Surely one of the most profound moments in living memory - the first Moon landing on 21 July 1969 was a major feat of technological innovation and of human ingenuity.
NASA has achieved many successes since it was established in 1958, of course the most high profile of those tend to be the missions and the innumerable inventions however, it is NASA's accomplishments in acquiring and managing talent that I want to talk about.
2 year evaluation period after acceptance onto the programme
2-3 years after evaluation period recruit becomes mission ready
Its incredible to think that in its fifty year history, NASA has selected an average of just 6 Astronauts per year and that a little more than one in a million citizens has "the right stuff".
Personally, I think that NASA is an awesome brand with a compelling purpose: "To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research."
However, I've learned that despite its unique status it has not been immune to the effects of the War for Talent. NASA employs around 18,000 people, approximately 60% of whom specialise in Engineering or Sciences. The increasing demand from private industry and a shrinking supply of talent in those disciplines has made the competition fierce. These underlying labour market conditions impacted recruitment and retention at NASA. Add to this the demographic pressures of an ageing workforce and NASA has faced truly mission-critical talent challenges.
If you saw this on your performance review you'd probably be feeling a little bewildered but, in recruiting circles, this seems to be acceptable logic.
In the past 24 hours I saw two posts on the subject of active and passive candidates - one (Only the Employed Need Apply) from the Wall Street Journal reporting that "many employers are bypassing the jobless to target those still working, reasoning that these survivors are the top performers." The other from RecruitingBlogs.com giving 10 reasons to prioritize immediately available candidates.
The two posts coming so close together really grabbed my attention especially in light of some of the research out there that suggests that:
Unemployment continues to rise
The employed are averse to leaving their current job at present
Organisations are looking to get the best out of who they have whilst making a small number of selective hires.
There are many arguments for and against prioritising both active and passive candidates and the approach that you take might vary from vacancy to vacancy depending on the reason for it.
Regardless of the reason for the vacancy and the nature of the candidate, recruiter success in many organisations is still measured only on the basics of time and cost of hire rather than more sophisticated indicators such employee performance and impact on organisation and this is likely to lead recruiters to prioritise working with active candidates. However, is this the best thing to do?
In Adler's contributions I like the blurring of the lines between passive and active, describing the continuum of entry to the job market in stages driven by the theory of 'diminishing job returns' - the point around which contribution starts to drop-off and employees start to think about the next steps.
What I particularly like about the theory of 'diminishing job returns' is the obvious segway into the importance of talent management and employee engagement strategy as methods of motivating and retaining key staff and managing the risk of some becoming the passive candidates targeted by other organisations.
Of your high performers who is starting to show signs of 'diminishing job return'? Maybe they are being scoped-out right now.
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 interested in whether organisations understand why some candidates apply repeatedly for roles that they are not suitable for. With less and less time in the recruiters day and more applications per vacancy wouldn't it be useful to know why some candidates are frequently adding to your work load so that you can take action to manage their application effectively and courteously?
For example, do serial applicants understand the minimum requirements that they must satisfy to be considered for employment in your organisation? Do they have the relevant skills and experience for the job? Are they so bowled over by your brand or benefits package that they are desperate to join?
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.
