connects passengers traveling along similar routes, a solution that has incredible potential to decrease traffic congestion and green house gas emissions.”

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Hyper Growth Amplifies Onboarding Challenges

Lyft, like most growing companies, needs top talent to achieve its lofty goals. The company now operates in more than 65 cities and plans to go global in 2015. In September of 2013 Lyft had about 100 employees. A year later they had more than 350.

“Competition for talent is fierce. Speed is critical,” says Storn. “We offer the type of work environment that attracts individuals that really want to have an impact yet they’re not really sure where that impact should best be applied. Our goals are to find an initial home for those individuals and then have the ability to monitor HR analytics that map their journey. The strategy is to understand what their capabilities and interests are and then realign those skills over time.”

With hyper growth, Lyft has found it increasingly difficult to onboard talent efficiently. Over time, they have developed a number of one off HR solutions that are “scrappy”, as Storn says, but not scalable. He equates it with, “being on a 747 that’s in the air and building an engine as you’re flying.”

As an analytic-driven executive, Storn required the new HCM system to be a robust, scalable solution that would help establish one platform that all managers and HR staff could use as a stepping stone to managing the workforce. Among its numerous shortcomings, Lyft’s old HR systems didn’t have tools to pull data to align employees to the right teams.

“Our approach to building our business is to launch and iterate,” says Storn. “We hire smart, talented individuals. We need the predictive analytics in Oracle HCM Cloud to identify, for example, an individual who has been rated as having great potential but has been flagged as underperforming in their last review. That will enable us to proactively deal with an issue before it’s too late. That kind of learning and alignment tool will help us become a great attraction for hiring talent hiring and for retaining people by keeping them engaged.”

Although a robust system was a core requirement in the selection process, Storn also recognized that Lyft’s business is not yet so complex or scaled to the point that they need everything that Oracle HCM Cloud has to offer all at once.

“Part of the reason Oracle was attractive to us is that we can actually pick and choose the modules that work for our company today,” says Storn. “Since we are starting from the ground floor, we deploy just a couple of modules first to get us off the ground. Oracle’s solutions are very adaptable in that regard.”

Outcomes

Storn is confident that Oracle HCM Cloud will provide the tools to properly manage current and future employees in a well-rounded way. The planning process for solution adoption has helped executives and managers take stock of and analyze Lyft’s HR needs. Oracle HCM Cloud will integrate and streamline Lyft’s processes by providing a consolidated space for most of their HR portals as well as a database of compliance information relative to employees.

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“Having the ability to be nimble, proactive, and preparatory helps stabilize our company,” says Storn. “We will be better equipped to provide an exemplary work environment that will contribute to employee loyalty and further establish Lyft as a leader and model of the start-up world.”

Read more: Ron Storn and Lyft featured in Oracle Profit Magazine Q&A

• Download the eBook, Modern Best Practice Explained • Learn more about how Oracle solutions can help you adopt Modern Best Practice for Finance, HR and

Talent, Marketing, Procurement, Sales, and Service.

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7 Questions for Tony Kender, Head of Oracle North America HCM Sales

By Jim Lein, Midsize, Applications Product Group, Oracle

Tony Kender, Senior Vice President, leads Oracle’s sales operations for HCM solutions in North America, including an organization dedicated to the unique needs of midsize companies.

Q: What is the most exciting thing happening with growing midsize companies and HCM solutions?

Kender: Midsize companies are often ahead of large enterprises on the technology acceptance curve in terms of HCM cloud. Oracle offers cloud solutions across the entire applications footprint, including ERP, Supply Chain, EPM, and CX, but what I’ve seen is that HCM is often the first cloud application adopted by a midsize company.

Q: Why are midsize companies ahead of large enterprises in adopting cloud applications for HCM?

