Over the past two years, the way we think about work has changed. Perhaps accelerated by the recession, there is more focus now on finding satisfying and rewarding work than on just finding a job that pays the most.

More people are thinking about finding something interesting, challenging, and perhaps even fun to do that provides enough income. The key words here are interesting/challenging and enough. Fewer expect to get rich and there is less focus on the money. There is more focus on lifestyle, flexibility, free time to pursue other learning or hobbies or sports, and less interest in family. I’ll do more columns on these trends soon, but partly because of them here are the major changes that I see happening this year.

Internal Recruiting Goes Mainstream

Perhaps one of the most significant trends will be a greater focus on finding current employees to fill existing jobs. Rather than continue time-consuming and expensive external searches, more hiring managers will opt to go with an almost-ready internal candidate who is a good cultural fit and is willing to learn fast. Although hiring managers may push back at this, management will encourage it, and the increasing difficulty in finding and recruiting top talent will help accelerate the trend.

Over the next few years there will be a move to enlarge the skills of current employees so they can be moved around to different functions as demand fluctuates. Employee development will morph from delivering training, to providing accelerated apprenticeships, developing simulations, and finding ways to encourage informal and on-the-job learning.

Recruiters should focus on encouraging hiring managers to look at these internal employees, encourage them to hire internally, and develop better internal talent communities to expose hiring managers to talented employees and employees to opportunities.

Social Goes Mobile

When recruiting does look externally, more of it will happen on mobile devices. The explosion of Android and iPhone apps means fewer potential candidates will be using traditional computers.

Clearly candidates with technical edge and savvy — the ones you are probably the most interested in hiring — will be spending most of their time on smart phones, iPads, and other tablets. If you have not developed specific recruiting apps that take advantage of these mobile platforms, you will be at a disadvantage as we roll into the middle of 2012.

More applicant tracking systems are now capable of using a social profile rather than a resume, and as most candidates already have such a profile it only makes sense that they use it to apply for a position.

Everything from branding to screening to even doing interviews is moving to mobile platforms and using such things as simulations, video, and chat. Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other major players will introduce more mobile apps and functionality during this year.

By the end of 2012, the traditional career site will be mostly obsolete. If it exists at all will be little more than the place where the candidate makes the formal application. Smart firms will make everything they do mobile-friendly and compatible and encourage candidates to interact more with hiring managers, other employees, and even alumni in online forums, chat rooms, Twitter chats, and via video, Skype, and other similar media.

Just-in-time Sourcing and Recruiting

Sourcing has already moved from searching static databases to using social media, and this trend will continue to grow. Rather than build proprietary databases or talent pools, recruiters can participate in and look for potential candidates in many different online forums and communities. As almost all professionals have an online presence, whether in LinkedIn or Facebook or elsewhere, and as many are also likely participating in Twitter chats, Facebook conversations, and so on. Searching for talented people is getting easier each month.

A recruiter can find an interesting potential candidate, start a conversation, provide the candidate with a variety of information sources about the organization and position, and even direct the candidate to screening apps and apps that allow the candidate to apply.

Recruiters can also use their network of current employees, alumni, friends, and colleagues to crowdsource good candidates and leverage referrals.

Entire recruiting campaigns can be run in a matter of days or weeks by using referrals, crowdsourcing, social media, mobile technologies, and by rethinking the recruitment process. Through streamlining, simplification and by getting hiring managers more involved, candidates can be found, screened, assessed, and hired in days.

Continued Rise of Contingent Workers

The use of contractors, part-time employees, and consultants has soared during the recession. And it will continue to grow for two reasons: the first is that it provides employers with the flexibility they seek to manage costs and headcount easily and much more cheaply than by frequent layoffs. Second, many people are finding that contingent employment suits their lifestyle and interests well. They can plan other activities around their work schedules, they can budget according to the amount of time they are willing to work, and they get variety in the kind of work they do and who they work for.

It will be hard to return to the model of employment where just about everyone is a regular employee. Strategies changes frequently, world events and business cycles make it necessary to adjust priorities more often than ever before, and people are less and less willing to commit to a long-term employment arrangement that is uncertain and stressful.

The Beginning of Applied Analytics

Look for more vendors to offer analytical software specifically for human resources and recruiting. We will begin to see how various independent events have an effect on the quality of hire by tapping into data hidden away in their ATS and HRIS systems. They will begin to seriously track and use data to decide the best sources of candidates, what key traits lead to retention and on-the-job success, and where they can reduce costs or efforts and still get good results.

All in all, the economy and the election will dominate this year and, as a result, this should be a year of modest employment growth, a focus on hiring returning military veterans, and even more growth in outsourcing volume recruiting and hard-to-fill positions to RPOs.

The leadership set aside at least half the day for the team to identify upcoming problems and opportunities and the resulting strategic moves that need to be made. This article is merely a checklist of the strategic talent management actions that I have found that the very best corporations should have on their potential to-do list.

The Top 15 Potential Strategic Actions to Consider in Talent Management

If you’ve decided to stop fighting fires and to do something major with a strategic impact, here is a list of possible programs and actions that you should consider.

1. Increase the productivity of your workforce – workforce productivity is merely comparing the output of your entire workforce (the total value of the products and services they produce) with the cost of your workforce (total labor and talent management costs). Many talent management departments measure engagement (a precursor to productivity) but they don’t measure workforce productivity. Even fewer take proactive actions to directly increase it. Increasing productivity requires talent management to identify the barriers that restrict productivity and then to proactively provide the consulting advice, best practices, and tools that have been proven to increase a team’s productivity.
2. Increase employee innovation – fierce marketplace competition requires firms to accelerate innovation in product and service areas, despite having fewer resources. Rather than targeting a few departments, talent management must increase innovation in all areas of the business. Typically, innovation can be increased tough the targeted hiring of innovators, retaining innovators, and minimizing the barriers that innovators face within the corporation. Talent management must help shape the culture so that the expectation of continuous innovation permeates every business area.
3. Reward great people management – Most managers simply don’t spend enough time on talent management activities. The primary reason is that managers are not directly measured or rewarded based on how well they manage their talent. This is true even though talent management “owns” all of the key components related to measuring and rewarding (performance management, performance appraisal, competencies, and reward systems). The key action step is to develop a “people management scorecard” for each individual manager and reward them based on their performance against those standards.
4. Identify and fix bad managers – research by Google has shown that in most cases, an employee’s or a team’s manager is the single-highest impact factor on the hiring, retention, innovation, productivity, and the development of employees. Yet most organizations have no formal program for identifying weak managers. Strategic actions would include implementing surveys and metrics to identify with managers and to provide general lists with proven tools and approaches to improve a manager’s people management performance.
5. Convert talent management metrics into their dollar impact – unfortunately, most traditional talent management metrics fail to impress executives because they are not expressed in “the language of business,” which is dollars. Saying we have a 12% turnover rate, a 54% engagement rate, or an 87-day time to fill generally won’t impress senior managers because the metrics are not expressed in their dollar impact on corporate revenue. In contrast, stating that every percentage point increase in regrettable employee turnover costs us $7.2 million gets an immediate reaction. Work with the CFO’s office to credibly calculate the impacts.
6. Calculate the risks of weak talent management — shifting from the positive business impact to the possible negative impacts requires a risk management manager. Risk management is an increasingly important function throughout the business, but unfortunately, few talent management functions have put anyone charge of risk management. Risk managers identify and quantify the risks associated with potential talent problems (its probability and likely costs). Underfunding important talent programs can create tremendous economic risks such as losing key innovators to competitors, failing to have enough developed leaders, and a weak employer brand that drives top candidates away.
7. You need to prepare for a leadership gap — the combination of increased growth and higher turnover rates will mean that most corporations will begin to suffer because of a lack of leadership bench strength. In addition, because the type of leaders who will be needed will also change, the entire leadership and succession program will have to be re-examined and new social media and project rotation tools will need to be developed and implemented.
8. Speed up internal movement through proactive internal placement – very few things increased productivity, retention, and employee development faster than periodic internal movement. Unfortunately, most corporate programs require the employee to initiate the movement and to find the “correct” placement area. A more strategic approach is a proactive one where recruiters periodically identify employees and then help to correctly place these individuals who should be moved both for their own and for the corporate good.
9. Improve internal best-practice sharing – most talent management leaders spend most of their time and resources on developing new programs and approaches. Surprisingly, the data indicates that you can have a higher impact faster and at lower cost by simply identifying and sharing “hidden” existing best practices. Rather than relying on this best-practice sharing occurring organically, a superior approach is a proactive one that seeks out these affected practices wherever they might be in the organization. And once identified, they are shared in such a manner that managers easily understand their value and implement them.
10. Update your retention approach – just like employer branding, retention programs have been allowed to atrophy because the economy has reduced most turnover to a trickle. Unfortunately, turnover is about to dramatically increase, so processes to prioritize key individuals, processes for identifying who is at risk, and retention toolkits need to be reinvigorated before it is too late.
11. Employee referral programs need to be reinvigorated — as the rate of hiring and competition for talent increases throughout the year, stagnant employee referral programs need to be re-examined. Because they produce the highest quality and volume of hires, referrals as the percentage of all hires should begin to reach over 40%. Employee referral programs must be closely integrated with the developing social media approaches.
12. Assess your external employer brand – during the economic downturn, the area of employer branding has been frequently ignored because very little hiring was going on. Unfortunately, during the same time, the reputation of many corporations has been tarnished as a result of layoffs, salary/promotion freezes and a reduction and development resources. In addition, corporate images in general and in some specific industries like banking, oil etc., have been damaged by recent events and “occupy” type movements. The growth of glassdoor.com, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook now make it much easier for negative messages to be spread. At the very least, the positive/negative aspects of your employer brand should be measured and monitored before an upturn in hiring begins.
13. Re-examine your social media approach – although many talent managers have “done something” in the area of social media recruiting, realize that the potential for social media in talent management is much greater than almost everyone anticipated. Plans should be developed to determine how social media can positively impact training, employee development, learning, retention, collaboration, problem identification, crowdsourcing of answers, and best-practice sharing. The mobile platform should be examined in a similar manner because it is rapidly becoming the dominant communications platform for employees.
14. College recruiting needs to be reengineered — communications and job seeking approaches have changed dramatically on college campuses but college recruiting programs have unfortunately been stagnant for years. Program features that need to be examined include remote college recruiting, social media approaches aimed at college students, mobile platform approaches and marketing research to better understand the needs and the actions of top grads.
15. Improve non-monetary motivation – when compensation and reward resources are limited, nonmonetary motivators need to be emphasized. Unfortunately, the compensation function focuses almost exclusively on “expensive” salary, benefits, and bonuses … even though a significant percentage of employee motivation comes from … recognition, praise, and feedback. Talent management should develop non-monetary motivation tools for managers that are easy to use and that produce measurable results. They should also target key employees and server them in order to identify “how to best manage and motivate me” plans.

