This week I've been working on making StepStone Ideas available to the ETWeb and EasyCruit customer communities.  I'm excited that all StepStone Community members are now able to post ideas for product enhancement and to discuss and vote on the ideas of others. 

The aim?  StepStone seeks to benefit from 'the wisdom of the crowd' based on the belief that two heads can be better than one and that 5,000 heads can be better still.  We feel that crowd-sourcing, is one of many ways to engage with customers and to get a deeper understanding of the pains and priorities in managing talent so that empathetic solutions can be found. 

Collaborating with customers is not new - however with the advent of social media, tools now exist to do it in a more transparent and engaging way.

StepStone Ideas has been designed to give community members an opportunity to share challenges, priorities and potential solutions so that StepStone can continue to develop products that meet the needs of customers.

Of course, collaboration is a two-way street, without engaging customers, suppliers cannot focus on finding ways to help.  This is as applicable to providers such as StepStone as to HR practitioners yet I regularly read that HR needs to prove its relevance and its value to other business functions.

In the current market, organisations are turning to HR departments to use the expertise in macro-level people management to get structures into shape and employees primed to deliver above average performance.  How is HR responding to these challenges? 

How does HR engage with its customers to understand what is needed? What techniques are HR practitioners using to design solutions to these challenges?  How are the ideas evaluated and selected?  How is success measured?  Do tools like StepStone Ideas have a place in your HR function? 

Over the past few months I’ve been reading books like ‘The Long Emergency’ by James Howard Kunstler that delve into the impacts on modern society of diminishing fossil fuel stocks. 

At the core of 'The Long Emergency' is the concept of ‘peak oil’ – the point at which oil reserves and oil production reach their zenith whilst demand for oil continues to grow.  Reaching and surpassing ‘peak’ mean that diminishing reserves get used-up faster and the ‘run away consumption train’ leads to lower supplies at higher prices. 

Peak oil is a Malthusian concept, and not without controversy – there are many opponents of this view of diminishing oil stocks.  Likewise there are some that believe the ‘War for Talent’ is over and there are others that argue that it continues in a different form.

Borrowing the concept of peak oil and applying it to the ‘War for Talent’ debate draws out some interesting parallels.

Despite the current economic conditions, demand for talent continues to increase and is likely to continue to grow in order to service the markets that will supply the expanding global population as it goes from 6 billion today to an estimated 9 billion in 40 years.

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It seems like every other post that I've read in the past 7 days has related to Twitter in one way or the other.  Whether it be reports from the ERE expo, Sarah Radwanick's recent post at comScore about the explosion of Twitter traffic not being being driven by the usual suspects  or Ben Parr's 15 Fascinating Ways to Track Twitter Trends the blogosphere has been jam-packed with content - perhaps down to the rumours earlier in the week that Google were about to buy Twitter. 

I'm a Twitter newbie (there's probably a tw-erm for that) and I find the whole thing incredibly interesting.  Today the little lexical definition that appeared on my Twitter home page grabbed my attention: tw-histor-i, an ongoing and hypnotic social experiment.  For me that definition about sums it up. 

Thats not to say that organisations cannot benefit from using Twitter - in recruitment advertising the likes of Twitterjobsearch and TweetMyJobs have sprung-up to bring organisations and candidates closer to each other and in the customer service and support world Twitter is being used to reach-out to customers.  A posting to Read Write Web a year ago on how to get customer service via Twitter gives some great examples of organisations proactively reaching-out to respond to a 'cries for help' and begs the question - how many organisations do the same with confused candidates or with employees on the verge of resigning?         

Inspired by the posting The Most Powerful Questions Recruiting Never Asks, I've set up a poll on LinkedIn to find out if recruiters ask serial applicants why they keep applying.

I'm interested in whether organisations understand why some candidates apply repeatedly for roles that they are not suitable for.  With less and less time in the recruiters day and more applications per vacancy wouldn't it be useful to know why some candidates are frequently adding to your work load so that you can take action to manage their application effectively and courteously?

For example, do serial applicants understand the minimum requirements that they must satisfy to be considered for employment in your organisation?  Do they have the relevant skills and experience for the job?  Are they so bowled over by your brand or benefits package that they are desperate to join? 

As a starting point, please tell me if you ask your serial applicants why they keep applying and I will share the data with you later in the year. 

So the war for talent is over.  We can all pack-up and go home, theres nothing for resourcers to do now - in the war for talent the (recession) bomb was dropped and both sides called it a draw.  Except... why are we all so busy? 

Last week I was speaking to a StepStone community member, a Head of Resourcing, who was was telling me how stretched she has been over the past few months.  The story she told was one of trying to find suitable candidates for key roles whilst dealing with overwhelming levels of unqualified response, a tsunami of speculative applications and near-stalking by agencies desperate to work on a vacancy. 

At the same time suitable candidates are becoming more cautious about moves, fearing a 'last in first out' approach to downsizing, they have been negotiating sign-on bonuses, longer notice periods and other clauses which draw-out the offer process and has lengthened the average time-to-hire.   

This talent crunch means that the business is putting her under pressure to ensure that key skills are available in order to ride-out the recession.  She is trying to satisfy the need for new hires whilst restructuring departments, putting the right people in the right places and, of course, making cuts in the overall headcount - starting with her own team.  Does this sound familiar?

This week I've been reading The Cold War For Talent by The Economist Intelligence Unit, a report that StepStone commissioned at the back-end of 2008.

The main conclusion of the report is that far from being over, the War for Talent has shifted into a subtle cold war. 

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