IBM completes acquisition of Kenexa

IBM completes acquisition of Kenexa, bolsters social business leadership

(Dec 20, 2012) IBM announced the closing of its acquisition of Kenexa. Kenexa bolsters IBM's leadership in helping clients embrace social business capabilities while gaining actionable insights from the enormous streams of information generated from social networks every day. Kenexa, a leading provider of recruiting and talent management solutions, brings a unique combination of cloud-based technology and consulting services that integrates both people and processes, providing solutions to engage a smarter, more effective workforce across their most critical business functions.

Kenexa complements IBM's strategy of bringing relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department from sales and marketing to product development and human resources. By creating a smarter workforce, businesses can help employees drive innovation to bring products and services to market faster, resolve problems before they arise to improve customer service, and increase sales by building new skills—linking the right experts to the right clients.

Both IBM and Kenexa are already generating real results for customers:

• Chilean Red Cross seamlessly connected their first responders to collaborate and speed up their disaster response operations by 100%.
• Cemex, a manufacturer of building materials, deployed its first globally branded product in 1/3 the time by leveraging a partner's formula in one country and applying it to others.
• VCC, a construction company, transformed its sales and customer relationship processes with social tools, increasing sales by 40%.
• AMC Theaters hired the right sales people to work the concession stands, generating millions of dollars of incremental income.
• Apollo Group, a leading provider of higher education for adults, used predictive hiring models to reduce their costs by $2 million per year.
• Cabela's, a leading retailer for outdoors gear, re-energized their sales teams with a performance management solution, significantly increasing sales per labor hour.

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Press release: IBM Completes Acquisition of Kenexa: Accelerates Social Business For Workforce Transformation

Press release: IBM to Acquire Kenexa To Bolster Social Business Initiatives

Frequently asked questions (112KB)

The Power of a Smarter Workforce

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan shares Kenexa and IBM's vision for a Smarter Workforce.

Explore the benefits of becoming a social business

Social business technologies can help you activate your workforce to improve productivity and delight your customers to create advocates and increase revenue.

Learn more about creating a smarter workforce and about creating exceptional customer experiences.

To us, business has always been personal—and it has always been about helping to make the workforce smarter, which is why we are proud to be a platform for a Smarter Workforce. We look at it from two angles—empowering people and transforming business. Our tools help enable businesses to attract and keep the best people, develop their skills, cultivate new leaders and capitalize on their collective intelligence by applying human insights, social tools and workforce analytics to transform the way they work. We provide deep insight and experience in employee engagement, talent management and leadership development mixed with industry-leading technology and social platforms, giving us the unique ability to build a Smarter Workforce.

Learn more about Kenexa events.

For more information about Kenexa, visit www.kenexa.com.

More information

Press release: IBM Completes Acquisition of Kenexa: Accelerates Social Business For Workforce Transformation

Press release: IBM to Acquire Kenexa To Bolster Social Business Initiatives

Frequently asked questions (112KB)

The Power of a Smarter Workforce

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan shares Kenexa and IBM's vision for a Smarter Workforce.

Explore the benefits of becoming a social business

Social business technologies can help you activate your workforce to improve productivity and delight your customers to create advocates and increase revenue.

Learn more about creating a smarter workforce and about creating exceptional customer experiences.

Employment Branding

The key to creating a powerful employment brand is discovering what makes your company unique. We translate this into creative communications and career sites that help attract talent who will thrive in your culture.

Recruitment Solutions

When it comes to recruitment solutions, you need a partner who can deliver the candidates you need—when you need them. Unlike other solutions that focus on the quantity of candidates, we focus on the quality.

Recruitment Technology

We understand that technology starts with building relationships. That's why we've designed our technology solutions to work together seamlessly on one platform—to ensure you have what you need, when you need it.

Assessments

Your organization has unique needs, drivers and culture—and we can deliver the appropriate blend of ready-to-use and tailored assessments to ensure you're driving talent metrics that influence business metrics.

Compensation

Building compensation strategies that are fair and accurate can feel like a balancing act. And that's why we build compensation programs that make you competitive in the market—without negatively affecting your bottom line.

Onboarding

With Kenexa 2x Onboard, you can provide a personalized onboarding roadmap with clarity and line of sight to performance milestones, progress measurement and integration of new employees into your company culture.

Learning

Our Learning solution helps you derive more worth from your people assets and enable them to more effectively collaborate, converse and learn while increasing their social and knowledge capital.

Performance Management

Maximizing performance is all about aligning, developing, guiding, recognizing, rewarding and engaging your employees. Performance Management by Kenexa aligns your company at all levels, providing a top-down performance focus.

Leadership Solutions

Investing in leadership not only enhances the effectiveness and abilities of your leaders, but inspires and engages them. And when leaders are more engaged, those they lead are more engaged.