Benchmark Firms to Learn From

A key competency for any talent management leader is rapid self-directed learning, so it only makes sense to benchmark the firms that are aggressively making tremendous strides in talent management. My extensive research has identified some of the best firms to learn from. Many are from the Silicon Valley, which has already returned to a “war for talent” (Google, Facebook, Zynga all approach talent management using a more scientific approach).

Firms outside of technology have also taken some amazing steps so they should not be ignored (Zappos, Sodexo, CACI, DaVita, Deloitte, KPMG, PepsiCo, and the U.S. Army have all taken bold steps).

Additional Strategic Talent Management Actions to Consider

In addition to the top 15 major actions recommended above, some other strategic actions to consider include:

• Prepare for VUCA, the new normal — talent management plans, approaches, and processes need to be improved so that they can handle the new business environment that we face (VUCA = Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity)
• Increasing revenues — examining how talent management actions can directly increase individual employee revenue generation
• Integration of talent management functions – an almost-universal weakness is a lack of integration. Talent management functions must more closely cooperate, coordinate, and integrate so that they work seamlessly.
• Hire right before they do — if your firm doesn’t have the strongest employer brand, location or glamorous product, you must develop a plan to quickly initiate hiring immediately before your talent competitors. A rapid “explode out-of-the-box” plan is also required.
• Corporate headcount “fat” – setting up a process that ensures that the return to hiring doesn’t result in a surplus of employees (i.e. headcount fat).
• Competitive analysis — identifying the competitive advantage that your talent management practices provide compared to your talent competitors.
• Prioritizing — prioritizing jobs, managers, and talent management programs so that your limited resources provide the highest possible impact.
• SWAT team — creating a rapid response team that can respond to sudden talent management opportunities and problems.
• Alerts — providing a process that alerts managers about upcoming problems before they get out of hand.
• Lean or agile talent management – adapting lean, CRM, and agile business approaches and tools to the area of talent management.
• Remote work opportunities — as technology, communications, and social media tools improve, talent management must develop ways that allows top talent to work from anywhere.
• Forward-looking metrics — unfortunately, almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Instead, forward-looking and predictive-metrics that allow for improved decision-making need to replace them.
• Reengineer performance appraisals – this is an almost universally disliked process that requires tremendous amount of time but produces no measurable results. A completely new approach is required.
• Transparency – throughout the business world there is an increasing emphasis on transparency and openness. The time has come for talent management leaders to reassess their entire approach to secrecy, privacy, and the degree of openness with employees and applicants.
• Cloud talent management – HR and talent management cannot be exempt from the powerful trend to move everything to the cloud.

Final Thoughts

The period immediately before the beginning of the New Year is a great time to sit back and think of your accomplishments and your legacy. Unfortunately, rather than being strategic, too many talent leaders have been simply happy to survive the last few years with their sanity intact.

Now is the time to shake loose any lethargy, to take some risks, and do something bold before you retire or move on. You may have “earned a seat at the table” but you can’t be truly respected and admired unless you produce a measurable strategic business impact.

Employer brands, however, have limited shelf lives in maturing markets. As an example, just compare Google today and its continuing series of product blunders to the Microsoft of 10-15 years ago. When a company’s business strategy changes due to changing market conditions, its talent acquisition strategies must immediately follow suit.

Quickly, here’s what I believe are at the root cause of most companies’ hiring challenges:

1. The company’s talent acquisition and development strategy is out of alignment with its business strategy and operating plans.
2. Lack of understanding of how the actual customer, in this case the passive candidate, decides to engage with a company and eventually accept an offer. Since there is a disproportionate percentage of top people in the passive pool, this is a critical shortcoming.
3. The workflow and recruiting methods to find and hire passive candidates is fundamentally different than for active candidates. Unfortunately, most companies try to mishmash the two together, and wonder why neither one works too well.
4. Overreliance on a big employer brand that hides process inefficiencies and narrows the selection criteria based on past hires rather than current and future business conditions.
5. The decision-making process to hire or not hire someone is flawed, and does not fully address the fundamental reasons why top people underperform. Typically these involve style problems with the hiring manager, lack of clarification around total job needs including available resources, and a superficial assessment of cultural and environmental fit.

Aligning Talent Acquisition Strategies, Plans, and Processes

Addressing the lack-of-alignment problem starts by examining each factor involved in the process. Start with these core components to see how well-aligned your company is. As you read through the descriptions, you’ll quickly see how lack of alignment on any of these factors creates inefficiency, lost opportunity, and problems with attracting, hiring, and retaining the best. One example will highlight problems causes by lack of alignment: a passive-candidate program to target world-class design innovators will fall short if the compensation is based on group averages instead of best in class. I’m sure you’ll see similar problems at your company as you read the list.

Business Strategy. The long-term business plan combined with current operating plans needs to drive every aspect of a company’s talent acquisition program. When the business strategy changes, everything else has to change in domino-like fashion, including the talent acquisition strategy. Since talent acquisition is so critical, if it doesn’t flex quickly with changes in a company’s business strategy, it becomes the tail wagging the dog.

Talent Acquisition Strategy. This needs to support the business strategy with emphasis on ensuring that the best people are put into critical roles. A quality-of-hire target for each job category should further refine this, with specific targets for all managerial, professional, staff, and rank-in-file positions. If you’re a recruiter and don’t know this for your assignments, either you’re not working the hot jobs, or your recruiting department is out of sync with the business it’s supporting.

Workforce Planning. A workforce plan allows a company to develop internal mobility and succession planning programs, and from this, determine external needs by class of jobs. Different sourcing programs are then developed depending on candidate demand vs. local supply, and whether candidates are active or passive. A workforce plan is the first step involved in turning a talent acquisition strategy into a operating plan, so if you don’t have one, you’re missing an important connecting link.

Sourcing Strategy by Job Category. A passive candidate sourcing program is far different than one designed for active candidates. Active is generally higher volume and based on a “find-and-apply” model. A passive candidate program is more targeted, including focused messages, and a multi-step “career discovery and matching process” before the candidate agrees to be a candidate.

Active and Passive Candidate Recruiting Workflow. This is a huge tipping point, and even if the planning and strategy development is appropriate, it often falls apart at the execution level. The key is to have at least two different workflow branches. The passive candidate branch would focus more on the prospect’s needs, involve a formal means to “bridge the gap” at first contact to ensure candidates never opt-out without full information, include pre-interview exploratory conversations with the hiring manager, and a career-based closing and negotiating process.

Of course, there are still a bunch of other HR/recruiting issues that need to be included as part of this talent acquisition program, but these are the big ones (here’s a link to the full list). Doing the up-front talent strategy and planning and then executing against this plan is why doing this right is important. Surprisingly, many companies react to changes in hiring needs rather than plan for them. This is equivalent to putting the cart before the horse, doing the doing before the thinking, or firing before aiming.

