Cornerstone Ondemand: Cloud - Based Talent Management Pioneers

The Cornerstone platform also allows organizations to measure their employees performance through its Performance function. With Cornerstone Performance, performance management is unified with learning, compensation, and succession in one system. Organizations can deliver ongoing feedback; align employee goals with organizational strategy; see and address skill and competency gaps, and use performance data to inform development, merit initiatives, and leadership planning. The performance can also be unified with compensation, and budgets through Cornerstone Compensation option. Managers and executives can drive a pay-for-performance culture, automate compensation planning, and improve transparency from a single location, with a single database. Lastly, Cornerstone Succession enables organizations to proactively address workforce issues and increase organizational longevity using learning, performance, and succession information stored in a single system—hence providing a unified and singular platform. Instead of cobbling together training records, reviews, and compensation data from separate platforms.

Having carved a unique niche today, the upward road has not ever been smooth for Cornerstone. As with most businesses, Cornerstone has experienced its share of setbacks and failures. In 2005, the company lost a large contract. Miller, however, views this as a lesson.

Instead of building the company around one large business, it set out to create a more broadly based system, which has been the key to its success. He says, “My experiences taught me to be a great leader; one must trust and respect his or her people. In the long run, gaining employees’ respect is not a one-time action. It takes effort in maintaining and earning staffers’ respect.”

Miller mentions that doesn’t mean that leaders have to talk to every last person in their organization. If they have a smaller business and that’s possible, they should go for it. But if not, they should focus on the key people who hold positions of influence in their company in the areas they are looking to affect change. “A big part of leadership is taking the time to get the buy-in to support your objectives, even when you don’t have much time and it seems like perhaps a waste of your time or inefficient use of your time,” Miller says. “In the long run, it’s an excellent use of your time. If you take shortcuts at the beginning of that kind of change or strategic reorganization or reprioritization, you’re going to pay for it over the long term. If you take the time, you get the benefit over the long term.”

“Talent acquisition teams achieve significant benefits by unifying recruiting with their existing talent management system”

Going forward, Cornerstone will be focussing on a five-point plan, dubbed Cornerstone 2.0. The company will refocus on recurring revenue by exiting the enterprise service delivery business. Whenever possible, Miller says, Cornerstone worked with the partners to hire employees on the services side of the business who lost their jobs from this sift. The focus will also be there on improved operating margins and cash flow, the creation of new recurring revenue streams, changes to the executive team, and improved governance. Before this transformation, Cornerstone has also tightened its product focus from 28 offerings to four product suites: recruiting, learning, performance and HR that’s focused on Europe, where the market is not as jammed with competitors as it is domestically. “The reason the focus on the four product suites is so transformative for us,” Miller mentions, “is that it allowed us to be more focused on what we are building and more ambitious about what we were innovating.” The improvements include recent release of the recruiting solution to deliver a consumer-like candidate experience, making it easier for recruiters to do their jobs. In addition, it will also include an LMS with simplified administration and a learning experience platform with Netflix-like content playlists. Miller informs that there’s much more on the horizon as the product team leverages their considerable technology investments to engage end-users and those who manage and administrate technology. He states, “Skills have become the new digital currency. Almost all the skills that are required today will change in the next 5-10 years. The pace of change is really dramatic now and it’s wiping out industries and transforming almost every job on the planet. And as a result, how we manage the skills needs to be completely different from the last 20 years, and we are up to it.”