When Jeff and his team began looking for a partner that could meet these specific needs, they wanted to make sure that the search and decision would be representative of the business as a whole. “We brought together a diverse group of individuals representing every major region and multiple functions of Rolls-Royce to be a part of the selection team,” says Lackey. This group of 12 people made a unanimous decision to choose Taleo, based on the very specific criteria set out in advance.

As well as the challenges outlined above, Taleo’s flexibility was another key part of the choice according to Libby Hayworth-Lenne, Global Design Lead for Rolls-Royce. “The system needed to be flexible enough to allow for regional legal and compliance processes, as well as cultural differences, and Taleo was the best choice for that.” The panel also found that Taleo was one of the few products that was able to meet the very high-standards of IT security outlined by Rolls-Royce.

With the decision made, Taleo provided consultancy for the UK, US, and Canada rollouts of the software. With the Rolls-Royce deployment team gaining essential experience alongside Taleo consultants during these initial rollouts, Taleo was then able to hand the reins over to Rolls-Royce for the remaining global implementation. In nine months, three quarters of the workforce, about 29,000 employees, were online with Taleo in three countries.

When it came to gathering feedback on the deployment, while there were some understandable challenges to overcome, the response was positive: “Our head of IT at the time called out Taleo as one of the leading HR implementation success stories in Rolls-Royce. It is still considered today to be well thought out, well deployed, and well implemented and the general consensus is that it is probably one of the best deployments of HR IT in our global organization,” says Lackey.

Rolls-Royce deployed Taleo Recruiting and Taleo Reporting tools, the combined effect of which has been to deliver a range of benefits to the company’s overall HR practice. Streamlined automated processes are beginning to help tackle average times to hire, as well as providing Rolls-Royce with the ability to deliver better, faster, and more consistent interactions with candidates.

An online careers portal now gives internal and external applicants visibility into available roles and has improved the overall candidate experience. Visitors can review and apply for a range of Rolls-Royce structured recruitment programmes that include student internships, apprenticeships, graduate and MBA programmes, as well as search for current job vacancies by function and discipline from around the world. Bersin & Associates view internal mobility to be strategic, and enduring organizations (like UPS, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, Caterpillar, and others) see internal talent mobility as a key to their long-term success.

Rolls-Royce is also leveraging Taleo Reporting to help enhance operational HR performance and provide better Talent Intelligence. “Taleo has allowed us to track volume increases, and we’ve been able to monitor our performance more closely because of it,” says Lackey. “For instance, when we went through an increase in recruiter demand of almost 200 per cent in autumn 2010, we knew about it almost immediately and could actually report back exactly how many openings we had globally and begin discussing the hiring forecast.”

“We were able to deliver a really crisp presentation by region and by sector that showed where our recruitment demands were spiking and what we needed to do about it in response,” says Lackey. “That presentation went to the Office of the Chief Executive, as part of their discussion on strategic demand planning.”

Lackey provides one final piece of advice for anyone considering an implementation of this scale. “We made a conscious choice to rollout a ‘vanilla’, basic version of Taleo to begin with. Having the system accessible globally ensured that we were able to quickly and easily identify any issues that arose, before building the system up as we became more familiar with it. Taleo is a very robust system that has a lot of configurability, but those two things combined can equal complexity. We found that keeping the initial deployment simple was key.”