Employee Surveys

The first step in moving an organization forward is getting an accurate measurement of employee engagement—understanding manageable factors that cause your people to work harder, stay longer and care more.

Social Solutions

Understanding your target audience is key to attracting the right talent. Kenexa Social offers a unique way for you to source candidates—going beyond just technology.

Government Solutions

Kenexa® Government Solutions is uniquely positioned within the HR field for the public sector. We understand the challenges you face trying to recruit during a time of decreasing budgets, pay freezes and reform.

More information

Press release: IBM Completes Acquisition of Kenexa: Accelerates Social Business For Workforce Transformation

Press release: IBM to Acquire Kenexa To Bolster Social Business Initiatives

Frequently asked questions (112KB)

The Power of a Smarter Workforce

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan shares Kenexa and IBM's vision for a Smarter Workforce.

Explore the benefits of becoming a social business

Social business technologies can help you activate your workforce to improve productivity and delight your customers to create advocates and increase revenue.

Learn more about creating a smarter workforce and about creating exceptional customer experiences.

• Technical Assistance
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• Request a Demo or 800.391.9557

More information

Press release: IBM Completes Acquisition of Kenexa: Accelerates Social Business For Workforce Transformation

Press release: IBM to Acquire Kenexa To Bolster Social Business Initiatives

Frequently asked questions (112KB)

The Power of a Smarter Workforce

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan shares Kenexa and IBM's vision for a Smarter Workforce.

Explore the benefits of becoming a social business

Social business technologies can help you activate your workforce to improve productivity and delight your customers to create advocates and increase revenue.

Learn more about creating a smarter workforce and about creating exceptional customer experiences.

1. What are you announcing today?

On December 4, 2012, IBM completed the acquisition of Kenexa, a publicly held company headquartered in Wayne, Pennsylvania (hereafter referred to as Kenexa, an IBM Company). Kenexa is a leading provider of end-to-end, integrated talent management solutions and services that help customers optimize their most important asset – their workforce.

Kenexa’s unique combination of software, content and services provides its clients with a one-stop provider for their portfolio of human capital requirements, with solutions including:

• Recruitment Technology
• Recruitment Solutions
• Performance Management
• Learning
• Compensation Planning and Strategy
• Assessments
• Employee Surveys
• Employment Branding
• Onboarding
• Leadership Solutions
• Social Solutions
• Government Solutions

2. Who is Kenexa?

Founded in 1987, Kenexa is an industry leader, providing cloud-based, integrated talent management solutions that help customers identify the best individuals for every job and foster optimal work environments. Kenexa has studied human behavior and team dynamics in the workplace, and has developed software solutions, business processes and expert consulting that helps organizations deliver positive business outcomes through human resources.

In short, Kenexa helps business leaders across multiple industries attract, empower and motivate their most valuable assets.

With operations in 21 countries, Kenexa has a large and diverse client base of approximately 8,900 customers globally, including more than half of the Fortune 500.

3. What solutions does Kenexa provide?

Kenexa’s unique combination of software, content and services provides its clients with a one-stop provider for their portfolio of human capital requirements, with solutions including:

Technology and content offerings:

• Recruitment Technology: Automates the full cycle of talent acquisition from sourcing to hiring to onboarding.
• Performance Management: Automates performance and compensation management, career development and succession planning.
• Learning: Comprehensive Learning Management System (LMS), Learning Content Management System (LCMS) and knowledge management solution supporting on-site virtual, mobile and social learning.
• Compensation Planning and Strategy: Enables customers to automate compensation surveys, build market rates, analyze pay practices and design compensation plans.
• Assessments: More than 1,000 tests enabling organizations to select and retain top performers based on key areas that predict performance and potential.
• Surveys: Automates employee surveys and customer satisfaction surveys that improve organizational performance.

Service offerings:

• Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO): Global recruitment services that leverage technology to reach highly qualified candidates and deliver them real-time to recruiters.
• Implementation Services
• Human Capital Management Consulting

4. Why did IBM acquire Kenexa?

Business leaders around the globe are looking to transform business processes to increase effectiveness by attracting and retaining talent, improving performance management and compensation, and cultivating future leaders. According to IBM’s CEO survey, 71 percent of respondents cite human capital as the single biggest contributor to creating sustained economic value. The acquisition of Kenexa and the launch of the new IBM growth play – smarter workforce – will help further accelerate our clients’ abilities to impact business results and build competitive advantage through workforce optimization.

With the acquisition of Kenexa, IBM is helping to redefine the work experience for all business functions – from marketing to sales to development. The combination of IBM and Kenexa will allow IBM to help clients attract and develop the right skills to build the right teams, for the right projects, the first time.

When a smarter workforce is effectively enabled, it can fundamentally change the way an organization attracts, empowers and motivates people to get things done.

