Taleo Expands Award-Winning Assessment Solutions

New partner assessments now available on Taleo Assessment; Taleo also unveils additional proprietary assessments for campus and customer service hires

San Francisco & Huntington Beach, CA – From its Fourth Annual WORLD Users' Conference in Huntington Beach, CA, Taleo Corporation, the world's leading company focused solely on on-demand talent management solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning Taleo Assessment Solution. As part of this expansion, Taleo announced several additional partnerships with assessment providers and new Taleo-developed assessments for campus and customer service hires.

Taleo's new partners include:

• Polaris Assessment Systems, which specializes in pre-employment testing for entry level, front-line jobs, including personality, attitudes and beliefs, and basic skill testing;
  
• Shaker Consulting Group, which specializes in assessments that predict performance in a variety of positions such as call centers, retail banking, field service technicians, distribution centers, and manufacturing; and
  
• TalentMine LLC, specializing in performance-based talent and culture assessments for the financial services, healthcare and transportation markets.

These organizations join other Taleo assessment partners including Batrus Hollweg International (BHI), which specializes in assessments for the restaurant, hospitality and foodservice industries. Shaker Consulting Group and Batrus Hollweg International are also sponsors of Taleo WORLD 2005.

Assessments developed by Taleo's new partners are now available on the award-winning Taleo Assessment Solution, named one of 2004's Top 10 HR Products of the Year. Taleo Assessment provides customers with an enterprise-wide method for incorporating in-depth assessment tests for all hires, helping to further improve new-hire performance and reduce employee turnover by providing the means to predict how well candidates will perform at specific jobs.

Taleo unveils additional proprietary assessment content
In addition to its retail assessments, developed in-house by Taleo's I/O Psychology team, Taleo also announced the availability of assessments specifically for campus and customer-service hires. Taleo's campus assessments, created specifically for organizations with active college recruiting programs, help organizations measure leadership potential and predict job performance and training time. Taleo's campus assessments identify campus recruits that will fit the cultural values of the company, have strong potential as future corporate leaders, and have shorter time-to-productivity than other candidates.
Taleo's customer service assessments are designed for front-line customer facing jobs in the hospitality, entertainment and retail industries. With Taleo's customer service assessments, organizations can better identify candidates who are stable and dependable workers and those who will enjoy immediate success on the job. These attributes significantly contribute to the organization through improved customer service levels and reduced turnover, hence enhanced brand equity and customer loyalty, improved corporate culture fit and reduced training time.

Mosaic Director of Talent Acquisition Jason Leonard stated, "Mosaic provides distributed sales solutions to organizations including Best Buy, Microsoft and Nike. Throughout our U.S. operations, we hire approximately 7,000 hourly retail associates per year and stress the "quality of hire" for these field representatives to our clients. Quality of hire is a key competitive differentiator for us, and one of the reasons we selected Taleo Assessment as a key component to our talent management strategy."

Leonard continued, "We liked Taleo's approach of tailoring a comprehensive assessment strategy to our unique business requirements, and delivering it within the Taleo Enterprise Talent Management solution. We have documented early successes with Taleo Assessment, which has helped us flag both potentially ‘unsuccessful' and ‘successful' applicants, ensuring we make smart hiring decisions to deliver on our quality of hire customer promise."

Administering assessments with Taleo's Assessment Solution is easy and flexible because customers can build the process directly into their overall talent management program, choose the assessment content source - using content developed by an in-house I/O Psychologist, content developed by Taleo's I/O Psychology team, content developed by a certified third-party provider, or a combination of the three, and deliver it seamlessly to candidates over the Internet. Additionally, populating content on the Taleo Assessment platform requires no customized integrations, making it easy for Taleo customers to select assessments that meets their unique business needs.

"The significant growth that Taleo Assessment, and our partner program has undergone over the past year, is based on two contributing factors – our customers understand the substantial impact that high qualified, best-fit hires can have on their brand, customer loyalty and therefore, revenues; and content providers recognize the benefits of our delivery method and flexibility of our award-winning solution and platform," said Jeff Carr, EVP, global sales and marketing, Taleo. "The level of flexibility, configurability and assessment selection provides our customers with unmatched options in utilizing assessments throughout their organizations."

About Taleo Corporation
Taleo is the worldwide leader of on-demand Talent Management Solutions covering salaried, hourly and contingent workers. Taleo helps organizations of all sizes improve business performance by more effectively acquiring, deploying, retaining, measuring and managing their workforces. For the first time, Taleo arms HR Executives and Staffing Directors with the capability to wring out talent management costs, respond more quickly to organizational demands and drive workforce quality. Taleo turns talent management into a source of value, competitiveness and workforce performance management. Taleo serves the world's most demanding businesses and is one of the world's largest ASP's with more than 400,000 users and 24 million candidates across 87 countries.

Source: Taleo Corporation