Saba Transforms Traditional Career Development and Succession Planning Using Machine Learning and Crowd-Sourcing

TIM Provides Real-time Personalized Career Advice, While "Rock Stars" Surfaces Top Talent to the Attention of HR Professionals and Business Leaders

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 19, 2013-- Saba (OTCPink: SABA), a global leader in next-generation cloud solutions for talent management, today announced groundbreaking functionality in its Saba Cloud, including The Intelligent Mentor (TIM) and Rock Stars, that is designed to transform traditional career development into a deeper and more personal experience and to make succession planning into a more comprehensive and effective process.

New to talent management, TIM acts as a career GPS for employees to help them build their professional network and a roadmap for success. It is built on Saba's patent-pending machine learning technology that automatically learns about an employee based on their activities in the Saba Cloud. By doing so, TIM makes personalized and relevant recommendations about content, classes and mentors that can help them be more productive on the job and develop in their careers. Users enter data to get great feedback, while human resource and executive teams benefit because they are always operating with up-to-date and complete profile and career interests data.

TIM makes career development and succession planning more accessible and flexible for any organization because it is designed to work with or without models, such as global competency frameworks or centralized role-based learning assignments, that can sometimes be complex and costly to implement and maintain. TIM does this by learning the interests and characteristics of users in the system and establishing affinity groups to power personalized recommendations based on users with similar goals and interests. With TIM, Saba Cloud is a talent management system that learns.

Another significant new capability, Rock Stars, uses social dynamics to help surface high-potential and high-performing employees through informal peer feedback. While traditional succession planning and talent calibration processes are critical to building a leadership pipeline, sometimes executives and managers may not have a full picture of the true stars in the organization based on their everyday activities and the value they add to the productivity of their peers. Saba has significantly enhanced the succession planning and career development process with "Rock Stars" identifications.

Through an intuitive and insightful talent dashboard, Saba Cloud provides managers and HR teams with a broad view into key talent indicators and overall workforce strength. The Saba Cloud dashboard focuses on six main data points:

  • People Quotient (pQ) scores: Patent-pending technology that measures an employee's influence, reputation, and impact within the organization.
  • Badges: Enables real-time feedback and social recognition from an individual's network and provides a historical record of that feedback that can be referenced for quarterly and annual performance reviews.
  • Role model and Rock Star endorsements: Allow employees to recognize their colleagues as role models and rock stars within the workplace and showcase their talents and leadership to the wider team.
  • Contribution: See overall contribution and performance of employees at-a-glance, based on several factors such as performance and potential scores, role model and rock star endorsements, and formal mentorship nominations.
  • Risk: Managers can understand the overall retention risk of their people based on key talent indicators.
  • Bench strength: Helps managers and HR teams see details of bench strength for key employees and positions, identify risks, and assess timing of readiness for successors.

To learn more about Saba Cloud, please visit: today's blog.

Supporting Quotes

"The tools being deployed to connect people, engage them in social communities, and better utilize enterprise talent are a rich source of data," said Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst, Aragon Research. "Combined with the information to be gleaned from collaboration and other interactions, enterprises have significant potential to improve the value of their recruitment, talent management and learning capabilities. The role of machine learning will help to shift the focus from analytics to recommendations. Saba's TIM and Rock Star features in its Saba Cloud are examples of new innovation that companies can use to more effectively develop their people, increase retention, and identify future leaders."

"As companies become more agile and team-driven, many traditional HR practices need to change. Many of the principles of human resources that we use today were developed at the turn of the century, when organizations were hierarchical structures driven from the top," said Josh Bersin, Principal and Founder, Bersin by Deloitte. "Now we need performance management, recognition, employee development and leadership strategies that focus on empowering teams, not just standardizing the process."

"Until now, end users improved their skills based on outdated performance reviews and training resources assigned to large groups. They often didn't know about the learning materials or colleagues that could help them to really advance in their careers. And from an employer perspective, HR cannot effectively plan for the company's succession since they don't directly observe the daily activities or skills of each worker," said Hemanth Puttaswamy, vice president of strategy and application development at Saba. "With capabilities such as TIM and Rock Stars, Saba Cloud provides the ability for end users and management to leverage new technologies for their mutual benefit."

Supporting Resources

  • Visit Saba: www.saba.com
  • Follow the Saba blog
  • Like Saba on Facebook
  • Follow Saba on LinkedIn
  • Follow Saba on Twitter: @SabaSoftware

About Saba

Saba (OTCPink: SABA) is a global leader in next-generation cloud solutions for talent management. The company helps organizations transform the way they work by enabling the continuous learning, engagement and development of everyone in their people network, including employees, partners, and customers. Supporting the new world of work, Saba delivers learning, performance, succession, career development, workforce planning and compensation solutions that incorporate modern technologies such as social, collaboration, mobile and gamification. Saba solutions are based on the Saba Cloud platform, a highly scalable architecture that exceeds industry scalability, performance, and security standards. The company currently supports over 31 million users from 2,200 customers across 195 countries and in 37 languages. For more information, please visit www.saba.com.

Source: "Research Note: Five Trends Are Transforming The Workplace and Workforce," Aragon Research/Mike Anderson, February 28, 2013.

Source: "Predictions for 2013. Corporate talent, Leadership and HR - Nexus of Global Forces Drives New Models for Talent," Bersin by Deloitte/Josh Bersin, January 2013.

Source: Saba

Saba
Michael Zeglin, 650-776-4065
mzeglin@saba.com
or
Racepoint Group for Saba
Allison DeLeo, 541-953-3554
aDeLeo@racepointgroup.com


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