How familiar do the three scenarios below sound to you? They’re a few examples of how the siloes in talent management impact HR, employees, managers, candidates, and corporate executives. The impact: companies waste time and money; they compromise on the quality of their talent; their employee engagement deteriorates; and, ultimately, their business performance suffers. Breaking down these siloes is the topic of a workshop I’m running at the fall ERE Expo.
Here are those three well-intended but ineffective scenarios of siloed talent management:
- Company X has a rigorous succession planning process, but the results of this process sit in binders in several HR business partners’ desks. Mary, a senior manager, has a critical vacancy, so she calls her recruiter, John, to fill it. John hires a retained search firm at great cost and expends a great deal of effort, but finally fills this critical but difficult-to-fill position. After the hire, John gets a call from his HR business partner, who asks, “Why were the three ready-now internal successors identified during talent reviews not even considered for this position?”
- Brad, a manufacturing site manager at Company Y, reviews his staffing needs on March 15 and determines that his plant is fully staffed. However, on March 22, he calls his recruiter, Jane, and tells her a change in business strategy has occurred, and he needs 100 new people at his plant by the end of April. Jane thinks, “Senior leadership must have known about this change three months ago. If only I had known ahead of time, I could have proactively pipelined external talent, and worked with Learning and Development and Succession Planning to pipeline internal talent. At this point, I’ll never be able to meet Brad’s timeline!”
- Peter, a new employee at Company Z, meets with his manager, Lisa, two weeks after his start date. In that meeting, Lisa tells Peter that HR requires every employee to have a development plan. She hands him a copy of the development plan template, and tells him to put anything he wants on it. Peter thinks, “I wish Lisa would give me more direction and support for my career development. I interviewed with so many people to get this job; you think they’d have some sense of my development areas and some suggestions for how to grow. I guess this company’s stated commitment to employee development is just lip service.”
Integrated Talent Management: the Solution keep reading…
Yahoo’s beleaguered CEO Scott Thompson is out, in a shakeup that replaced the company’s chairman of the board and added new directors chosen by a dissident shareholder.
Unable to ride out the storm over a false academic degree listed on his resume, Thompson left the company over the weekend. Yahoo issued a statement Sunday mentioning Thompson’s name briefly, and only in connection with announcing his replacement, Ross Levinsohn, as interim CEO. Levinsohn was Yahoo’s executive vice president and head of global media.
The decision to replace Thompson over his false claim of holding a degree in computer science jelled late Friday, after search firm Heidrick & Struggles denied it had anything to do with the falsification. In meetings he held to attempt to calm the waters last week, Thompson blamed a staffer at an unnamed headhunting firm for making the resume mistake, which he failed to notice for eight years.
That firm would have been Heidrick & Struggles, which was handling his placement at eBay. keep reading…
When most recruiters learn about a potential new media channel like Pinterest or Instagram, their initial reaction is often to discount them as a low-volume source. Many recruiters shortsightedly fail to see their value, no matter how many desirable prospects “hang out” on them, simply because the new source is not designed primarily to be a recruiting site. But don’t let those recruiters with a shortsighted “fill the requisitions mentality” steer you away from a strategic opportunity to build your firm’s image as an innovator by being the first to use new approaches.
Including innovative practices and sources in your recruiting is essential because innovators look for signs of innovation in the recruiting process as an indicator that innovation permeates the firm. And if your firm is one of the first users of these hot sites, you further reinforce your employer brand image as a first mover and innovative firm. If you are going to be a strategic recruiting function, you need to look beyond the short-term goal of filling reqs.
Build Your Image as an Innovative Firm keep reading…
Recruitment process outsourcing by definition is a form of business process outsourcing where an employer outsources or transfers all or part of its recruitment activities to an external service provider. Each letter in the term RPO represents a valuable and equal piece of the RPO process model, yet more and more RPO providers today are using the letters in the phrase but not performing up to standard expectations around each functional letter R-P-O.
Whether outsourcing any particular business function is good or bad can be debated, but for those companies who choose to outsource their recruitment departments and select an RPO provider, there are several key elements that will either make or break the initiative. Most important, understand what a particular RPO provider is willing to deliver and what they are good at delivering. Through personal experience it seems that most RPO providers have forgotten or ignored the “R” or “Recruitment” in RPO and spend the majority of their time and resources focusing on “Process” and/or “Outsourcing/Optimization.”