While most companies complain they can’t find enough top talent, the root cause is more likely a lack of alignment with the company’s business strategy and talent acquisition programs. If you don’t have enough recruiters, if hiring managers aren’t held accountable, if compensation determines who gets hired, if your ATS establishes your workflow, or if some corporate lawyer says you have to write a boring ad, you are experiencing the problem first hand. Collectively all of these practices and processes are built upon a surplus-of-candidates mentality. The idea behind this approach is to attract as many unqualified people as you can, and hope that a good person falls through the cracks.

Alternatively, you could build your talent programs on a scarcity-of-talent model. In this approach, the needs of the best people determine the workflow, not a DBA. To get a sense of a talent-centric approach, consider how some of your recent best hires made it through the maze. As you review what happened, don’t be surprised that someone “modified” your company’s basic processes to meet the person’s needs. Commonsense would then suggest that you make the talent-centric approach the default rather than the exception. This is a great way to start aligning your talent acquisition programs to meet your company’s business strategy.

• Market segmentation — an approach that separates top performers and innovators into a distinct segment, so that recruiting could distinguish between the unique expectations of top performers and the completely different expectations of average candidates.
• A scientific approach to get in front of their eyes — surveys or in-depth interviews with top prospects to determine the best location for them “to see” job postings or employer-brand-influencing content.
• A databased approach to identify decision-triggers — periodic focus groups asking top non-job lookers (i.e. passives) what factors about the job and company must be present in order to actually trigger them to consider your job, and in-depth behavioral profiles that reveal which factors lead to complete application/acceptance.

You Don’t Know Jack

What recruiters don’t know about candidates is extensive. For example, it is extremely rare for consumer-oriented companies to even make note that a candidate is a regular customer. Hiring managers interview candidates without realizing that even a mediocre candidate experience might drive them away from their brand as a consumer. Few companies have a formal process to identify the job acceptance criteria of top candidates.

Most recruiters believe they know “candidates,” but when you drill down into their knowledge in specific instances, you realize that the knowledge is limited to generalizations full of stereotyped assumptions. It’s not entirely the recruiters’ fault; few human resource leaders (possibly because few have spent time in recruiting) seem open to investing in market research to arm them with data. Recruiters have been forced to rely solely on ad-hoc information garnered from interviews, and informal conversations with candidates that often lack insight into day-to-day behavior outside the job search. It is my argument that if recruiting is to ever move from an art to a science and to prove its business impact, recruiting leaders must implement an in-depth market research practice.

Prospect market research is the process of systematically identifying and exploiting the job search approach and the decision-making criteria used by top prospects

Key Learnings

Other Business Functions Have Already Made the Transition — Almost every consumer-touching business function already leverages market research. Sales, marketing, brand management, customer service, and even product development long ago shifted to a data-based model. Other aspects of HR use tools like 360s, employee surveys, and exit interviews to better understand the internal audience, but external audience research is one of the most important but most-ignored aspects of the strategic recruiting process (along with quality-of-hire metrics and sales training).

I estimate that less than 10% of corporate recruiting functions have ever flirted with conducting real market research on their prospects. Most recruiters and recruiting leaders argue that they are simply too busy to do this research. Unfortunately, it’s quite possible that the high workload may in part be caused by their lack of a understanding of their target, which results in ineffective messaging and the poor placement of job announcements. If you’re getting a high volume of low-quality candidates who barely know your firm, a lack of market research may be the culprit.

Moving from one job to another is equivalent to buying a house — Most in recruiting severely underestimate the complexity of the decision to switch jobs, equating the job-search decision with the simple and unsophisticated purchase of a Starbucks coffee or a Diet Pepsi. However, if you expect to land top candidates and those who are currently employed, you need to realize that moving from one company to another is a life-changing decision.

As a recruiter, you are selling something that is the equivalent of buying a house or a car, because it’s a major decision that impacts everyone in the family. The cavalier attitude comes from an over-emphasis on “active candidates” who will go out of their way to find and apply for a job, but if you’re trying to attract a top prospect who already has a job and multiple career choices, you better “know them” and their decision criteria backward and forward or you will never see an application from them.

The job search process literally changes almost every day — Knowledge about candidate search behavior like most knowledge might become obsolete in less than six months. Take a step back and think about it: nearly every day the news features an announcement of a new technology or app related to communicating, making referrals, or finding a job. Do candidates use Foursquare? Do they want to apply for jobs using a mobile device? Do they find out about a company from their website or on Facebook or Twitter? Do they use Glassdoor, Quora, or LinkedIn to find out about an organization’s negatives? Does this generation search for jobs in a different way?

You can’t actually “know” what candidates are up to without continuous market research. One of the reasons that firms are struggling to prove the ROI of social media recruiting is because we really don’t know precisely how and when these new communications tools are being used by the different market segments. You can no longer be satisfied simply knowing that these new communications and networking tools exist; you need to know how top prospects are actually using them as communications channels and job-search tools.

Job expectations are constantly changing — Speaking of different expectations … are you having difficulty recruiting from the different generations? I laugh at most of the junk science used to describe the expectations of the different generations. Almost all of the assumptions about generations are based on broad global generalizations based on age rather than data-driven segmented market research.

Assuming that everyone within a 20-year generation that lives in any country of the world can be attracted using the same recruiting approach is simply silly. Incidentally, this segmented market research information can also tell you how you need to change your jobs so that they become exciting to the specific individual or market segment you are targeting. Without market research, you can only rely on trial and error to fully understand these changing expectations.

Next week: Recruiting Market Research Action Steps and Information Gathering Targets

Apple in Sydney

In Part 2 of this case study on Apple’s talent management practices, I look at its approach to innovation, compensation, and benefits, careerpathing, and online recruitment (its career site). Some approaches discussed are unique to sub-factions within Apple, as would be expected in any organization of significant size. It’s also quite rare for organizations that design, manufacture, and sell through direct retail to have consistent approaches across all units.

Talent Management Lessons To Learn and Copy (continued)

You should not be surprised to learn that the firm that made the term “think different” a brand uses talent management approaches that are well outside the norm. In addition to the lessons presented in Part 1, some approaches other firms can learn from Apple include:

Career paths reduce self-reliance and cross-pollination — in most organizations, HR helps to speed up employee career progression. The underlying premise is that retention rates will increase if career progression is made easy. The Apple approach is quite different; it wants employees to take full responsibility for their career movement. The concept of having employees “own their career” began years ago when Kevin Sullivan was the VP of HR. Apple doesn’t fully support career path help because it doesn’t want its employees to develop a “sense of entitlement” and think that they have a right to continuous promotion.

Apple believes career paths weaken employee self-reliance and indirectly decrease cross-departmental collaboration and learning. Absent a career path, employees actively seek out information about jobs in other functions and business units. In a company where creativity and innovation are king, you don’t want anything reducing your employee’s curiosity and the cross-pollination between diverse functions and units. Automatically moving employees up to the next functional job may also severely narrow the range of internal movement within the organization, which could reduce the level of diverse thinking in some groups.

Create and manage a culture of innovation — most firms have a culture with a singular focus on one attribute like performance, quality, customer service, or cost-containment. Apple is unique in that it has two dominant cultural attributes that exist side-by-side. The first (discussed in part one) is “performance,” with the second being “innovation”; the latter may actually be the strongest of the two. The dual emphasis works at Apple because the firm operates in the consumer technology field, where there is a universal expectation for “disruptive” performance.

Producing $2 million-plus in revenue per employee certainly establishes Apple as a performer, but it is its industry-dominating product innovation that differentiates it from competitors like HP, Sony, Microsoft, and IBM. Three factors drive the innovation attribute, including the expectation of continuous innovation, extreme secrecy within the product development process, and continuous brainstorming/challenge meetings (even at play just days before a product launch).

“I expect a pony”

Apple’s culture of innovation is unique because the goal is to produce a “pony, not a real horse but instead something so desirable that everyone wants it and considers it ‘gorgeous.’” Simple evolution doesn’t cut it — only extraordinary industry-leading innovation that results in WOW products does. To accomplish that, Apple doesn’t do what most consumers assume it does. Instead of developing completely new industry technologies, Apple takes existing technologies and then bundles numerous small developments on top to produce what appears to the public as giant step forward. It takes a powerful culture and group of managers to delay taking great work public faster, but Apple knows that numerous small releases don’t produce the same media and consumer buzz.

The expectation of innovation permeates the culture

The expectation of innovation is driven by Apple’s history of innovation, its leaders (who forbid the use of “that’s not possible”), and the peer pressure among employees to be among the contributors to the final product that the customer sees. In order to generate this expectation of innovation, it doesn’t rely on posters or motivational slogans (although they have those too … around here, changing the world just comes with the job description). Instead, every communication, process, product launch event, and even advertising slogans (Think Different, Imagine the Possibilities, Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. Etc.) make it crystal-clear that innovation is at the heart of Apple’s success. Innovation has driven Apple’s past and current successes, and it will continue to drive future success. After walking in the door of the corporate offices in Cupertino, California, you can literally “feel” the expectation to innovate.

