Talent inventories, recruiting trends and pivot points in this week's Three To See.
A common, yet solvable, internal mobility challenge is incisively illustrated in the Dilbert strip below - my first pick:
My next came via Jason Buss at The Talent Buzz and is the 2010 Trends in Recruiting report from LinkedIn. Referencing a survey of 1,100 in-house recruiters in six countries (Australia, Canada, India, Netherlands, UK and US), the report findings include the following suggestions:
Improving "Quality of Hire" is the most important consideration when purchasing recruiting solutions (rated by 86% of respondents)
More than 25% agreed that passive candidate recruiting is currently an important part of their sourcing mix
Pipelining and pooling talent undertaken by a majority of respondents with only 5% saying that they do not do this
Recruiters are most concerned that their competitors will achieve market advantage by using social recruiting techniques more effectively, building and nuturing a strong talent pool and investing in their employer brand
It is the "global competitive hot buttons" (slide 11 of 15) from the report that I find most interesting because of the way that it breaks down eight answers to the question "What are you most nervous your competitors might do?" by each of the six countries.
My final pick this week, The New Science of Human Capital on the HarvardBusiness YouTube Channel, has some interesting commentary from John Boudreau on how organisations should build their approach to managing talent around the "pivotal" moments, people or positions that make a difference to the execution of business strategy.
"Our old reality focused on the individual. Our "New Normal" focuses on the 'network', or the collection of individuals, as well as what flows between them. Where the "War for Talent" is dying, "War for the Network" is emerging."
I was a little concerned when Letourneau introduced Newtons' 2nd Law, "Force equals Mass times Acceleration" (F = MA), as a means of explaining the thesis (Physics has never been one of my strengths) but it proved to be a useful device:
"Let's say Force (F) correlates to the ability to get things done. Mass (M) correlates to "Human Capital", while Acceleration (A) speaks to "Social Capital", or the ability to quickly mobilize the network.
Let's look at 3 candidates:
"Candidate A (M = 8, A = 4). F = MA, or F = 8x4 = 32.
Candidate B (M = 5, A = 7). F = MA, or F = 5x7 = 35.
Candidate C (M = 7, A = 5). F = MA, or F = 7x5 = 35."
I think its a helpful contribution to the conversation that some in the HCM community, such as Jon Ingham, have been engaged in.
Libby Sartain posted Academic Evidence: Layoffs Are Bad For Business! to the Brand for Talent blog. In the post Sartain shares recent work by Jeff Pfeffer, a professor of organisational behaviour, whose research indicates that:
Layoffs do not reduce costs
Layoffs do not raise a company's stock price
Layoffs do not increase productivity
Layoffs do not increase profits
Companies do not permanently get rid of the employees
Layoffs do nothing to strengthen the organization
Sartain adds an observation of her own: "Layoffs weaken an organization's employer and consumer brand." Interesting opinions - I wonder how they compare with the recent experiences of many HR pros?
I spent yesterday at StepStone’s UK leg of its global seminar series ‘HR’s Time to Shine’. It was a good day with a mix of informal networking, round-table discussion and presentations kicked off by Bettina Pickering of PA Consulting Group who shared some of her experience of organisations putting talent management on the agenda of the Board and at the centre of operations by demonstrating the link between human capital and financial performance.
The session was followed by StepStone’s Scott Morton who presented on the dilemma faced by many organisations going through restructuring at present – to retain and train or make reduce headcount. “Organisations are facing unprecedented challenges and need to weigh up the financial and reputational cost of making redundancies now and then hiring in the upturn against maintaining headcount and developing people to take on the challenges of the next economic cycle. In reality many organisations are doing both at the same time – a finding of the EIU’s report, The Cold War Talent says Scott.
Ruth Mundy, HR Director with Mouchel and a long standing customer of StepStone was next up. Ruth ‘stole the show’ with her frank descriptions of Mouchel’s approach to managing talent, the challenges of implementing policies, processes and tools and how she and her team have overcome them. In the panel discussion later in the day Ruth provided great insight and shared some of the learning from her experience.
The presentations were finished off by Robert Symons’ passionate speech on the ‘Power of Information’. Robert, StepStones Sales Director for UK & Ireland, echoed the sentiments of other speakers when he talked about the downturn presenting HR with a golden opportunity to demonstrate it relevance and importance to the Board and other stakeholders he went on to suggest that this could be achieved by providing predictive (not just lagging) indicators to support organisational decision making, repositioning HR practitioners as Critical Resourcing Officers - an exciting term based on the often used phrase that ‘people are our most important resource’.
People and their contributions are increasingly recognised by Chief Executive Officers as the most important factor in determining organisational success. We’ve all read articles about how its keeping them awake at night and its not surprising given that is has been proposed that having your ‘A team’ rather than ‘B team’ on the field can improve contribution to the bottom line by 40%, if you’re fielding a ‘C team’ that gap increases to 80% a disadvantage that no organisation can afford.
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.
Over the past few months I've posted a few times on the need to base workforce planning decisions on accurate factual data.
Dr John Sullivan has blogged extensively on this topic over the past few weeks. In his most recent posting to ERE, Dr Sullivan has neatly summarised some techniques for workforce planning that give organisations agility in terms of flexing headcount to meet changing demands.
I particularly liked the idea of what he referred to as the 'Shamrock Strategy' - grouping employees into 4 categories:
Those that are contracted on a contingent or temporary basis
Those in roles that can be outsourced
Those in key roles with the requisite skills and perform at a satifactory level
Those under performing individuals that can be substituted by other higher potential colleagues or new hires.
However in order to to implement this strategy organisations need to know which individuals sit in each category before taking action.