For me, the “R” is the most important aspect in the term RPO and is what I focus on. If a provider can’t deliver on the “R,” then “P” and “O” are useless to me. Other organizations may place a higher value on the “P” and “O,” and again it is all what is best for organizational needs. To me, most RPO providers have lost the concept of recruiting and now focus on the outsourced part.
Although it may be more efficient and although it may be more cost effective — I still demand a certain bang for my buck and while I don’t expect executive-search-quality candidates for every position, RPO providers should still be focused on providing candidates of a certain level of quality and not just numbers.
Lucky for me after trial and error, I was able to locate a provider who has not lost focus on “recruitment” and that can and does deliver at a high level, and that is what it is all about for me. Do your homework, talk to some other professionals in the industry, and conduct a proper assessment prior to partnering with an RPO provider. And if all else fails – meet me at the 2012 ERE Expo in South Florida where I can tell you an RPO story that will make the hair on the back of any HR executive’s neck stand straight up. See you there.
A report in Reuters has indicated that LinkedIn is among a handful of potential companies expressing interest in purchasing all or some of Monster Worldwide. According to sources close to the situation, LinkedIn and Silver Lake Partners are two of “a broad range of strategic and financial buyers” who are weighing Monster as a potential acquisition target.
According to the report, the company plans to send out more detailed financial information by the end of next week to potential buyers.
Monster Worldwide shares are up over 15% in late-day trading in reaction to the report.
keep reading…
With Google instead taking the lead, for the first year since 2008 Disney was not listed as the overall first-choice employer. Disney did rank in fifth place overall in our study of where high school and college scholars most prefer to work in the future.
That’s what we found at the NSHSS, an international honor society recognizing outstanding academic excellence in high school and college scholars globally — 750,000 scholars representing over 160 countries. The full list is at the bottom of this article.
Members were asked to rank their preferred companies to work for and selected from a list of more than 200 companies. The list of companies was created by combining the 2012 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For, the 2012 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity, selected companies from Fortune’s Global 500, and popular write-in choices from prior surveys. Respondents were given the opportunity to select up to three companies and were also allowed to write in choices. Results have are available charted by overall ranking, gender rankings, high school/post-high school rankings, and diverse/non-diverse rankings.
The most popular choices continue to reflect interests in technology and health fields, with Google moving to first place in 2012 as the most preferred employer. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, local hospital and health providers, and the Mayo Clinic all placed in the top 10 most preferred. Teach for America was a popular choice, ranking 16th. Many government agencies place highly as well. The FBI ranked #6 and the CIA closely followed at #8. The Air Force ranked #15, the Navy ranked #26 (up from # 31 in 2011), the Army ranked #28, and, the Marines ranked # 64.
Respondents were also asked about the importance of certain workplace factors when choosing an employer, with options separated into four categories. Students ranked responses based on what they most want in an employer, ranked below. The factors ranking as most important in each area included fair treatment, strong benefits, opportunities to enhance career skills, and the ability to create a harmonious work/life balance.
Financial and business consulting group PricewaterhouseCoopers captured the top spot on DiversityInc’s Top 50 Companies for Diversity.
Of PwC, DiversityInc said this: “Always cognizant of the war for talent, PwC continuously creates innovative strategies to find, engage, and promote the best and brightest employees, especially those from traditionally underrepresented groups.”
Surprisingly, considering the layoffs and slowdown in hiring that have beset the finance industry, it was well represented on the list. Ernst and Young, Deloitte, Prudential, KPMG, and a few others in the sector made the list.
Tar Heel Cops Needed
The highway patrol in North Carolina is hiring. There are 183 jobs open in its “first recruiting blitz in five years.”
Recruiting Company Lawsuit
The U.S. EEOC says Randstad U.S. LP is settling an ADA-related lawsuit for $60,000. keep reading…
If you have ever been in a situation when checking references on a candidate you uncovered negative references and/or performance reviews, you are not alone. What you do with the information is key.
This is one of the most misunderstood, hence mishandled, situations preventing good candidates from being hired. I have seen people get poor reviews because of “sour grapes,” and it happens more often than you may think. I’ve had managers tell me negative things about a former employee, and upon diving in and asking more detailed questions, determined the negative feedback to be sour grapes or a poor fit with culture or the manager. Oftentimes a hiring manager calls a former associate of his whom the candidate worked for and gets a lousy reference. In a split second the candidate is dropped from consideration without further investigation.
