Christina Yue, Customer Learning Manager |

Located in Palo Alto, California, Stanford University includes 26 separate schools and administrative units for 20,000 students. The university employs 2,500 faculty and 16,000 staff, leaving HR with a complex challenge for talent management.

One of the primary talent management issues comes from Stanford’s proximity to esteemed businesses. As Cindy Martin, Senior Director of Client Services shares, Stanford is up against companies like Facebook, Apple, and Google.

Institutional success depends on attracting, retaining, and developing bright people despite these challenges. Changes are difficult in a workplace with a long history of decentralized, siloed organizations with different practices and talent strategies, but the HR leaders are determined to integrate and maximize all aspects of talent management.

Talent management at Stanford looks like a combination of the following:

• Workforce planning to better evaluate Stanford’s current and future workforce needs
• Talent attraction to better compete for top talent and to optimize the overall recruiting process
• Talent management to support, develop, and retain valued employees
• Employee engagement to ensure that employee feedback about their work experience is gathered

Optimization with an Integrated Talent Management System

The drivers for an integrated talent management system include vacant positions across the organization, a lack of qualified candidates, and an inability to identify talent. Internally, the university experiences high turnover for critical roles, and externally, recruitment is difficult due to a low unemployment rate and very high housing costs. Seeing these problems, Stanford leaders knew they must optimize.

Optimization is the process of addressing how an organization has chosen to use their HCM Cloud solution and deciding if it is being used to its maximum effectiveness, both functionally and technically. Five major signs that optimization is needed in an organization are:

1. Streamlining and simplifying complex processes
2. End-user experience and adoption
3. Reporting capabilities and data quality issues
4. Leveraging new functionality as released
5. Lacking internal knowledge around initial implementation and governance

Stanford enlisted the help of Baker Tilly for optimization. Baker Tilly employees helped university leaders identify key optimization areas including candidate experience, Taleo functionality, and hiring managers’ and recruiters’ engagement.

To develop a formidable course of action, Baker Tilly led the optimization process through four steps: 1) Analyze, 2) Design and Build, 3) Test, and 4) Deploy. Upon completion of these steps, leaders celebrated big wins in each identified area.

Lessons Learned

Along the way, the Stanford HR team learned eight major lessons:

1. Talent management is not easy.
2. There are no rules to guide the way.
3. It’s important to define organization roles and responsibilities.
4. Optimization can’t just be an HR initiative—It must be organization-wide.
5. HR language and labels can be a barrier.
6. You must break through Talent silos.
7. Include organizational readiness as a part of change management.
8. Prepare to respond to external surprises.

Tips and Tricks

To help you in your own optimization process, the team also identified a few key tips and tricks:

• Learn what’s possible and socialize opportunities.
• Prioritize and define objectives.
• Assess current state and build recommendations.
• Harmonize disparate practices.
• Re-engineer processes.
• Implement improvements.
• Redefine operational structures and success metrics.
• Consider functional roles and responsibilities.
• Measure value realization.
• Drive adoption.
• Change management.
• Communication.
• Don’t stop measuring, optimizing, and sustaining.

To learn more from Stanford and Baker Tilly’s optimization process, watch this video.

Want to learn more about Oracle HCM Cloud? Discover everything available at COLLABORATE 19, the Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community, April 7-11, 2019, in San Antonio. Learn more and follow #C19TX on Twitter to stay up-to-date on all things COLLABORATE 19!