Secrecy drives internal competition

The second critical driver of innovation is the product development process. This innovation process is unique in that it doesn’t rely on a formal “ideation” type model; instead, it has been described as an “iteration” process energized by peer competition and Apple’s famous siloed/secret approach to teams. Apple does many things using small development teams, as many firms do, but doesn’t rely on a single team to design each product element. Multiple teams may be assigned to the same area (or they may accidentally wander into the same area). The approach has been called 10 to 3 to 1 because 10 teams may work on a product area independently. When work is ready for review a formal peer review, it will whittle 10 mockups to three and eventually down to one. It is an approach that is unique to Apple. Outsiders may consider it expensive and slow, but they can’t argue it isn’t effective.

Apple is well known for its obsession with secrecy in order to heighten the impact during a product release. Secrecy is also the most unique element in its innovation process. In order to maintain secrecy, development and design teams are intentionally siloed. As a result of these communication barriers, team leaders may not be initially aware of how many teams they’re competing against and what those other teams are working on. The level of open collaboration that you might find at other firms like Google is not possible under this process, but neither is early-stage groupthink. Once possible feature solutions move forward to peer review, the organization benefits from broader scope best-practice sharing and collaboration. While it may seem counterintuitive, Apple has turned “team silos” that would be a negative factor at most firms into a positive force.

Paired design meetings force free-thinking to continue until the end of the design

Another element of the design and innovation process is the holding of weekly “paired design meetings.” Every design team is expected to hold two meetings each week. The first is a traditional production meeting where small refinements are discussed and made. The second is a “go crazy” meeting, in which everyone brainstorms and uses free-thinking to scope out parameters. Most organizations stop these brainstorming meetings once the design parameters are clear, but Apple continues them long into the development cycle to guarantee that completely new ideas will constantly raise the innovation bar.

The talent management lessons to learn in the area of innovation include the concept that intense competition may produce innovation faster than any formal ideation process. In addition, peer vetting of ideas, delaying collaboration until toward the end of the development process, and requiring the continuous use of brainstorming processes may result in bolder innovations and higher levels of risk-taking.

Tying economic rewards to overall company success can reduce selfish behavior – You won’t find anyone who will publicly argue that Apple pays well with regard to base compensation. Economic rewards at Apple are significant, but largely tied to the company’s valuation. The primary monetary motivator at Apple is “the opportunity for wealth creation” as a result of stock ownership. Most employees at Apple get periodic stock grants to reward their contribution. By putting the focus on the stock, they send every employee a clear message that individual accomplishments are important only if they directly contribute to the overall success of the company. This approach, coupled with the firm’s famous “product focus,” keeps everyone focused on product success rather than individual results and individual rewards. Individual rewards are provided based on performance and consist of stock grants and cash bonuses up to 30% of base salary. Apple’s retail employees also have stock opportunities. They are paid on an hourly basis and do not receive a sales commission.

Benefits and even pay play a secondary role in recruiting and retention — at Apple, the primary long-term attraction and retention factors are stock growth and exciting work. Because of the importance of these two factors, its message on benefits is clear. If you’re doing the best work of your life and having a major impact on the world, do you really need sushi in the cafeteria? (It has that also.) Although most talent competitors to Apple spend huge amounts of money on benefits, Apple’s offerings are spartan when compared to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. While Apple’s health plan is well-funded, and it has good food and an on-campus gym, neither the food nor the gym is free. One perk that does excite potential applicants (especially in retail) is the employee discount on Apple products which is given to every employee. These discounts further support and reinforce Apple’s companywide emphasis on the product.

Your corporate jobs website should boldly inspire — because the primary goal of most corporate career/jobs websites is simply to provide company and job information to potential candidates, most corporate job pages are chock-full full of information. Apple’s website is lean on information but strong on inspiration. As a result, after exploring the site, the potential applicant comes away inspired rather than with a pile of information about the company.

There are two categories of inspirational messages on the site, and each one is bold. The first group of corporate messages makes it clear that Apple is “anti-corporate.” In fact, the first bold headline you see is “corporate jobs, without the corporate part.” They also highlight what they are proud not to have including endless meetings, being bureaucratic, having executive perks and managers wearing suits. Instead they boldly tell you “don’t expect business as usual.”

The second category of inspiration on the website concentrates on openness, innovation, and changing the world. Key phrases include “open minds, collaboration, and of course innovation.” You will also find the phrase “there’s plenty of open space — and open minds” (obviously perfect sentence structure isn’t a high priority either). Finally, they promise to “give you a license to change the world” and “be inspired.”

Its focus on inspiration is so strong that for a tech firm, there is a surprising lack of technology-speak on the page. You will not find blogs, videos, or any mention of Apple’s availability on Twitter or Facebook easily. When it comes to mobile access, the site will render fine on the latest smartphones, but receives a 1.51/5.0 with regard to meeting mobile standards. If you visit the site, you might even find links that don’t work and features that load very slowly. What you will find is inspiration — loads of it.

I’ll leave you with this introductory statement from its career site:

“There’s the typical job. Punch in, push paper, punch out, repeat. Then there’s a career at Apple. Where you’re encouraged to defy routine. To explore the far reaches of the possible. To travel uncharted paths. And to be a part of something far bigger than yourself. Because around here, changing the world just comes with the job description.”

Next week, Part 3: Employer branding, recruiting, retention, and other talent management approaches to copy and learn from.

V. Program Responsiveness Features

Being responsive to those who refer and the referrals they submit are critical features that drive program loyalty, participation, and engagement.

1. Rapid response to a referral is critical – a lack of responsiveness to employee referrals is the #1 program killer. The best programs set a target of getting feedback to the referrer and the referred individual within 48 – 72 hours of submission (Aricent & AmTrust Bank).
2. Expedited interviewing – some firms make a commitment to decide whether to interview/not interview all referrals within a week. Others make a more narrow commitment, which is to actually schedule an interview with all “A” quality employee referral candidates within a week of receiving their referral (Owens Corning).
3. Referrals must be tagged and the processing expedited – in the best programs, all referral applications are tagged in order to measure program effectiveness. In addition, the tagged referrals are given a priority for processing (i.e. fast tracked). This is necessary in order to ensure that both the employee and the referred individual feel like they are “special” (Accenture).
4. “On the spot” screening – consider developing a process where resumes collected at the referral desk undergo instant screening followed by instant feedback to the employee and the candidate (Tata consultancy).

VI. Communicating with employees and applicants

High-performing referral programs require frequent and effective communications.

1. Personalize and target your communications – broad communications addressed to all employees almost always produce disappointing results. Instead, develop customized or personalized promotions and campaigns. Write personalized e-mails, tweets, or Facebook entries to targeted job families, well-connected individuals, and top performers alerting them to critical needs in their area. Periodically push relevant job openings that require referrals only to the narrow list of appropriate employees (Amazon & CACI International).
2. Provide periodic employee notifications after a referral is made — employees are almost always nervous about whether their referrals were any good and what is going to happen to their colleague. The best practice is to electronically notify employees immediately when their referral is accepted/rejected, if the candidate is invited for an interview and when the candidate is finally hired or rejected.
3. Provide periodic feedback to applicants – prospects who have been referred are also frequently nervous about their chances. At the very least they should be electronically notified that there referral has been received and accepted. These notifications can also include an overview of what they can expect, including the steps in the process, frequently asked questions, and the likely timeframe before any decision is made.
4. Offer an online chat feature with employees – one of the best ways to reach busy and hesitant employees with questions about the ERP is through an online chat feature (Aricent).
5. Develop and use referral champions – a powerful way to inspire employees to refer is to use senior leaders as referral champions. These executive champions should participate in communications and help to explain to employees the importance to the business of the positions being recruited for (Accenture).
6. Consider a follow-up meeting after a great referral – after a great referral, schedule a follow-up meeting with the person. Goals include to hand-deliver the bonus, to thank them (and their manager), to identify and then learn from their approach, and to ask them if they know any other stars. (Amazon).
7. Provide direct feedback to employees on weak referrals — make sure that you provide feedback to individual employees who make weak referrals, so that they know what they did wrong and how to improve.
8. Keep top referral rejects interested – top referrals who were not hired because they lost out to an exceptional candidate should be kept for consideration of future openings. Your goal should be to develop a pool of these potential “future hires” and to build a long-term relationship with them by continually communicating through periodic messages or an e-newsletter. Also “push” future relevant jobs to them. In order to keep them excited, consider telling all A+ rated referrals who were not hired what specifically they could do to improve their chances.
9. 24/7 help desk – large firms with a high volume of referrals can open 24×7 referral help desks to provide information and to answer questions, much like a concierge (Tata and Aricent).

VII. Specialized referral approaches to consider

In addition to providing a broad employee referral program, it is also wise to consider implementing some specialized subprograms.

