The social space, succession management and the great performance review debate in this week's Three To See.

Andy Headworth shared the infographic below of The Social Media Landscape in 2010 below on his SironSays blog after finding it on CMO.com.

You'll need to zoom in (Ctrl+) to see the details but the colour coding helps to give an at-a-glance overview of 10 of the most well known brands.

My second pick appeared on Malaysia Tomorrow and was authored by Sara LaForest and Tony Kubica.  In Succession Planning: How to Meet Future Talent Needs the authors provide 3 reasons "why you need to immediately implement a succession planning strategy":

1. Replacement for Key Employees
2. Support Anticipated Growth
3. Address and Deal with Talent Shortages

My final pick this week is; Ditch Performance Reviews?  How About Learn to do Them Well? Posted to the Harvard Business Review blog by Maxim Sytch and D.Scott DeRue in response to the Wall Street Journal post earlier in the year: Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews and a number of posts related to it.

The authors cite key "challenges and solutions to the performance review dilemma".

The challenges:

• Cognitive bias
• Sugarcoating the negative
• Lack of preparation.

The solutions:

1. Create an open, two-way dialogue
2. Reduce the subjectivity
3. Give constant feedback
4. Balance evaluation and development.

Three To See this week features posts on differentiated talent management, overcoming inertia and cultivating candidates.

My first pick is Workforce of One, an interview with David Smith of Accenture which was posted to the Harvard Business Review blog:

In the interview Smith proposes 4 differentiated talent management practices to engaging, retaining and maximising the contribution of employees:

1. Segmentation
2. Modular Choices
3. Broad & Simple Rules
4. Fostering Employee Defined Personalisation

Smith's proposition hugely challenges the prevailing culture in many a workplace - something that is not lost on Oscar Berg in his post to Content Management Connection: There's no shortcut to the future workplace.

Berg writes about the importance of culture in the successful implementation and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 practices stating;

"there must always be a spark somewhere - a culture or subculture (a social group that shares certain values and behaviors) - that initiates this change."

My final pick also has a culture-twist.  Kevin Wheeler posted Beyond Talent Pools: Building Dynamic Communities to ERE and starts out by saying;

"A social network helps you gather potential candidates together and it provides a way to deliver and receive information. But typical social networks tend to be weak at getting candidates excited and engaged about working for you. Part of this is because we have not yet embraced the idea of creating communities rather than talent pools."

Before going on to observe that;

"A community is entirely different. First of all it is two-way: both you and the candidate exchange information and both of you give and get. But a community also has several other distinguishing features:

• • Collaboration and Sharing
  • Feeling Included
  • Similar Values
  • Openess
  • Engagement"

I think its helpful post that makes a clear distinction between the two approaches and the different resourcing considerations of each at a time when some practitioners are under pressure to build sustainable talent pipelines for future roles.

In Three To See this week; new social stats, HR hate abates and employee fear-fatigue.

My first pick came via Luis Suarez on the Content Management Connection blog: Social Media Revolution 2 from Socialnomics.

There are some interesting stats in the clip but one that stood out for me was the claim that "80% of companies use social media for recruitment" and that 95% of these use LinkedIn, prompting me to ask recruiters the question - does this reflect your experience?

In his post to the Harvard Business Review blog, Bill Taylor explains Why We (Shouldn't) Hate HR:

"The real problem is that too many organizations aren't as demanding, as rigorous, as creative about the human element in business as they are about finance, marketing, and R&D. If companies and their CEOs aren't serious about the people side of their organizations, how can we expect HR people in those organizations to play as a serious a role as we (and they) want them to play?"

Taylor isn't letting HR off the hook with this statement, rather he is defining the valuable role that the profession can play in a way that outsiders can understand:

"You can't be special, distinctive, compelling in the marketplace unless you create something special, distinctive, compelling in the workplace. Your strategy is your culture; your culture is your strategy. The most successful companies I know understand that the most important business decisions they make are not what new products they launch or what new markets they enter. What really matters is what new people they let in the door — who they hire — and how they create an environment in which everyone in the organization can share ideas, solve problems, and develop a psychological and emotional stake in the enterprise."

My final pick: Bueller... Bueller... Bueller... Your Top Talent Is Bored Stiff with Being Scared Straight.  Time to Create Change was posted to the Fistful of Talent blogging community by Dawn Hrdlica. It is possibly the longest blog post title that I've come across so far, but also the most descriptive and I chose it because it offers a slightly different perspective on the ongoing conversation about employee engagement and talent retention.

This post comes from Su Oakley, Best Practice Consultant, with StepStone Solutions.  In this post Su discusses the use of social tools for recruiting.

Social recruiting is a hot topic amongst many of the customers I work with and something that most recruitment teams think they should be part of, though many are yet to identify how it fits into their recruitment and resourcing strategy and the approach they should take - this is not surprising, according to Department for Work and Pensions three quarters of employers are missing out on candidates by failing to use social networking sites to recruit staff.

Looking at some of the adoption statistics it would seem that the social web has a momentum that makes it compelling to recruiters:

• Socialising has become the number 1 activity on the web
• It took Radio 35 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet 4 years and  iPod 3years. Facebook had 100 million users after less than 9 months.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the 4^th largest country in the world.
• There are currently somewhere between 3000 and 5000 social sites.
• By the end of 2010 generation Y will outnumber baby boomers, 96% of them will have joined a social networking site.

Read the rest of this entry »

Two posts on differentiated workforces and a third on personal reputation management In this week's Three To See.

Professor Dick Beatty of Rutgers University talks about the importance of differentiation in Be Strategic With Your Workforce on the HarvardBusiness YouTube Channel.

This clip leads into my next pick How and Why we Must Differentiate Talent, posted by Josh Bersin to The Business of Talent blog.

Bersin poses the following questions:

1. Who differentiates talent?
2. How do you differentiate?  Who are really the High Performers?
3. How do you create more of these High Performers?
4. So what does this mean to HR?

In his answers he refers to the challenge of identifying "pivotal" talent (a term that cropped up in "The New Science of Human Capital" featured in last week's Three To See) and a technique that he describes as "a "heat map" of the specific characteristics which "define" high-performing managers in this particular company."

In Matrix: Building and Managing Your Online Career Reputation (Unvarnished, LinkedIn, Blogs and More) web strategist Jeremiah Owyang offers advice on how to protect and develop a personal brand.

Owyang outlines the Control Rating, Opportunities, Risks and "What No One Tells You" about your online footprint, reference submissions, LinkedIn references, Unvarnished references and Google listings.  If you've not yet heard of Unvarnished, Owyand describes it as "a website where people you’ve worked with can leave anonymous comments about working with you, both good –and bad."

This is an interesting post that puts individuals in the same position as organisations in having to deal with the perceptions propogated by others - sometimes a welcome, solicited endorsement but at other times a much less welcome "anti-referral" - perhaps because it is negative, unsolicited or accidental (i.e not intended for public consumption) - another useful contribution to the online background checking debate.