The opposite holds true of positive references: if the same manager gets a glowing reference on the candidate, he makes an offer. But neither of these situations individually indicates whether or not the candidate is “right” for you.
When employers look for senior people — and 31 percent will be, a new survey says — the evidence is they’re all looking for the same qualities. Industry experience is important; so is proven problem solving.
Nowhere on the list of qualities a CareerBuilder survey reported as important to employers was craziness listed. Perhaps that trait was covered by the “Is creative” characteristic that 43 percent of the respondents look for in a new executive. keep reading…
According to the U.S. Labor Department, 2.1 million people resigned their jobs in February, the most in any month since the start of the Great Recession.
This is startling given that the economy is not strong and that millions are out of work. The natural inclination would seem to me to be to hunker down and hang on to the job you have, no matter how bad it is. That is what happened in previous recessions. Yet these were disgruntled, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled people who voluntarily, many without other positions or jobs lined up, chose to leave.
In discussions with some of them, I heard talk about feeling they having been used to bolster executive salaries and inflate shareholder expectations unrealistically. Many felt unappreciated and disrespected — a word I hear a lot now and never used to hear at all.
And with eroding benefits and the potential of better access to health care, the hold that corporations used to have is loosening. keep reading…
With final exams underway at colleges across the U.S., it’s only a matter of weeks before the first of millions of young Millennials will be out of school for the summer. Will they have jobs?
The answer is a resounding, “Maybe.”
The National Association of Colleges and Employers says employers expect to hire more new grads this year than last, and the hiring picture has even improved since early last fall. The organization’s spring survey update found employers are planning to increase their grad hiring by 10.2 percent over last year. In the fall survey, the increase was 9.5 percent.
CareerBuilder reports that 54 percent of the companies it surveyed plan to hire from this year’s graduating class. That represents a 17 percent improvement over last year’s results.
Students looking for internships should also have an easier time. Another NACE survey found intern hiring plans are up 8.5 percent over last year. Not surprisingly, the best salaries will go to students in engineering and computer science programs. They’ll earn, on average, $20.79 and $19.10 respectively, says NACE. keep reading…
Marriott is giving away $100 each day for 10 days to a different job seeker, a Facebook freebie meant to generate a little attention to the company’s community and make more people aware it has open jobs.
The hotel chain received the 2012 ERE Recruiting Excellence Award in the employment branding category. It also has experimented with Facebook contests and games in the past, as mentioned in this post by Matt Jeffery.
Marriott’s Jessica Lee and I talk about the shoe program, below. She describes what drove the creation of the giveaway; how the company will measure results; what it means by a “spirit of community” it wants to create; and the balancing act between investing in a Facebook career page vs. a corporate careers site. keep reading…
Every staffing manager is concerned about the candidate quality and quality-of-hire metrics. These are very hard to measure. But if you have sourcers, recruiters, and candidate specialists who know what they’re looking for, and who know how to ask the right questions of the candidate who they’re talking to, then you vastly improve the quality of candidate, which in turn, improves the quality of hire.
If we don’t understand the technical functions of the job, then whole hiring process will be wrong, from start to finish. Here are the four problems that can occur: keep reading…
Last Week Dan Loeb of Third Point Capital sent a letter to the board of directors of Yahoo asserting that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson actually did not have a degree in degree in computer science as his executive biography indicated. Yahoo replied that this was an “inadvertent error.” Mr. Loeb wrote a response to the board demanding his removal for cause by noon on Monday.
Stories are being written by Kara Swisher, Michael Arrington, and many others about the incident. Most articles discuss the integrity of Thompson or the board of directors itself. Some might ask the legitimate question of whether an executive of a technology company even needs a computer science degree. Answer: They don’t. After all, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner did an amazing job turning around in the 1990s after initially turning down the job because he didn’t consider himself a technology guy. It makes the actions of Thompson all the more puzzling.