1. Proactively approaching target employees – most referral programs communicate using a broad impersonal approach; a superior proactive approach involves recruiters seeking out individual employees who have a high likelihood of making a quality referral for a specific job. Employees and managers are usually approached on a one-to-one basis (and often in person) and are asked to provide the names of a handful of individuals who fit a targeted set of criteria. Because the approach is personal and targeted, the response rate and referral quality are significantly higher. When top performers and executives are proactively approached, frequently they are willing only to provide “names” alone, with no follow-up or resume (Google & Aricent)
2. Boomerang referrals – this focused approach emphasizes maintaining a continuous relationship with high-quality former employees (corporate alumni) in the hopes of someday rehiring them through an employee referral. Top corporate alumni can also be asked to provide referrals (Aricent & Booz Allen).
3. Reference referrals – this approach emphasizes approaching the top references of last year’s top hires as referral sources. They are thanked for their helpful reference and asked if they “know anyone else equally as qualified.”
4. College hire referrals – because of their widespread usage of social media, college students are well-connected with other students in their field around the world. College referral programs have proven to produce excellent referrals for both interns and permanent hires. Last year’s graduates who you hired from key schools should also be proactively approached for names (Endeca, Aricent, & Intuit).
5. Onboarding referrals — make it a regular part of onboarding to highlight the employee referral program and to provide new hires with a referral information kit. Also make them aware that you have a recruiting culture and that they are expected to continually provide referrals. Each new hire should be asked to immediately provide top referrals from their former firm. (Aricent & Eli Lily)
6. Referrals for executive positions – because corporate executives are highly visible and accessible in today’s world of social networks, vacant executive positions should also be filled through referrals. In order to be successful, the executive referrals component requires an extremely high level of customer service and candidate experience. These “choose-your-own-leader” type programs can empower employees to get better leaders (Aricent).
7. Internal movement referrals – employee referrals can also be an effective tool for improving internal movement. Employees need to be rewarded for making successful referrals for key internal openings and managers must be rewarded for “releasing talent.” An internal recruiting team may also be used to speed up internal placements (Booz Allen, Sodexo, & Microsoft).
8. Offer letter referrals – this extremely aggressive program requires you to ask potential new hires to provide referrals as a condition for becoming an employee (FirstMerit).

VIII. Referral program technology

Globalization of referrals and the requirement for fast processing of applications mandate that programs use the latest in technology, which in this field advances by leaps and bounds.

1. Allow employees to submit using multiple platforms – provide your employees with multiple options for submitting referrals (web, email, phone, text). Providing multiple options can make it easier for busy employees to make referrals 24/7, while they are “on the run.”
2. Application website flexibility – the referral website should offer regular and expedited options. The first channel should provide the detailed information that first-time referrers’ need, but the second channel should be designed for experienced referrers, so that they can quickly jump directly to the referral submission page (Accenture).
3. A website that allows employees to track the progress of their referrals – an internal site can allow employees to continually track the progress of their referrals as well as their accumulated bonuses (Accenture and Aricent).
4. Offer referral program kiosks – because not all employees have continuous access to a computer, standalone referral kiosks often need to be strategically placed around the facility. These kiosks can be used to input referrals and to provide information about open positions. They can include advice, frequently asked questions, and a calendar of upcoming referral events (Aricent).
5. Online assessment tools – develop and offer online assessment tools so that the skills of referral candidates can be quickly assessed. Also consider another option of offering tools that allow the prospects to self-assess themselves before they agree to become a referral.
6. Online interview scheduling – develop a website that allows referrals who have been chosen for interviews to self-scheduling their own interview times (Alaska Airlines).

IX. Process management and the administrative aspects of referral programs

The effective administration of the ERP is an extremely important component for producing great referrals.

1. Proactively discourage weak referrals – help to avoid a clogged referral queue by developing a process that discourages “junk referrals.” Discourage your employees from referring their relatives, and strangers who “approach them.” In order to ensure that your employees are screening out weak prospects, require employees to thoroughly know and assess their referral’s work, their skills, their interest in the job, and their cultural fit. You can also require employees to rate their knowledge of their candidates on a 1 to 5 scale. Requiring this level of knowledge and assessment helps to make the employee own the quality of their referral, and it minimizes the wasting of hiring managers and recruiters time on weak referrals (Agilent & Aricent).
2. Establish referral targets for managers – managers and teams produce a higher percentage of referrals when they are provided up front with specific referral targets or goals for each quarter. Also rank managers from best to worst on their ERP performance (Aricent & Acumen Solutions).
3. Encourage internal competition – offering rewards for early-bird referrals (i.e. the first submitted) can foster competition and encourage employees to respond quickly. Holding contests between rival business ynits can also foster a competitive mindset around producing referrals. An employee scorecard that lists the employee’s personal referral success rate allows employees to continually track the progress of their referrals as well is accumulated bonuses. One organization sends their iRefer dashboard to all employees to encourage competition and to allow employees to contact top referrers for advice (Tata Consultancy & Aricent).
4. Continually monitor referral vendors – maintain continuous awareness of the services offered by the numerous established and emerging vendors in the referral area. Even if you don’t use them, be aware of the concepts, the technologies, and the outsourcing options that are emerging in this area.
5. You need dedicated program staff and recruiters – the best programs develop a referral team and assign responsive recruiters to specialize in referrals (Owens Corning, Microsoft, & Amazon)
6. Develop an SLA – you can increase the responsiveness of line managers by instituting service-level agreements that spell out expectations for both managers and the ERP program staff (Aricent & Tata Consultancy).
7. Develop a best practice sharing process – periodically survey or interview both new hires from referrals and employees (with successful and failed referrals) in order to identify what worked and what didn’t. Develop a formal process (i.e.  a Wiki, listserv, Facebook page, Twitter feed, or online forum) that allows employees to ask questions and to easily post and share best practices for finding prospects, building relationships, and selling prospects.
8. Monitor progress and continually improve using metrics – periodically assess the satisfaction of employees, hiring managers, and individuals who were referred. Other key metrics that should be tracked include new-hire job performance, new-hire retention, boomerang rehires, offer acceptance ratio, diversity referrals, and referrals as a percentage of all hires (Aricent & Accenture).

Some Benchmark ERP Milestones

Some “best in the world” metrics to compare yourself to include:

• Participation rate (% of employees with at least one referral): 71% -Aricent
• Percentage of all hires from referrals (with a bonus): 78% -AmTrust
• Percentage of all hires from referrals (without paying a bonus): 70% -AmTrust
• Employee satisfaction rate: 98% -Aricent
• Percent of boomerang rehires through referrals: 72% -Aricent
• Most globalized ERP: operates in 40 countries -Microsoft

Referral Program Killers To Avoid

If you expect great results, in addition to providing some of the above advanced features and best practices, you must consciously avoid the following 13 ERP killers:

1. An ERP that is slow to respond to referrals and questions
2. Delaying the reward/bonus payment for three to six months
3. Referral spamming of employees with too many messages
4. Failing to periodically re-energize the ERP
5. No ATS marking of ERP applications so that you can track program effectiveness
6. Equal rewards for all jobs
7. No feedback on weak or bad referrals
8. Individual recruiters are allowed to “ignore” referrals
9. Not tracking referral rates by manager
10. Too many rules and restrictions
11. Not weighting referrals based on the referrer’s track record
12. ERP applications are not given priority treatment in the recruiting process or ATS
13. ERP program manager turnover

Climbing wall at Google - Boulder

Firms that have successfully overcome negative momentum and turned their performance around often select new leadership with a proven ability to operationalize a much narrower strategy. They also accept that the talent that was with the organization going into decline may not be the best talent to help pull the organization back up.

Turning around an organization is a tremendous feat, one that involves numerous cultural battles. It’s illogical to assume that any organization in a state of decline could transform itself into the next Apple, Google, or Facebook without dramatic changes to every aspect of its culture.

Corporate culture, often the subject of much debate, is quite simply the real operating environment of the organization. It has nothing to do mission, vision, and values, and everything to do with the unwritten rules that are inferred every day by management actions. Many CEOs who led less-than-successful turnarounds did so with the expectation that the answer was in product development, R&D, or sales, overlooking the role of talent management.

Talent Is Key in Any Turnaround

Despite CEOs acknowledging that developing “strategies for managing talent” (Growth Reimagined, PwC, 2011) is the most critical business problem they face in this difficult business environment, there are few leaders in talent management bold enough to accept the challenge of leading a business turnaround. Recruiting leaders often say that they want to have a strategic impact, but focusing on tactical issues and efficiency demonstrates that they don’t know what actions they need to take in order to be strategic.

“Being Strategic” Requires a Performance Culture

Southwest Airlines Bags Fly Free Photo Shoot

Being strategic requires actions that demonstrate a multi-year impact on the primary strategic goals of the organization (i.e. revenue, profit, productivity, market share, time to market, and innovation). In cases where a dramatic business turnaround is required, CEOs often articulate the need to build a performance culture (every employee, every manager, every process expected to increase performance and innovation). Unfortunately, many organizations attempting to transition fail to consider the insane impact a talent management activity like recruiting can have on corporate culture.

