Some of the talent crowd's big beasts feature in this week's Three To See with definitions of Talent Management, Social Capital and factors influencing the future of recruiting.

I stumbled across the video below from Jay Cross on YouTube.  It features regular contributor to ERE, Kevin Wheeler and Murry Christensen responding to the interviewer's question: "What the hell is Talent Management?" (a shortened version can be seen here).

Both interviewees provide useful answers - I particularly liked Christensen's emphasis on enabling talent to contribute to an organisation - a notion that is built on in Jon Ingham's recent post to his Strategic HCM blog: Social networks and organisations hierarchies.

In his post Ingham shares opinions as to whether informal organisation structures are becoming more relevant than formal hierarchies and offers a different perspective - that its not the structure but the "recognition that ‘social’ is important".  He goes on to say:

"To me, the social revolution that I believe is starting to impact organisations is about recognising the importance of – and then investing in – the relationships between people, as well as the people themselves."

He develops his thesis with the observations that:

"The people revolution puts human capital at the centre of business strategy, the social revolution extends this to social capital too.

The social revolution is potentially an even bigger revolution than the people one for two reasons:

1. The point of performance in most organisations is the team, not the individual – so social capital has even greater value than the human sort
2. Most organisations manage their people very poorly.  They use up human capital rather than accumulating it.  But at least the management of people is something that they try to do.  Managing or even just influencing relationships is something that most organisations have not even thought about as yet."

John Sumser offers-up a summary of 16 factors that he suggests will influence the destiny of talent acquisition in his post; Five Scenarios for the Future of Recruiting 1 which appeared on the Two Color Hat blog.

Amongst the factors:

• The profession is 30% to 50% smaller than it was 18 months ago.
• Many more HR Generalists are filling the recruiting role.
• Sourcing is simultaneously separating from the selection process and transforming itself.
• Social Recruiting is grabbing a foothold.
• Budgets are trimmed to the bone.
• Other industries are in peril creating a sea of displaced, disrupted workers.

I'm looking forward to the other articles in the series that he has promised.