Kender: Generally, larger enterprises are not quite as agile as midsize businesses and take longer to make the move to a new platform. Often, they have big investments in existing HCM processes—a lot of inertia with people and systems around it. Midsize companies are lighter on their feet due to the way they need to operate. They’re eager to adopt HCM cloud technology because it lowers their cost, helps them innovate faster, and helps them focus on core competencies which are usually not HR and Payroll.

Q: Are midsize companies adopting HCM cloud in a piecemeal or suite strategy?

Kender: We’re seeing that midsize companies want the entire suite, not a piecemeal approach, whereas large companies are more open to a piecemeal approach. Midsize companies don’t have time to deal with three, four, or five vendors across HCM. What they want is a complete solution. If a company looks at some of our competitors across the midsize space they won’t see the full breadth of the solution spanning the whole HCM suite. For example, maybe one has a great core HR but a weak talent product. It takes years to develop a really, really strong recruiting suite. Oracle is unique in that we offer the best of breed functionality that companies require across the entire HCM lifecycle.

Q: Why is Oracle HCM Cloud so popular?

Kender: It’s simple. Oracle is driving new HCM innovation and product functionality faster than anyone in the HCM market. We have an amazing amount of investment in the development of cloud HCM founded on the experiences we’ve gained via our JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite HCM customers. We have the knowledge and experience of what an HCM system should do and we combine that with the best cloud technology.

Q: Why are growing midsize companies choosing Oracle HCM Cloud?

Kender: First, midsize companies have the same complexity as large companies but they don’t always have the same amount of resources. Oracle HCM Cloud offers the best, most innovative HCM solution, and eases customers’ worries about upgrading software or hosting it and all the IT expenses related to that. Second, we have a dedicated organization focusing just on the needs of midsize companies—marketing, sales, implementation, consulting, and training. Third, we make it easy for midsize companies to move to cloud by offering incentive programs like Customer 2 Cloud where customers can potentially redirect some of their investment in Oracle HCM on premise solutions to Oracle HCM Cloud applications.

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Q: How are changing demographics of the workforce impacting HCM innovation?

Kender: Recently, I had a customer at a midsize company tell me, “If my millennial workforce can’t use this system and aren’t comfortable with it they won’t use it at all. I need the user experience to be easy and impactful. They can’t go through training.”

The Oracle HCM Cloud user experience is designed to be like using a popular social network. You don’t take a training course. You turn it on and use it. It’s like Larry Ellison said in his keynote at Oracle HCM World, “There are no classes for Facebook.”

Q: What price do midsize companies pay by not adopting an innovative HCM cloud solution?

Kender: Now more than ever, people are the key to success in midsize. And midsize companies are competing with large enterprises for talent. The ability to source the right people with capabilities like social sourcing can put a midsize company on the cutting edge of finding top talent. Often times that gives them an advantage over the recruiting practices used by larger, more established companies. Conversely, if you are still sourcing people like you did in the ‘90’s you risk losing out on the best talent. Oracle HCM Cloud helps them win the war for talent.

Then, once talent is hired, midsize companies need modern best practice for learning, development, and succession planning. You have to keep them excited, comfortable, and engaged by providing a fantastic user experience. That’s what today’s worker expects and demands and you need all that to reduce turnover because turnover is expensive and disruptive. With Oracle HCM Cloud, midsize companies can have the sophistication that large companies enjoy along the entire continuum of the HCM experience—the features and look and feel that today’s workers expect—minus the cost and complexity of on premise systems.

Learn more:

• Infographic: Get Ready for a New Era of HR • Harvard Business Review Global Modern HR Survey: The Age of Modern HR • Is Your Human Resource Management System Attracting a Modern Workforce? • Oracle HCM for Midsize Companies

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People First! The Priority for Midsize Companies

By Jim Lein, Midsize, Applications Product Group, Oracle

Early in my technology career, I conducted an ROI assessment to help a very large customer update their HCM business processes across seven operating entities and tens of thousands of employees.