It’s no secret that firms notorious for delivering record-shattering performance invest significantly in both recruiting capability and capacity, while those that fail often institute cost-containment efforts without any consideration for functional effectiveness. Companies like Google, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos accept that the recruiting function can dramatically impact corporate culture by managing the caliber of talent that makes it through the front door. There are few more impactful ways to build a performance culture then to populate your firm exclusively with new hires who know how to build that culture rapidly.

The First Step – Accepting the Role of Gatekeeper

By accepting gatekeeper responsibility, recruiting leaders send a clear message to everyone inside the organization that they will ensure that all new hires will either be a top performer, an innovator, or a game-changer. This is necessary because despite the crisis, individual hiring managers will likely continue hiring in their own short-term interest if allowed to.

20 Additional Steps Recruiting Can Take To Help Turnaround a Business

The following 20 actions are the most impactful actions a recruiting leader interested in driving a turnaround effort should consider. They are broken into four categories.

Change Goals, Targets, and Branding

1. Shift the goal to “hiring for the good of the firm” – traditionally the recruiting function has allowed most managers to hire for their short-term, self-serving needs. In a performance culture, that tendency must be changed so that all hiring decisions are made based on meeting the goals of what is best for the overall performance of the organization. Follow the example of Google and consider instituting a broad hiring team that will ensure that every hire fits the new culture.
2. Change the targeted competencies – recruiting leaders need to change the definition of “corporate fit.” Organizations must target individuals with new competencies who would not “fit” the old culture. This is necessary because in a performance culture, every job description and selection criteria must emphasize performance, the ability to lead, and the ability to successfully innovate. You can’t produce significantly different results if you hire the same competencies that got you into your current situation.
3. Change employer branding and recruiting communications – in order to attract the very best, recruiting and corporate communications must shift messaging radically. The new approach must clearly communicate that “things are changing” and articulate why the organization would be not only relevant, but also an exciting place for top performers, game-changers, and innovators to work. Those involved in hiring must be provided with a sell sheet that helps them to effectively communicate the changes that are occurring and how the new culture would be exciting to top candidates. Emphasize fast decision-making and a chance to try new things.

Change Who You Hire

1. Begin with a few magnet hires — start by identifying and hiring a handful of “magnet” individuals. This will quickly send a message throughout the industry that the very best have recently decided to join your firm. By bringing in a few well-known people, you automatically attract others who admire them.
2. Prioritize the hiring of managers and leaders – managers and leaders have the most influence over changing the culture and improving performance and innovation. As a result, recruiting must prioritize the hiring of great managers and leaders, so that they are filled with change agents and innovators.
3. Prioritize high-impact jobs – in a performance culture, everyone acknowledges that all jobs do not have an equal impact on business results. Because at least initially there will be a limited number of hiring opportunities, with its remaining hires, recruiting must identify and prioritize the business units and the jobs that will have the most impact on performance, innovation, and the turnaround. Recruiting leaders must influence the CFO and COO to prioritize the authorization of requisitions in those high-impact areas.
4. Hire change agents – whenever you hire regular employees, emphasize the identification and hiring of “change agents” with a track record for implementing change. Also target individuals who have a history of intolerance for the status quo and those who overly defend it. Look for “fist raisers” and individuals who will instantly speak up when they see a performance weaknesses or a lack of innovation.
5. Shift the focus to external hires – a successful turnaround will require employees with a completely different skill-set and a mentality. Although organizations normally have a preference for promoting and transferring current employees, changing long-held employee values and behaviors may require more time than the turnaround allows. You need to shift the ratio of internal versus external hires to emphasize external hires not overly tied to the current culture.
6. Target your competitors — if you’re going to beat your competitors in the marketplace, you also have to beat them in the talent market. Winning the battle for top talent must start with a competitive analysis that includes the strengths and weaknesses of each of your major talent competitors. Because a large percentage of the top performers in your industry are likely working at one of your competitors, target your competition’s best talent. Hiring from competitors not only helps your firm but it also simultaneously degrades the capability of your competitors.
7. Speed requires team lift-outs — in order to minimize the time it takes for your turnaround, you may have to target and successfully recruit entire intact teams from other firms. This is because intact teams are already used to working together, and as a result, they often can produce results much faster than a newly organized team of “strangers.”

Change Your Processes

1. Change the assessment process to identify performers and innovators – at least for the first year of the turnaround, recruiting must change its resume screening, interviewing, and candidate assessment processes, so that they effectively screen out anyone who is not a top performer or an innovator. Instead of simply relying on candidate statements, require each candidate to demonstrate their ability to perform and innovate on real problems that the company is currently facing.
2. Emphasize proactive referrals — in order to ensure success with limited recruiting resources, every employee must become a talent scout. Start by approaching current employees who are known for performance and innovation and specifically ask them to use their social networks to identify and make employee referrals of those who fit the new culture.
3. Focus on direct sourcing — you cannot assume that broad advertising will successfully reach and convince the people that you really need to apply (especially if you are targeting individuals who are not actively looking). Instead, your sourcing effort must proactively identify and sell the specific individuals who you need to build your culture of performance and innovation.
4. Improve coordination and sharing – effective recruiting relies heavily on other HR and talent management functions. In order to maximize speed and results, interrelated functions need to be more closely coordinated and integrated. A process must also be put in place that ensures rapid and widespread best practice sharing. You may also need to develop a SWAT team to rapidly address the most difficult recruiting problems that come up.
5. Develop metrics to identify problems – in a performance culture, metrics improve accountability and spur continuous improvement. As a leader of the turnaround, recruiting must lead by example by developing quarterly performance metrics that quickly allow everyone to identify hiring successes and failures.

Additional Actions to Consider

1. Show the business impacts of recruiting – recruiting leaders cannot assume that executives and hiring managers will automatically see the tremendous economic impact that recruiting can have on the business turnaround. In order to get executives and managers to own recruiting, both groups must be shown the direct dollar impact on revenue that results from hiring top performers, game-changers, and innovators. In fact, all recruiting results must be converted into their dollar impact on corporate revenue and sales.
2. Negotiate control over other types of labor — because as much as 50% of an organization’s “labor” may come through contingency or outsourcing channels, the head of recruiting must ensure that they have some degree of influence or visibility into contingent hiring as well. This is necessary so that everyone (regular or contingent) is on the same page when it comes to performance and innovation.
3. Re-train your recruiters – in order to hire the best, you will need to retrain your recruiters so that they have the mindset and the capability of bringing in top performers, game-changers, and innovators. The tools and technologies that you provide to recruiters and managers must also improve if you are to successfully recruit top talent into a firm with a lagging reputation. Focus on referral and social media tools because they are effective and inexpensive.
4. Reward great hiring – in order to get managers to focus on great hiring, work with those in compensation and performance appraisal to add the hiring of top performers, game-changers, and innovators to the bonus criteria of every manager and executive.
5. Improve internal movement – because resource limitations will restrict the amount of external hiring, it is a good idea to use your corporate recruiters internally to identify and move innovators and top-performing employees quickly into areas within the firm where they can have a larger impact. Influence the promotion criteria so that they promote based on a recent record of performance and innovation, rather than on experience and loyalty.

Final Thoughts

In my former role as a chief talent officer, I can tell you that I learned quickly that the prime differentiator between great and average recruiting leaders was their ability to see the tremendous business impact of great recruiting. Once a recruiting leader realizes that recruiting alone can have a tremendous impact on building a performance culture and on turning around a struggling business, they are simply unstoppable.

Gertrude Stein is noted as saying “There is no there there,” and I am a firm believer in this philosophy. Although many people have succeeded and gone far in their careers using the traditional “ladder” method (simply moving up within their job family), I’d like to suggest that there is another way that can take your candidates way beyond “there”: the lattice.

The lattice method is a way of moving up in your career by moving over to adjacent work, work that touches on what you are currently or historically doing, but brings some new twist to it. Ask your candidates to think of their overall career: what themes do they see emerging? Are they a bridge (connecting people)? Are they a builder (of process, products, teams)? Are they a collector (of information, of ideas)? Ask them to think about those themes, what they have done in the past, and what “adjacencies” those skills may touch.

If, for example, throughout their career they have noticed that they excel at building (processes, policies, teams) and they have been in program manager roles, perhaps they could consider becoming a recruiter (where they would build teams, manage priorities, and create a process for culling down the candidate pool) or an account manager (where they would build knowledge stores of information for their customers, and help them navigate processes).

Thinking about these adjacencies can lead to a varied and fulfilling career because it can span across industries, functions, and job titles. It allows your candidates to try new things without completely leaving their well-tested skills and expertise behind: a perfect way to bridge the gap and get from here to there. This is a method that not only works for advising your candidates, but can also be taken to heart in your searches, too. Are you searching for people with skills and expertise versus just that 1-to-1 experience? Are you considering their adjacencies as a creative match for a hard-to-fill role? (By the way, you can use this for your own career development as well.)

