Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/94708
HRO Today Forum Europe not the case anymore. VMware, encryption tools, and software monitoring tools are much better. People would have never considered banking online five years ago, and today it's status quo. How important is integration of solutions to clients? Very—but it should be easier now. Traditional applications required code development for integration. Now that's no longer an issue with web services. Clients are still massively worried though. Clients typically have an enterprise resource platform, and they want solutions that can be integrated. If you take our space— recruiting talent—it requires sourcing, recruiting, onboarding, and loading all HR records, and this can all vary by interaction. Clients will want it all visible on one level playing field. So how do software providers stay competitive when there seem to be new entrants into the marketplace every time you turn the corner? That is the million-dollar question. It's remarkable how quickly the market has grown in the last two years; there's quite a lot of stuff out there. You only really have a competitive edge six months before someone else creates a similar product. There seems to be four or five major competitors in every product space, and the best you can do is to keep an eye on what they are doing. Each one will try to trump each other in terms function, but 80 per cent of the product is typically very similar, with the other 20 per cent offering different functionalities. Does this friendly competition between providers favour practitioners? It encourages providers to push themselves to be on the bleed- edge of that market and make considerations: How good are we at updating? How quickly are we upgrading? Any gaps that need to be filled in the recruiting space? Nowadays candidates are quite acceptably waving their flags on social media to attract employers. There are thousands of available candidates, and it can be difficult to tell who's good and who's not. And how can employers filter everyone? By location? By qualification? By skills? There is just too much noise on social media to sort it all out efficiently. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff? There is going to be a lot of development in the future around this need. [26] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | FALL 2012