Their HR department was a room full of desks, each covered with stacks of blue paper cards. A legion of clerks each spent forty hours a week transferring hand written data from the cards into a main frame system. The scary part? The decision was to be based entirely on anticipated cost savings, not benefits. That was only a dozen years ago!

HR used to be at the bottom of the totem pole when it came to IT spending. Today, Human Capital Management and Talent Management solutions are surging to the top of the priority list at both midsize and enterprise companies. Finally, everyone seems to agree that people are a company's most important asset.

I asked Richard Atkins, EVP of Oracle Cloud applications for UK based Certus Solutions, what is driving investments in Oracle's Human Capital Management.

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"Cloud has changed everything," says Atkins. "We used to work almost exclusively with large enterprises. Now, most of our new clients are growing midsize companies with global operations. Our Cloud solutions enable them to deploy best practices fast and affordably. It's that simple."

Certus works with clients in the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and India. Most are either replacing a Tier 2 solution or have never had an HCM solution in place. In some regions, best practices for recruitment are a priority while, in others, the focus is on internal talent management.

"Our clients with global operations often need to cover both these scenarios,” says Atkins. “On the recruitment side, with social media and other options, it's almost becoming harder to find the right talent because there is just so much information out there. In areas where there still isn’t

budget for hiring, internal talent management—like learning—is the priority. Oracle HCM Cloud covers all these needs for recruitment, social sourcing, learning, and core talent management. Clients have so much more information to make hiring decisions and to more easily spot the right people internally and retain the skills they need."

Growing Midsize Companies Want HCM Best Practices and Mobile

Certus clients are also eager to adopt best practices. "We rarely do requirements gathering anymore," says Atkins. "To our customers, the word 'standardization' is music to their ears. They want an out of the box system that delivers best practices quickly. They are encouraged by the ability of cloud solutions to deliver on that."

And mobile applications have massive appeal. “The kind of company looking at cloud solutions usually has a very mobile workforce,” says Atkins. “Senior management and, often, the entire workforce are working off smartphones and tablets. Oracle’s solutions work beautifully across those devices.”

Find out more about Oracle HCM Cloud and Talent Management Cloud solutions if you’re ready to go mobile, enhance your learning programs, source talent socially, recruit more efficiently, or just replace your version of the blue card. See what Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has to say about managing your most precious assets.

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The Fastest Oracle HCM Cloud Implementation Ever?

By Jim Lein, Midsize, Applications Business Group, Oracle

by Nandita Vijay Sinha, Principal Consultant, Manufacturing Unit, Infosys

Growing midsize companies need fast time to value from enterprise application projects but they usually don't set out to break any speed records. In 2013, The Kamal Osman Jamjoom Group (The KOJ Group) deployed Infosys’s Oracle Fusion HCM RapidStart Oracle Accelerate Solution in 32 days – start to finish. At the time, it was the fastest implementation of Oracle Fusion HCM known to mankind.

At Infosys, we strive to continually discover innovative, ground-breaking ways to deliver Oracle Fusion Applications so that our customers will benefit from best practices in both Cloud and on-premise deployment models.

The KOJ Group is a rapidly growing chain of 660+ retail outlets in the Middle East. Their operations span multiple franchises carrying beauty, fashion, healthcare and children’s learning and development products. 12 brands, 6 countries, 3,500 employees.

Their executive team has long realized that a talented and happy workforce is the key to their continued success and growth. In

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2013, during a time of rapid growth, they decided it was business critical to automate their appraisal system in order to reward workers appropriately and make sure the right management progression processes were in play. The end of that appraisal cycle was less than two months in the future.

The only solution that fit both their HCM requirements and time constraints was Infosys’s Oracle Fusion HCM RapidStart Oracle Accelerate Solution. Oracle HCM Cloud in 2013 had everything The KOJ Group needed at the time and it fit seamlessly into their all Oracle IT strategy they had embarked on in 2006.

