Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire (Part 8)

SM: In the way the product is marketed, are you also competing against job boards such as Monster? MG: No, they are more partners of ours. We have direct linked feeds to most of the job boards. If a company decides to approve a requisition, they can hit a button in our system and it will post to whatever job board they want.

SM: Do you consider SuccessFactors to be the main competitor? MG: Yes I do. They only have a performance management package; they do not have a recruiting solution. They can’t deliver on the unified talent management vision that we have.

SM: Can anybody – can Kenexa? MG: Kenexa does not have a performance management package, so they can’t deliver on that either.

SM: What is happening inside of PeopleSoft or SAP? MG: That is a really good question. Oddly enough my expectation over three years after leaving PeopleSoft is that they would be a dominant player in this space, but they have not focused on this area. It is only recently that SAP has started to focus and think holistically about talent management.

SM: You don’t see those two players in your accounts? MG: It is a different model coupled by a different problem space. I was at PeopleSoft and we talked about talent management. PeopleSoft HR was transactional, and talent management is strategic. It is really difficult to take a database schema that is built for high volume transactions and have that same database schema or cadre of applications work in the context of something strategic.

PeopleSoft was, and probably still is today, the best HR system out there. But it is about people who are already your employees and taking care of their healthcare and benefit information, etc.

We are taking care of all of the potential employees of your company, and once those employees get in, strategically thinking through succession planning, performance management, and goals alignment. The Peoplesoft system was never architected to do those types of things.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Building an Ambitious SaaS Company: Taleo CEO Michael Gregoire
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