• Human Resources professionals have more time and resources to be even more strategic and can focus their energy on helping grow the business.
• Sales teams can be more agile; junior level reps learn from experts and start generating new business more quickly.
• Customer service teams can predict and resolve problems before they become major issues.
• Marketing can develop a deeper understanding of customer needs to create more powerful campaigns.
• Product development teams can delight customers and lead the competition with crowdsourced innovation.

IBM’s smarter workforce initiative is focused on helping companies deliver business results that are tangible and measurable. In summary, a smarter workforce means:

• Getting the right skills, on the right project, the first time
• Connecting via social tools to learn faster and act with speed
• Integrating people and process for business transformation
• Acting on data supported by analytics to make the right decisions
• Exploiting new opportunities on a global scale
• Delivering outcomes for clients and is motivated to excel
• Leveraging social, mobile and analytics delivered via the cloud
• Applying human behavioral science into the hiring equation that leads to attracting the top talent for each company

IBM’s industry-leading social software, HR services and business process outsourcing complement the world-class front-office process solutions delivered by Kenexa’s 2,800 employees. With Kenexa, IBM will be able to offer strategic consulting, a social technology platform and the delivery of local skills and services in multiple countries to help clients create a smarter workforce and lead in any market.

5. How does Kenexa software fit within IBM software portfolio?

The Kenexa portfolio will become part of the IBM Social Business portfolio. Following the close of acquisition, the Kenexa team will become part of the Software Solutions Group, led by GM Alistair Rennie, and form a close operational alignment with the Global Process Services organization, led by Lori Steele.

6. How does Kenexa fit within the IBM Global Process Services (GPS) portfolio?

This announcement is significant for GPS for a number of reasons. The acquisition will greatly enhance our multi-process Human Resource, Learning and Recruiting services capabilities. Kenexa’s technology will create a foundation around which we can continue to build our services offerings while expanding our assets with industry-leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications in recruiting, learning, analytics, talent management, compensation and data collection. The inclusion of Kenexa into the IBM portfolio demonstrates our ongoing commitment to the HR marketplace while adding additional talent management delivery capability and localized expertise to our global footprint.

7. How does Kenexa impact the IBM GPS Human Resources, Learning and Recruiting services business?

We will look to leverage the ongoing investments in the smarter workforce tools and technologies to bring about fundamental changes to how people work. IBM expects to leverage our recognized expertise in social networking, analytics, content management and consulting services to drive improved performance to customers in the marketplace.

8. How does Kenexa impact the Recruitment Process Services of the respective organizations?

The Kenexa acquisition give IBM the ability to bring together complementary approaches to recruitment services and utilize the best practices and service delivery capabilities of the respective organizations that will drive the business to a higher level. The combination of Kenexa’s quality of hire methodology and tools with IBM’s delivery excellence efforts will enable us to deliver greater value to our clients. The combined global organization will be positioned to provide even better support to our clients throughout the changing market conditions with localized talent management expertise across the globe.

9. What value do Kenexa’s solutions provide to customers?

A smarter workforce approach helps organizations attract, empower and motivate their employees and simplify their work experience. This is done through an integrated set of offerings that assist organizations to help attract and retain talent, expand skill bases, and help people optimize and redefine their work. This combination of enterprise grade social networking tools and analytics along with talent management processes and expertise help facilitate a more competitive workforce. In today’s global and digital work environment, organizations require deployment flexibility (whether on premises, in the Cloud or outsourced) and seamless integration with their existing management tools. IBM’s smarter workforce approach provides an industry-leading solution.

10. How does the acquisition affect IBM’s Smarter Planet vision?

Organizations everywhere are seeking new ways to innovate and create competitive advantage. Our smarter planet strategy is to help clients leverage the instrumented, interconnected intelligent systems that are emerging across the world to transform their organizations and business processes. IBM’s investment in social business, including Kenexa, help bring people into this equation. By digitizing front office processes, organizations can effectively leverage information to improve the effectiveness of their workforce and improve business outcomes. This improvement will result in a workforce that:

• Gets the right skills, on the right project, the first time
• Connects via social tools to learn faster and act with speed
• Acts on insights driven by analytics to make the right decisions
• Delivers outcomes for clients and is motivated to excel

The combined capabilities of IBM and Kenexa will help clients address the pressing need to attract and retain the best and the brightest employees, expand their skill base and enable their workforce to act on the insights that can be derived from the vast quantities of data generated on a smarter planet.

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More information

Press release: IBM Completes Acquisition of Kenexa: Accelerates Social Business For Workforce Transformation

Press release: IBM to Acquire Kenexa To Bolster Social Business Initiatives

Frequently asked questions (112KB)

The Power of a Smarter Workforce

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan shares Kenexa and IBM's vision for a Smarter Workforce.

Explore the benefits of becoming a social business

Social business technologies can help you activate your workforce to improve productivity and delight your customers to create advocates and increase revenue.

Learn more about creating a smarter workforce and about creating exceptional customer experiences.