Ultimately this begs the following question, “How in the world did a Fortune 500 company recruit and hire a CEO with inaccurate statements in his biography?” This might indicate symptoms of a more broad and disturbing problem, such as lack of proper recruiting budget investment, formal process, and execution of proper human capital processes. To view this as a Yahoo problem and move on would be missing a rare opportunity to drive positive change. keep reading…
I strive to be the world’s most prominent advocate of employee referrals simply because there is no more powerful tool in recruiting. Well-designed referral programs not only identify top prospects that are not in a job-search mode but they also require employees to assess candidates for skills and fit and to sell them on the company and the job. Taken together, this identification, assessment and selling feature make referrals superior to any other source.
If your corporation is not getting close to 50% of your hires from employee referrals, I have gathered 10 compelling numbers that should change your perspective. keep reading…
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April’s jobs growth fell below expectations, coming in at 115,000, the lowest since October, said the U.S. Department of Labor in its monthly report out this morning. Most surveys put the average of economists’ estimates in the 160,000 range.
The report also showed the unemployment rate dipping from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, mostly due to workers leaving the labor force. The share of Americans now in the labor force is at the lowest level since 1981, the New York Times reported.
However, the total number of unemployed Americans is 12.5 million, down about 1.3 million in the last year. Long-term unemployed (more than 27 weeks) accounted for 5.1 million of the unemployed, or 41.3 percent. Another 7.9 million are working part time because they can’t find full time jobs. keep reading…
I’m going to contend that with new tools now available, “true” passive candidate recruiting can maximize quality, reduce time to fill to weeks, and minimize cost per hire. Top-tier third-party recruiters are already using all of these techniques, so they’re proven and doable. What is surprising is why their corporate counterparts have yet to step up to the plate and do likewise. Now’s the time.
Let me start with three basic points:
Point 1: active candidate recruiting leaves a lot to chance, primarily quality-of-hire and time-to-fill, primarily since hiring managers will procrastinate as long as possible to find their “ideal” candidate. This waiting time is random, unless the supply of top people is greater than the demand, or the manager becomes pressured to decide. Of course, the longer the wait the more the cost.
Point 2: The lack of a correct and agreed upon definition of pre-hire quality adds more randomness, time, wasted effort, and cost to the process. No one uses the job description for measuring quality and we’ve all had hiring managers confidently say “I’ll know the person when I see him.” This is a problem with passive candidate recruiting, too, but it’s more like playing the lottery when you’re only sourcing active candidates.
Point 3: passive candidate recruiting emphasizing direct networking techniques, i.e., calling pre-qualified referred prospects, reduces the time to find prospects to a few days.
How to Achieve the Recruiting Performance Trifecta
With this as background, here’s a basic passive candidate recruiting process that will maximize quality of hire, minimize time to fill, and reduce cost per hire: keep reading…
We got a pitch this week about The Pitch from The Ladders, which is doing a co-promotion with the latest unscripted TV show to air. From cable network AMC, this show has two ad agencies competing each week to win an account.
If you think about it (but not too much) there is a connection between agencies pitching a campaign and a job seeker pitching themselves, as in the elevator pitch, the interview, and so on. There’s also a kind of ironic coherence having TheLadders promoting a show that will take us into the kind of brainstorming sessions that lead to TheLadders’ own (provocative) ad campaign featuring shirtless men and dancing women.
TheLadders also knows market repositioning. The job board started life as the place for only $100k+ jobs, and $100k+ candidates. Now it takes almost all comers.
Ready in Full Force
From the where-are-they-now department, you may remember that ERE article about Emergent and other new players in the staffing field. We mentioned that Readyforce was in a private beta and not getting too public and all. No longer. It’s now inviting U.S. students and companies to sign up for the beta, and says that 300 companies have joined Readyforce so far. keep reading…
LinkedIn served up a double surprise today, reporting it grew revenue in the first quarter by 101 percent, and buying content sharing site SlideShare.
Minutes after the markets closed in New York, LinkedIn made the two announcements, sending its already pricey shares up almost 10 percent in after-hours trading. The stock, which closed the day at $109.41, hit $119.80 after the reports were out.
LinkedIn said the SlideShare purchase is worth about $118.75 million, to be paid in a combination of stock and cash. Like LinkedIn, SlideShare is widely used by businesses and professionals, who use it to host their PowerPoint, documents, and other presentations. Users upload their materials, which can then be shared, and viewed in much the same way videos are on YouTube. keep reading…
