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?
In your organisation who is responsible for Succession Planning? Is it owned at C-level, is it owned by individual line managers or is it owned by HR?
OK, OK, this question is a lot like asking who is responsible for Talent Management. But for me, Succession Planning is an interesting topic because its an easy way to introduce the concept of Talent Management to people that are not HR practitioners because Succession Planning is all about managing risk.
Risk Management is something that anybody in the organisation can understand. Risk Management leads to conversations about Business Continuity, resilience and inevitably to scenario planning and at that point Succession Planning becomes a 'hard' topic with none of the 'fluff' of other talent management concepts (eg Recognition, Career Planning and Skills and Leadership Development)perceived by those outside HR. In the context of risk management Succession Planning is vital in keeping the organisation running through periods of forced change.
The traditional HR view of Succession Planning is fairly straight-forward. The short-term emergency is typically about filling a vacated seat, usually of a senior executive and sometimes of key technical staff. This point is well articulated in the clip: Refilling The Pipeline.
The medium-term is about mapping the current workforce to future organisational design and understanding the development needs of a group of 'High Potentials' that may go on to succeed members of the current senior management team. The long-term looks at the capabilities needed by the organisation and the career path from entry level jobs through to C-level.
The traditional approach to Succession Planning takes a linear perspective, based on 'business as usual' conditions, geared to the higher echelons, reinforcing the organisational 'chain of command'. It is biased towards seniority and strata as a framework and on filling vacancies as an outcome rather than replacing talented individuals. Replacing talented individuals is many times more difficult than filling a vacancy and, in organisations with flatter structures, Succession Planning requires more creativity.
What’s the obsession about completion rates of application forms?
Does it matter what percentage of those that started making an application online actually end-up submitting it if you are still making quality hires? Especially right now when there are more candidates chasing fewer jobs.
In the past incompletion rates were a big deal because it meant that the organisation was ‘throwing money way’ on expensive application packs. If the organisation was sending out 100,000 packs at a cost of £3 and getting 1/3 back then £200,000 was wasted. It sometimes prompted recruiters to invest in redesigning application forms in order to increase the completion rate. But did this activity do any good?
Consider for a moment the extra time spent on chasing the additional applications – were they the people that ended up being hired? Did the extra time and cost translate into better hires or did it just end up increasing the volume of applications to be processed? Did the hiring managers notice a difference in the quality of candidate?
I'm looking forward to getting out to some of the sessions in StepStone's Global Seminar series to meet community members and to talk about current priorities.
These events are intended as safe environments for attendees to share their challenges, experiences and solutions to managing talent in a recession, to speak to StepStone's consultants on a one-to-one basis and to hear from industry experts from outside StepStone.
The seminars are running through-out May and June in 20 locations around the world. For more information and to book your place please take a look at the events page on our website.
Last week the British Chancellor announced that he is expecting the global economy to double in size within 20 years - a staggering thought given that in next 40 years the global population is expected to grow by 50%. On the face of it this sounds like good news - taken as a straight-line, those projections would indicate that per capita wealth is likely to increase but who is going to do the work?
Recently I posted about 'Peak Talent' and touched on the magnetic effect of the Asia-Pac region. Since then I have since found two interesting clips from CNBC. The first features an interview with Puneet Swani of consultants Hewitt who talks about the competitive labour market in China and India and the second an interview with David Arkless who talks about Manpower's Talent Shortage Survey that was conducted last year. More recently a posting on how to address China's growing talent shortage appeared in the China Economic Review.
Today I found this video, from Australian based consultants Future Presence, on You Tube.
Its a compelling call to action to business leaders and those responsible for ensuring that organisations have the talent that it needs in the future to look at how to engage with Generation-Y and to begin developing self-sufficient means of resisting talent shortage.
So, if they are going to do the work, what are you doing about Generation Y?
With the current economic conditions, now may not feel like the right time to be thinking about the potential resourcing challenges of the future. However if, like StepStone, your organisation is planning for the upturn and looking to gain competitive advantage by being 'first out the blocks' then you need to work on three plans - the now, the near present and the long-term and find the thread that links them together.