Based on a long relationship with Oracle, The KOJ Group trusted that Oracle was committed to HCM. And they trusted that Infosys had the experience and expertise to complete the project successfully in the tight

time frame. The keys to success were strong executive commitment enabled via a steering committee and the formation of a highly efficient and collaborative project team consisting of The KOJ Group, Infosys, and Oracle experts.

An Accelerated Project Drives Fast Time to Benefit

Accelerated project components consisted of:

• An Oracle Cloud instance available on Day 1, • Pre-built Configuration Templates used for data collection during the workshops, • A detailed business processes performance requirements document used for enabling the product processes a pre-

built data migration solution, and • 800+ pre-built System Integration Test (SIT) scenarios.

Some of the results include:

• A single HCM solution for 3,500 employees, spanning 650+ stores (today) and 6 countries, integrated to core ERP, • Establishment of specific and measurable employee performance goals, • The ability to identify and reward top performers, • The real time ability to check evaluation (performance appraisal) status, • A considerable improvement in business analytics available to managers, • Multi language support, and • Significant reductions in administrative cost.

Synergies Drive Success

The synergies between Oracle HCM Cloud and Infosys's methodologies and rapid implementation tools resulted in The KOJ Group achieving the goals the needed from this project.

“This is an amazing project," said Rizon after the go live in 2013. Exceptional teamwork between KOJ, Oracle, and Infosys. The 1st milestone of go live in Performance Appraisal is achieved!"

"The most challenging of deadlines,” added Martin Alexander, Group Human Resources Director at KOJ. “Yet with great commitment, professionalism, teamwork, and hard work we achieved a successful implementation of the new appraisal system. I am proud to be part of this project."

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The KOJ Group Hitches Its Wagon to Oracle

By Jim Lein, Midsize, Applications Product Group, Oracle

"Hitch your wagon to a star," is an American expression that translates loosely as "aspire to the highest goals and ideals". I'm sure there is a Middle Eastern version of this advice. I'd like to learn what that is.

After Nandita submitted her post, I did a little research on The KOJ Group. The company embarked on an all-Oracle "Red Stack" strategy in 2006. That decision was made based on the industry best practices in Oracle Retail, the end-to-end strength of Financials in Oracle E-Business Suite, our commitment to building a complete suite of modern applications, and the integration between applications and the platform itself.

All-Oracle strategy has served The KOJ Group well. As Mohammed Thameem Rizvon, Group IT Manager, explains in this video, the KOJ Group has improved the experiences of their customers. Equally important, they have realized increased workforce efficiency and productivity by empowering end users through best practices.

This video was recorded in 2012. At that time-and since deploying the integrated Oracle IT platform-The KOJ Group had almost doubled their number of stores (300-500+) while decreasing the number of warehouse workers (155-135) and IT staff (51-27).

Like Oracle, The KOJ Group aspires to the highest goals and ideals. They have-and continue to-achieve great success. Like many growing companies, they have trusted their continued success to that of Oracle's. They leverage our expertise, experience, breadth and depth of solutions, partners, and financial strength. In short, they have tied their reputation to ours and that of our key partners such as Infosys.

Since The KOJ Group deployed Oracle HCM Cloud in 2011, Oracle has released Oracle HCM Cloud enhancements and new modules as well as acquiring best of breed solutions such as Taleo Talent Management. As Larry Ellison said recently at Oracle CloudWorld, "My focus now is on people, and that means taking care of your employees, and taking care of your customers...HCM is the app that manages your most precious asset-your people".

The combined KOJ Group and Infosys project team wasn't trying to make it into The Guinness Book of World Records. They implemented the solution at laser speed because the business demanded it. Is 32 days still the fastest Oracle HCM Cloud implementation ever? I don't know. Some things aren't meant to be a race.

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Useful Links:

• Oracle Midsize Blog • Oracle for Midsize Companies • Oracle Accelerate • Oracle Modern Best Practice • Oracle Accelerate Solutions • Stay Connected: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

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