Feature:

Enterprise-Wide Talent Acquisition Process Gives McKesson a
Strategic Advantage

s one of the oldest and most respected companies in the U.S., 173-year-old McKesson Corporation has a rich history that spans across industries, from medicine to dairy products. During the 1980's and 90's, McKesson divested many of its peripheral operations and refocused on its core healthcare supply management businesses.

That renewed focus helped McKesson gain its current position as the world's leading healthcare supply management and information technology company. Today, the company ranks 16th on the FORTUNE 500, with more than 24,000 employees across three major segments with nine separate business units.

As McKesson proceeded with the ‘One McKesson’ vision, related functions that had formerly been administered through separate units were evolved into broader enterprise processes. Payroll, compensation administration and performance management are three such enterprise functions, and they represented three parts of what would become a broad foundation for building a talent management platform. The fourth piece, an enterprise talent acquisition system, still remained on the table.

Connecting Talent Acquisition, Payroll, Compensation and Performance Management
By late 2004, senior management agreed on a plan to develop and implement an enterprise-wide talent acquisition system that spanned all nine business units. The talent acquisition piece would connect with payroll, compensation and performance management. McKesson's Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Susan Slater, worked with project team members to plan the solution.

"In any industry, the ability to understand your organization's needs from a workforce and business perspective and then be agile enough to focus your recruiting strategy to meet those needs is essential," says Slater. "We developed a system that would allow us to view talent acquisition at an enterprise level, ensuring we keep our focus on strategy. Our managers, recruiters, employees and external candidates have access to our enterprise system. Managers can run their own reports. Employees can set up job agents and check on their employee referrals, and our external candidates are able to see all McKesson open positions. A key strength of the system is that it connects pre- and post-hire functions."

For managers in particular, the new system delivered a dramatically improved process. "Our legacy talent acquisition systems could not handle the complex organizational data structures needed for accurate reporting," says Slater.  "When managers attempted to create requisitions, they had to sift through large amounts of data. It was not user friendly, and the data integrity was low.  The new system is built on the core HRMS, so organizational data is now pre-populated, making requisition creation easy and extremely accurate. Managers can create requisitions from the same portal they use to execute other HR transactions, such as compensation and performance management, with the exact same look and feel.  It was amazing how well they adapted to the new system."

McKesson completed development and initial rollout of its talent acquisition system in February 2006. The lessons the company learned from the implementation apply to any company embarking on a similar large-scale mission. From conception to implementation--close cooperation and confidence between executive, technical and line-of-business stakeholders is critical to a successful strategic initiative.

The Vision: A Strategic Talent Acquisition Process
McKesson's talent acquisition program was conceived to address clear tactical and strategic needs. "Everyone involved knew what they were aiming for," Slater says. "That was a big part of our success."

Charlie Fusco confirms that view. As product manager of HR applications, he was the technical project lead. "The project required seamless integration, from recruitment to paycheck," says Fusco. "At the very beginning, we showed business unit talent leads that we could develop a system that worked across all recruiting functions. We assured them that we could and would act on their input, and they had confidence in our ability to deliver."

As project manager for the talent acquisition implementation, McKesson Talent Program Manager Kathi Seifert worked with Fusco as well as business unit managers and recruiters. "Before we deployed the system, most managers couldn't enter requisitions online – the system used in many parts of the organization was too complicated," she says. "They had to go through recruiters. The new system would allow managers to enter requisitions, view their candidate pipelines, and get the reports they need instantly. It would also show how many openings we have across the business and how many candidates applied during a given month."

According to Slater, the new functionality added up to strategic capability.  "With readily available recruiting metrics we can better understand what our value proposition is as an enterprise rather than as a business unit," she explains. "We can understand exactly what it takes to fill a particular position at McKesson, and how and where we need to improve."

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