This week's Three To Read has an unashamedly techie bias with a look at how HR is using technology to tackle its Service Delivery priorities, a post on Enterprise 2.0 - the buzzword for institutional use of social media - and a timely guide to technology jargon past and present.
According to research by Towers Perrin, more than 60% of organisations are intending to maintain, or increase spending on HR technology in 2009. In the post Has the Financial Crisis Shifted HR's Priorities, Towers Perrin go on to assert that Talent and Performance management systems are the number one priority, with a number of other service delivery issues following closely behind, as illustrated in the chart below:
Larry Dignan over at ZDNet shared his views on why social networking tools will go enterprise: All your employees are using them. The post draws on Forrester's Third Annual Social Technographics Profile which indicates that more than 80% of US internet users are now active in social media. Dignan points to the table below showing the social activities of users and suggests that we're close to the tipping point where the use of social tools in the workplace becomes inevitable.
To finish off this week I've found something for those of us feeling overwhelmed by talk of virtual desktops, VoIP and 'the cloud'. Carolyn Duffy Marsan's post 12 words you can never say in the office is a helpful way of 'joining the dots' on technologies old and new.
I hope that you enjoy this weeks Three To Read - if you'd like more please browse my bookmarks.
This week I found some interesting posts on beating the War for Talent, why you shouldn't always hire the best person for the job and the hierarchy of employee engagement.
Talent Management published a post by Harold Stolowitch ‘The Unneccessary War For Talent' - that explored the permanent/contingent worker model as a means of opting out of the War for Talent.
What I found most interesting about this was the description of two types of organisation; those that are talent-critical - depending on the majority of staff to out-perform competitors and those that are talent-intensive - depending on a defined minority of high performers to do so.
In the piece Stolowitch argues that talent-intensive organisations may benefit from using seasoned ‘free agents or consultants' as a way of filling talent gaps and boosting performance more cost effectively than ‘growing your own'. He later goes on to advise that a mix of both approaches - improving the performance of permanent employees whilst also using contingent workers - is the best way of avoiding participating in the War for Talent.
This mix of performers is fairly typical - sometimes it's a deliberate strategy and other times a response to circumstances, however, can organisations ever really avoid getting involved in the War for Talent? If an organisation is working to retain and develop talent or bringing in new permanent or contingent workers isn't it participating in that war?
Speaking of participating - do you agree that Recruitment Is A Non-Rational Process? I thought that Charles Van Heerden's post to RecruitingBlogs.com was interesting because he makes a distinction between hiring the best person and the right person.
The next post 'Employee Consumer Engagement - Its All Connected' came via Brad Federman at The Engagement Factor Blog, and is a great video of Will Marré talking about the 4 levels of employee engagement.
Brian Chappell of Ignite Social Media shared geographic, demographic and traffic data from the 2009 Social Network Analysis Report's look at more than forty social networks. The data is displayed in a series of easy to understand charts with brief analysis on each of the social networks included in the report - useful information for anyone using 'social' for talent acquisition.
Staying with social, if you are thinking about using social media for pre-employment background checks then Steve Bruce's post to the HR Daily Advisor blog; Background Checks on Myspace - Dangerous or Due Dilligence is worth reading - not least for some of the sensational examples of what employers have found when conducting internet searches.
I hope that you enjoy this weeks Three To Read - if you'd like more, please see what else I've bookmarked at http://delicious.com/craigendicott.
Agencies are losing their appeal as they fail to develop innovative ways of sourcing talented candidates. That was one of the conclusions from round table discussions with UK retailers hosted by StepStone recently.
During the session attendees discussed the effect that the downturn has had on their organisations and found that:
The majority have experienced organisational restructuring and have made redundancies since the start of the credit-crunch
All continue to recruit and experience difficulties hiring talent into key roles
Active candidates lack the skills and attitudes that retailers are seeking
Agencies are losing their value because they are failing to innovate
No organisation has enhanced or damaged it employer brand because of the multilateral approach to reorganisation
Organisations are developing their own direct sourcing strategies with a focus on social recruiting
Given the epoch-breaking change in the global economy and the impact on the retail industry, it was unsurprising that the majority of attendees had some experience of re-organising their operationsand managing the resulting people issues. Each attendee described their organisations need to make redundancies in some areas - typically store staff at a senior level - whilst at the same time recruiting for specialised positions, echoing the findings from the Economist Intelligence Unit's report The Cold War for Talent published earlier in the year.
There was round table agreement that despite the labour market being awash with candidates at present, many of those candidates do not have the skills, experience or ‘brand affinity' that retailers are looking for and that the recession hasn't affected their career prospects or earning potential of hard-to-find talent, indeed some retailers are fighting to retain key people and making counter offers with pay hikes of more than 10%.
With the competition for talent continuing unabated, retailers have turned tosearch and selection firms for help only to find that their agencies lack the ability to innovate beyond what in-house teams are capable of doing themselves - evidenced by sourcing candidates already known to the organisation or putting forwardcandidates that do not meet requirements. This poor performance, combined with the increasingly aggressive behaviour of agency consultants,has lead attendees to question the value of their PSL (Preferred Supplier List).
As a result retailers have been revisiting their talent acquisition strategies and looking to new ways of engaging directly and more deeply with prospective hires and are keen to step-up their own use of social recruiting techniques, such as employee referral programmes, to reach out to talent. Attendees acknowledged that, with the renewed focus on direct sourcing, their employer brand equity is important but agree that, although they may have been affected by the recession, in reality it's been a zero sum game - no organisation has damaged or enhanced its reputation more than another.
The breadth of discussion on the day was fantastic, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with members of the StepStone Community and taking part in the conversation but looking back I wonder how many of the conclusions reached are specific to the retail industry and how many relate to any organisation. What do you think?
Besides the great contribution from Josh Bersin - Today's State of Talent Management - that appeared on the Community Post earlier this week, there are three others that are worth a look:
If you're thinking about using social media as part of your talent acquisition strategy, Ben Parr's recent post on Mashable about Why Teens Dont Tweet will be very helpful. Parr reports that Twitter is mainly used by the over 24's with those in the 45-54 year old bracket 36% more likely to visit - typically to promote business activity and to gather information and news. The main reasons given for the lower adoption of Twitter by teens are that they have less to say and care more about engaging with close friends via Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. Interesting stuff!
On to managing talent:
Anthony Tjan's wrote an excellent piece for Harvard Business Publishing on How to Align Employee and Company Interests by asking direct reports to list their 5 priorities for a period of time and then asking 3 simple questions: Which priorities will have the biggest impact, which is of most interest to the individual and which is the individual most likely to make a success of? Tjan writes "that real magic for an employee happens when these three questions produce the same answer."
Continuing the productivity theme, Dr Jim Sellner wrote a frantic post on the 3 Whys of Talent Management - For Joy, Profit and Financial Sustainability that appeared in ezinearticles.com. In his piece Sellner illustrates how organisations are wasting money by failing to effectively manage the performance and development of employees - a view that sits neatly alongside Josh Bersin's post.
I hope you enjoy this weeks Three To Read as much as I did.
