In Three To See this week: The success of random groups, attracting people who are out of your league and post-recession risks.

My first pick is "Strategies: Diversity Wins" from Tom Peters' "Little BIG Things" video series on his blog.  In the clip below Peter's tells us that random groups of people have been found to provide better solutions to problems than groups that have been purposefully selected... really.

Are you an imposter?  That's the title of my second pick, posted by Andy Porter to the Fistful of Talent blogging community.

Porter urges organisations to decide the quality level of talent that they aim to employee (eg A, B or C players) and then stick with the decision rather than making opportunistic hires from higher levels when they are temporarily cheaper, arguing that:

"Every time an employee is hired for less than they believe they are worth by an organization that suddenly can “afford” top talent, as an employer we're on a slippery slope.  If an employer is legitimately underpaying an employee (emphasis on legitimately) they're essentially sending a message to this employee that they're being undervalued - we know it, you know it and we don't care.  And no one likes to be undervalued.  An employee might accept the situation for awhile but over the long term they're likely to put less discretionary effort into their work and will eventually go to work for an employer who values them more."

And:

"Maybe you're ok with this scenario, but as employers, we do pay in the end either in replacement costs, training, morale or actually paying employees what they're worth."

My final pick came via Skip Reardon on the Six Disciplines blog who posted Six Enemies of Post-Recession Performance which originated from The Corporate Executive Board.

The six:

1. Changed Customer Needs
2. Top Talent Dis-engagement or Flight
3. Increased Risk Velocity
4. Higher Levels of Employee Misconduct
5. IT Budgets Targeting a Shrinking Share of Enterprise Information
6. Misplaced and Untrained Leaders

Point 2 warns that:

"The average organization faces an imminent 7 percent productivity loss from the combination of departing top talent and undermanaged recruiting pipelines."

In this post customer community member Gitte Halby Thomsen, HR Coordinator with Danish pharma and biotech engineers; NNE Pharmaplan, shares her views on the challenges facing employers in 2010.

CE> You met with a number of Danish customers of StepStone Solutions at one of the community forums - what did you take from the event?

GHT> I've been part of this networking group for a year and a half and it has been good to meet with other members to share experience and knowledge and to discuss common issues.  In the most recent forum we really got into the International capability of EasyCruit.

CE> The past 12-24 months have been challenging for many HR practitioners.  What have you learned from this experience?

GHT> The downturn allowed us to change our focus from recruiting new talent to spending more time developing the talent that already existed within the organisation.

It also confirmed that China is an important market - recruitment activity there has been growing fast.

CE> What do you think the biggest challenges and priorities are for employers over the next 12 months?

GHT> Retaining and recruiting the best people will be the biggest priorities.  However it will be more difficult to forecast and plan because organisations will be cautious about growth and committing to hiring new people.

CE> How should HR approach these priorities?

GHT> When working with existing employees, HR Business Partners will need to focus on supporting line management in thinking of various ways to retain key people for example by finding challenging work within the department or redeploying them to other parts of the organisation which could involve cross-training in other disciplines or entering a development programme.

HR Business Partners will also need to assist line management in ensuring that employee performance is satisfactory and that those that consistently under-perform are dealt with appropriately.

Information about how members of the customer community use StepStone Solutions products can be seen in our case study library.

Advice for recruiters, War (for Talent) stories and unblocking critical career paths in this week's Three To See. 

5 Things That Recruiters Should Stop Doing was posted to ERE by Linda Brenner. 

The five:  

1. Working Outside the ATS
2. Beginning a Search Without the Right Information
3. Not Using Questionnaire Functionality in the Applicant Tracking System
4. Taking a Passive Approach to Scheduling Interviews
5. Producing Manual or Customized Reports

The rationale for the five is described in the post which opens with Brenner's assertion that:

"By streamlining their work, recruiters will have more time to focus on the most valuable aspects of the hiring process. The results will be: 

• Better hiring decisions
• An improved candidate experience
• A more cost-effective approach to talent acquisition" 

On his SironaSays blog Andy Headworth asks Is this this the ultimate talent acquisition strategy? 

In the post Headworth discusses the practice of buying-up talent as part of a strategy to "crowd-out" competitors, prompting a number of interesting comments from readers about the ethics and business sense of the doing so. 

The approach can help organisations to establish and maintain market dominance in hyper competitive situations.  However, as several of the comments allude to, the strategy can only work whilst the talent acquired is engaged in employment that continues to meet their aspirations - in other words, the organisation remains their employer of choice.  When aspirations are no longer being met and employees see alternative means of achieving them, then the approach is at risk of crumbling.  I find this debate fascinating and am interested to see what others make of it. 

Sticking with talent strategy, Kim Lamoureaux posted Tackling Your Blockers to the Bersin & Associates blog in which she contends that:

"There are three common scenarios that companies face with blockers.

• He is a high performer, however the role would give a high potential a critical experience.
• He is a good performer, but there are other individuals who could do the job better.
• He is an underperformer and is blocking others from promotion."

Lamoureaux then goes on to offer useful recommendations for dealing with each of the three scenarios before sharing the following insight:

"There are positions in every company that are either critical to certain career paths or that provide high potentials with a key experience.  If you can identify what those roles are, you will be able to treat them as “rotational” assignments and set the expectation accordingly.  For example, at ARAMARK, the safety leader role is designed as a 2-year rotational assignment.  The role offers employees with the opportunity to develop core leadership competencies and exposes them to senior business leaders. It is also recognized as a career builder for high potentials." 

What do you think of these Three To See?

In this week's Three To See: Networked organisations, the future workplace and more on ROWE.

My first pick is Matt Alder's interview of Kevin Wheeler for the Social Future blog.  Wheeler paints an interesting picture of the informal nature of organisations in the future. 

For obvious reasons, Gartner Says the World of Work Will Witness 10 Changes During the Next 10 Years is my second pick this week.

The 10 changes?

1. De-routinization of Work
2. Work Swarms
3. Weak Links
4. Working With the Collective
5. Work Sketch-Ups
6. Spontaneous Work
7. Simulation and Experimentation
8. Pattern Sensitivity
9. Hyperconnected
10. My Place

There is some very interesting content in the article and is well worth looking at. 

The previous two posts link tenuously to my third pick.  In It's Not About ROWE posted to the Three Star Leadership blog, Wally Bock comments on the Flexible Work and Well-Being Study by Phyllis Moen and Erin L. Kelly of the Flexible Work and Well-Being Center at the University of Minnesota.

Bock asserts that the study does not really reflect ROWE (a Results-Only Work Environment): 

"Folks, this is not exactly a landmark study. The findings are that a program designed to give workers control over their schedule and work methods (hence, "results-only") gave them more control over their "schedule and decisions about where and when they work."" 

On goes to state that:

"The best source for a review of all the issues is Chris Ferdinandi. He wrote a great post last year titled, "Why I don't like ROWE." Don't believe the title. Read the post and comments. And check Chris' slide show, "Smashing the Clock" on Slideshare."

As part of our "Talent Crowd" series, I interview Jon Ingham, founder of Strategic Dynamics Consulting and one of the top rated bloggers in the talent space, to find out what he thinks the next 12 months hold for employers and HR practitioners.

What do you think of Jon's points?