I’ve moved from sales to consulting to business owner to program management in both large multinationals and startups in the technology, financial, culinary, and arts & entertainment industries. What interesting and unusual career paths have you had? What about your candidates? Sharing these stories with each other helps to reinforce that others have also taken “risks” and tried something new. More often than not, there are success stories on the other end of an interesting climb.

As I work with companies and talk with HR and talent acquisition executives, it is surprising that even today there remain deeply rooted social and organizational norms within even progressive companies regarding a concept of talent ownership.” It has been one of the more surprising artifacts I’ve observed in consulting: even now, organizations maintain a substantial amount of outdated, sometimes-unconscious thinking with regard to a concept that is clearly been eclipsed. This despite the fact that more companies are moving to an HR model of ‘end to end’ talent management. Many do not address some of the underlying organizational principles that need to change in order to compete in today’s New Talent Economy. The concept of talent ownership is one such example: many companies still insist on supporting regulation and rules-based HR policies to control for internal movement. A common example is restricting internal talent from applying for internal opportunities until they have been in their current job for x months. This is completely incongruent with the free-agent economy that exists today.

I’ve said many times, “If you are not recruiting your own people, you are the only company that isn’t…”

That has never been truer than today as social media has created innumerable entry points for recruiters and non-recruiters to reach people in your company. Yet company after company maintains policies that erode the concept of a laissez-faire talent economy internally. They restrict their own employees from changing jobs even as the world around them has evolved to be a free agent nation.

I do understand the practical implications of policies to balance the needs of individuals versus the broader needs of an organization. Clearly things don’t work well if workers are changing jobs every three months. So here are some ways to create programs that work in today’s talent economy.

• Create an internal talent marketplace: The talent marketplace outside of your company is becoming increasingly more efficient. For example, the “findability” of talent has never been easier. How is the talent marketplace inside of your firm? Many accounts suggest the process and approach to finding and landing a job inside of your company is more difficult than doing so outside of your company. If companies like Kayak are shortening their external recruiting process to seven days, how does your internal process stack up? Can internal talent sign up for new jobs to be delivered to their inbox? Is your process clearly communicated, concise, and have face-validity? If not, why not?
• If you must have term limits, change the structure of term limits: I’m a large fan of laissez-faire talent principle, but in practice, inside of an organization where hierarchy and structure and policies help drive efficiency at scale, they can be useful. So instead of enforcing term limits based on tenure, enforce term limits on the number of times people can move in a given period. Most companies set policies that require people to remain in roles for ~1 year before they can move.   Which essentially suggests “we own you.” A smarter solution is to set guidelines that people can only move three times within an X year period. This provides flexibility while balancing the broader needs of the organization.
• Use social media internally: It’s obvious that recruiters are gaining leverage from social media. How are you doing so within your organization? Creating groups and tranching internal employees into segments makes sense. Do you have an internal social media strategy? Are you using tools like LinkedIn and Facebook to drive engagement and syndicate information (and human connection) across your organization. If not, why not?

As usual, sound off in the comments.

This all began in November of 2008 when people like then-staffing-chief and now Chief Learning Officer Don McLaughlin, the HR SVP Brian Schipper, and others realized it really needed to keep the talent it had as the company grew in areas like virtual healthcare and smart grids. In January 2009, Heather Yurko, Amy Buck, and a 30-person team of others in Cisco — from the compensation, staffing, operations, and other departments — ran a prototype test. If all went well, the program, called TalentConnection, would expand.

It went well, and it did.

Over and Up

Essentially what traditionally went on at Cisco was that to get a Cisco promotion, you had to move horizontally first, from one department to another. With the new plan, you could move two steps at once — to a different division, and up. Cisco had to change its way of thinking to make this happen, Yurko says, taking into account skills and experience more than knowledge of a given area.

She gives the example of Cisco’s technology group, which was where this 2009 pilot was done. If a program manager job was open in the technology department, instead of seeing which program managers were available, what Cisco would do under this pilot program is analyze what skills it would take to do the job well: working with multiple clients, for example, as well as balancing priorities, and having a passion for great customer service. Perhaps an account manager in a different division has these skills, and could move into the technology group, and up into this manager role, all in one fell swoop.

The initial pilot worked. From March through May 2009, nearly 80 percent of positions were filled by internal candidates, and the time to fill a position dropped by an average of 22 days. Satisfaction in the program ran high.

Yurko, who works out of the Research Triangle area of North Carolina, acted as a program manager, and Buck, working remotely from the Sierras in California, the executive sponsor. The 30-person team dissolved, and born later was what I’d call an “HR R&D group.” Cisco calls it a Staffing Innovation Organization; Buck is the senior director. Formed in July of 2009, it got the green light from HR leaders to move full speed ahead with expanded testing of the recruit-and-retain employees program.

Going Global

Turnover at Cisco runs somewhere around 5%. But the company has been watching various studies (from Deloitte, for example) showing that large numbers of employees will start looking for new jobs as the economy picks up steam. It also learned in a 2009 internal survey that 36% of employees did not know of additional opportunities within the company. It wanted to change the mindset at Cisco into one that Yurko calls an “open marketplace of opportunity.”

So this year Cisco ran a new and bigger pilot, from January to August of this year, using employees in the operations and finance departments globally, as well as some of the European sales staff. A lot had to be done, and tinkered with along the way, according to Yurko. Compensation had to rewrite policies. Employee engagement folks needed to alter their mindset and their messages — basically, the employee value proposition. Relocation policies needed to change also.

Cisco’s back-end system that manages employee resume-type information, from ADP, had to be modified (such as adding fields and new metrics to use in evaluating the program). Employees use the system to complete profiles and opt-in to receiving inquiries about internal jobs.

A big part of what has been happening, however, at Cisco, has been softer. It’s less about policies, and more about change. “A lot of active, ongoing, change management, organizational adoption training,” Yurko says.

Recruiters were and are encouraged to actively source Cisco’s employees. The Staffing Innovation Organization and others in recruiting and staffing and human resources have been talking to recruiters and managers about why this is important, why it’s in the long-term interests of the company. Yurko says the message is: “You may need someone to do a job, but you’re hiring someone for Cisco, not just your team.” She says that “moving from the concept of ‘my talent’ to ‘Cisco talent’ — we know this will be ongoing, for years.”

Anyhow, this 2010 pilot was deemed another success, like the one in 2009. But this summer HR leaders suggested that rolling it out to all employees needed to wait a few months, as a ton seemed to be happening at once at Cisco, from performance management to management training initiatives.

The program was launched worldwide this September, to all 70,000 employees (the exception being that if you’ve been on the job less than a year, you’re not yet eligible). The Staffing Innovation Organization now has 11 members, three added over the last couple of months. The TalentConnection program was mentioned briefly in the company’s corporate responsibility report. And after two months of this September’s launch, 33% of all internal positions were being filled by recruiters actively sourcing employees, as opposed to people applying directly to the role. Employee satisfaction with the recruiting process is on the rise.

I Like My People, Even if They Don’t Perform!

Talent managers, in the designing, planning, and executing of a given plan, usually restrict themselves to the question: “Who internally can I preserve or develop to replace Jane Smith if she leaves,” and disregard the question “who externally can I attract” for consideration with Jane for that same position.

The implications of not using all available sources in succession management programs and not including talent acquisition as part of the plan (which also means integrating it with workforce planning) is apparent: What can be the greatest strategic competitive advantage in the human resource and human capital management arena is reduced to nothing more than a tactical, possibly irrelevant process, likely documented on a seldom-used Excel sheet.

In a Caliper Corp. survey conducted in 2008, and published (PR Newswire) in November of that same year which was titled “Caliper Survey Finds Hiring People a Daunting Task” researchers found that out of 190 corporate responders across a gamut of different industries, 69% found it to be easier to work with the “’devil they know’” rather than an “’unknown’” and a mere 31% found it to be “harder to manage the people they have than to select new employees.”

This survey and many others just like it show evidence that the bias toward a talent management and executive leadership approach to directing succession management can be caused (partly) by the internal attitudes of the organization. “Let’s replace people from the inside because we know them—or at least plan to do so” — hiring managers might say when they are faced with the issue of succession.

The First Rule of Succession Management: HIPOs! HIPOs! HIPOs!

Succession management comes down to identifying and developing the high potentials. But, if that survey and the ones that mirror it are valid, then it would also apply to the selection of the HIPOs in the succession management program for positions of leadership in the organization. This means that executives and managers (probably unknowingly) assume that “my high potential is different from all the other high potentials in other organizations.” This assumption is not supported.

One must then consider what makes a high potential a high potential if they are to fully analyze the issue of high potentials in the workplace; recruiting leaders need to understand who it is they need to attract and how to attract them. I discuss that also in the Journal.

But this is where the recruiting leader can assist their succession management counterparts–identifying high potentials in other organizations or in their industry and including them as potential replacement candidates for the internal succession management program. Of course, the recruiting leader must assess what makes the external candidates high potentials and align recruiting methods to attract them. If this method is applied, it would augment and supplement succession management activities and bring the strength of succession management to a whole new level.

