Few weeks ago Marc Coleman – HR Tech Europe – has carefully drilled down into the Key HR Investment Areas in Europe:

European HR Investment #1: Talent Management

No surprise here, given the old and sometimes tired adage of People are our Most Important Asset, this is never likely to change for obvious reasons. Looking through our talent management lens,  we’ see this is still the biggest pain point for so many businesses, big and small alike – it influences everything – innovation, sales, marketing, culture, leadership, etc.  We have noted that Talent Management and Recruitment projects have similar numbers to change and transformation projects for success and failure. Besides, it only takes a new CEO/Head of HR to come in and completely change the talent strategy from efforts started 12 months earlier.

Streets ahead of all other votes Talent Management stands out from the crowd. We narrowed this down from 40 investment areas in 2012, including Succession Planning, Recruitment, Retention, Talent Communities/Pools/Networks, etc. We even enjoyed heated debate at inaugural iRecruit 2013 earlier this year (Europe’s largest Recruitment Conference & Expo) on the difference between talent networks, talent communities, and talent pools.

European HR Investment #2: Analytics

HR Reporting … Analytics … Metrics … Measurement … Predictive … Social Analytics … no surprises this hits #2 on our list and the reason why we ran with the Theme of Big Data HR at our HR Tech Europe Spring Warm-Up in London – the opportunity is real and we see this area exploding and analytics/better HR reporting tools makes #2 spot on our buyers hit list for 2013. Coupled with the fact that people are people – there are the good, the bad and the ugly in every company and every department (not just HR!) – it seems a good bet that decision science and predictive capability where decisions based on data, analytics and scientific experimentation have a leading role to play in the Future of HR.

 

The following European HR Investments are:

#3: Saas HR

#4: Performance Management

#5: Strategic Workforce Planning

#6: Future of Workplace Learning

#7: Mobile

#8: Rewards

#9: OnBoarding

#10: Collaborative Tools