This week I found some interesting posts on beating the War for Talent, why you shouldn't always hire the best person for the job and the hierarchy of employee engagement.
Talent Management published a post by Harold Stolowitch ‘The Unneccessary War For Talent' - that explored the permanent/contingent worker model as a means of opting out of the War for Talent.
What I found most interesting about this was the description of two types of organisation; those that are talent-critical - depending on the majority of staff to out-perform competitors and those that are talent-intensive - depending on a defined minority of high performers to do so.
In the piece Stolowitch argues that talent-intensive organisations may benefit from using seasoned ‘free agents or consultants' as a way of filling talent gaps and boosting performance more cost effectively than ‘growing your own'. He later goes on to advise that a mix of both approaches - improving the performance of permanent employees whilst also using contingent workers - is the best way of avoiding participating in the War for Talent.
This mix of performers is fairly typical - sometimes it's a deliberate strategy and other times a response to circumstances, however, can organisations ever really avoid getting involved in the War for Talent? If an organisation is working to retain and develop talent or bringing in new permanent or contingent workers isn't it participating in that war?
Speaking of participating - do you agree that Recruitment Is A Non-Rational Process? I thought that Charles Van Heerden's post to RecruitingBlogs.com was interesting because he makes a distinction between hiring the best person and the right person.
The next post 'Employee Consumer Engagement - Its All Connected' came via Brad Federman at The Engagement Factor Blog, and is a great video of Will Marré talking about the 4 levels of employee engagement.
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.
Over the past few months I’ve been reading books like ‘The Long Emergency’ by James Howard Kunstler that delve into the impacts on modern society of diminishing fossil fuel stocks.
At the core of 'The Long Emergency' is the concept of ‘peak oil’ – the point at which oil reserves and oil production reach their zenith whilst demand for oil continues to grow. Reaching and surpassing ‘peak’ mean that diminishing reserves get used-up faster and the ‘run away consumption train’ leads to lower supplies at higher prices.
Peak oil is a Malthusian concept, and not without controversy – there are many opponents of this view of diminishing oil stocks. Likewise there are some that believe the ‘War for Talent’ is over and there are others that argue that it continues in a different form.
Borrowing the concept of peak oil and applying it to the ‘War for Talent’ debate draws out some interesting parallels.
Despite the current economic conditions, demand for talent continues to increase and is likely to continue to grow in order to service the markets that will supply the expanding global population as it goes from 6 billion today to an estimated 9 billion in 40 years.
Over the course of my career the phrase 'war for talent' has been a constant. Sure, it wanes everytime we have an economic downturn such as the dotcom bubble or the current crunch, and then picks up again when we're over the bump.
History tells us that this happens in real wars when, for periods of time, one side enjoys an advantage over the other only to find that circumstances have changed and their dominance is undermined. This pattern repeats until one side achieves and retains an unfair advantage over the other and momentum carries it to victory. An aggressive defense, where no ground is given-up easily, can be a useful strategy to ensure that when the tide turns, there is not so much ground to make up.
So it goes in the war for talent. Organisations wishing to be 'first out of the blocks,' seeking to grab market share at the sign that the economy is improving, obviously need to retain key talent. However they also need to retain good reputations as employers and to continue to promote their employer brand in order to attract talented individuals away from competitors when the the financial and labour markets start to unfreeze.
In his recent posting, Graeme Martin makes some interesting observations about the importance of employer branding in a recession.