What we have to communicate to our talent management partners is that no organization has a monopoly on the best talent, or the best development methods, or the best recruitment processes. The best any organization can do is to develop a top-notch comprehensive human resource and talent management system based on sound strategy and superior tactics that are aligned with their internal goals and objectives, and hope that the best talent in the world will choose the organization because of it.

Don’t Worry, We’re Already Doing it—Kind of!

The concept already exists in what is commonly called “passive candidate recruiting.” I simply propose that an organization should recruit passive candidates in a much more strategic fashion, and for purposes of enhancing succession choices. Target high potentials in other organizations proactively and long before they are needed, develop close relationships much earlier than one would in other cases, and then maintain those relationships for prolonged periods of time.

They Might Not Like it, so Get the Buy-in!

Talent acquisition departments must seek out their talent management and executive team member partners and create a real and functional partnership. They must convince their counterparts that internal succession management can be a much more valuable activity for the organization if they were to augment it through the use of highly targeted and well-developed external possibilities. Then, for each key position or key professional, the recruiting team should provide quality alternatives for discussion in the planning phase.

The team then must choose from their combined pool of internal candidates and external possibilities. Clear advantages of this method occur in situations where the internal candidate or candidates who were to succeed their supervisor for a particular position are either unavailable, have also left the organization, or are critically needed elsewhere.

It’s One Big Yellow Submarine, and We’re All in it

Tools and processes of the human resources profession should never be used in silos. Leaders of the recruiting profession always should measure their tactics with respect to their counterparts, and to seek inclusiveness in their methods. Succession management and workforce management are two sides of the same coin. They must work together and not against each other.

However, over time, we’ve come to learn that these programs also represent a vital component of our company’s journey to build a diverse and inclusive workforce.

The Beginning of an Evolution at Sodexo

Like many companies, Sodexo’s diversity initiatives have evolved over time.

We created a diversity and inclusion framework that was based on measures of accountability from the CEO down, tied to incentives and performance goals. We established a consistent and transparent recruiting and selection process and provided training in compliance in such areas as EEO/Affirmative Action to ensure that all our managers understood the legal environment.

And, we built a comprehensive diversity sourcing strategy, focused on best practices, and using technology and new communications media to identify and connect with top diverse talent. We required all of our recruiters to become AIRS-certified diversity recruiters. We also focused on the importance of building relationships with top talent. From recruiting at colleges and universities that have highly diverse populations, to diversity-focused professional associations, to positioning our company as a top employer of diverse talent, we worked hard on the front end to attract and hire. But, we realized that all of these efforts would be meaningless without a work environment that let our employees thrive.

Embedding Diversity and Inclusion Into our Corporate Culture

Encouraging all employees — from senior staff to front-line workers — to embrace diversity and inclusion values can be can be daunting for an organization our size, with more than 6,000 individual operations across the U.S. alone. Our company created this cultural shift by literally embracing the words of Mahatma Ghandi: “We must be the change we want to see in the world.” Through diversity-focused training, to the establishment of vibrant employee network groups and mentoring initiatives, over time, diversity and inclusion have become a part of our company’s DNA. This value is so deeply embedded in our culture that it is viewed as a distinct competitive advantage. In fact, we’ve even been recognized this year by DiversityInc as the #1 overall on their top 50 list of diverse and inclusive companies and #1 for Recruitment and Retention. In 2008, ERE recognized Sodexo as #1 in diversity recruiting.

Why Internal Mobility?

The short answer is that our employees are our greatest asset!

We know from our candidate surveys and our company engagement survey that our employees want to stay in a company that provides a range of professional opportunities and career paths where they can grow their career. So, if we can leverage the opportunity to promote and hire from within the company, we may be able to retain existing diverse employee populations.

The Challenge

Like any large organization, our challenge lies in the existence of multiple market segments all within our one company. It can be difficult for individuals to plan, identify, and compete for promotional opportunities — especially when those opportunities might be in a different market segment.

Meanwhile, we see an opportunity to stimulate employee creativity and innovation by introducing employees who may have different business perspectives. They bring a fresh perspective to existing work plans and can stimulate process development and productivity.

Blazing the Path for Internal Mobility

Thus we launched our internal mobility initiative with the goal of helping our employees achieve their career aspirations, and, ultimately attempting to influence the engagement and retention of our top and diverse employees..We began with “soft” internal sourcing: sharing jobs with our employee network groups and sending e-cards internally to individuals on our succession plan. As we progressed, we learned that just sharing information with our employees was not enough. We needed to help them to overcome organizational barriers that make it difficult for our employees to post and compete for positions outside of their markets.

So, we took a more consultative approach to our challenges. For example, we engaged our executives in panel discussions and held focus groups on internal job opportunities and barriers. We looked for ways to focus on competencies vs. organizational experience when looking at talent, and considered developing partnership programs to team with other company initiatives to more explicitly focus on helping our top and diverse employees achieve their career aspirations.

Team Effort: Engaging Multiple Leadership Levels to Drive Results

Buy-in from the executive level is critical for cross divisional movement to be successful. To assist in driving success, our talent acquisition group launched three vodcasts with messages from senior leaders in support of internal mobility to be used at team meetings throughout the organization and with recruiter training.

Additionally, our talent acquisition group formed and now leads a cross-divisional and cross-function team that is systematically looking at program enhancement opportunities and ensuring that proposed solutions will fit within our company framework. Early results from these efforts show that on average, 10% of our internal management hires have been cross-divisional transfers. And the information from our 2010 Employee Engagement Survey is especially encouraging in an environment where most companies have seen the engagement of their employees drop (as reported by the 2010 Hewitt Study). We have succeeded in increasing ours by a strong 7%, with 85% of our employees reporting that Sodexo is a better employer than the competition.

More Than Just Another Hire

While Sodexo has been recognized for implementing best practices in diversity and inclusion, we know that our journey is not complete. We are continually looking for new ways to take our programs to the next level.

To be a competitive employer for top diverse talent, we need to be able to do more than simply source and hire. We need a corporate culture where employees thrive and are able to achieve their career aspirations. As such, we believe that our current focus on internal mobility is an important initiative to increase retention of top diverse talent. It completes the circle: sourcing, hiring, and retaining top diverse talent.

Let’s Continue the Conversation at the ERE Expo

Will you be at the ERE Expo this fall? If so, I invite you to join my keynote session. I would love to continue the conversation, share with you some of what we at Sodexo are doing to take our diversity journey to the next level, and also learn from you the best practices at your organizations.

When promoting from within, do you select the person who is doing the best job in their current role? Do you promote the person you like the most, the person who has the most seniority, or the person who gives you attention and deference? It is not unusual to promote a good technical person or a good clinical person into a management position. Technology companies and healthcare organizations do this frequently.

If this is your current practice, then you are missing out on the opportunity to improve business performance. You may also be dramatically and unnecessarily increasing your cost of operations. This is hardly a good strategy in the current economy.

Look at the cost of a bad (mismatched) promotion:

• Time to become productive in the job
• Time to separate from being a peer to being a boss
• Time to learn the new political aspects of the job
• Turnover cost resulting from a bad promotion
• Lost productivity resulting from the turnover
• Recruiting cost to replace employees lost to turnover
• Time to become productive for the new hire

While cost is obvious, time is a valuable and non-renewable resource. A poor promotional decision is expensive.

Internal promotions should be approached the same way you approach external hires: formally. There are distinct advantages when promoting from within. The candidate knows the business, knows some of the politics (politics at the managerial and executive level, however, are different), and is familiar with the culture. But this knowledge alone does not qualify them for promotion. What qualifies them for promotion is a positive performance track record and a demonstrated ability or high potential (versus just interest) to take on additional responsibilities and succeed.

Here are five actions that organizations can take to prepare internal candidates for promotion:

1. Have a formal (or at least an informal) succession plan. Identify individuals in your organization who can fill current senior positions should the incumbent retire or leave, or new positions that are created due to growth, new product or service introductions, or new projects critical to the success of the company.
2. Implement a management development program to provide future promotable candidates the opportunity to take on additional and more challenging responsibilities. A management development program will serve to identify employee strengths, preferences, values, and potential derailers (risk tendencies) that will enable a best fit for positions available.
3. Introduce a valid and meaningful 360-degree evaluation. This will ensure that the candidates identified for promotion are truly qualified and not just good at managing up and managing their image.
4. Provide the future promotable candidates with a mentor to help guide them through both the tangible and intangible aspects of achieving success within the company.
5. Provide the newly promoted employee with coaching support to support the transition from a functional and technical focus to a manager with broader responsibilities.

Once the candidate is selected and promoted, their transition must be supported. It is reckless to assume that a candidate promoted from within the organization will automatically succeed and needs no further attention. Yes, they know the organization. But do they know how to manage and perform at a new level within the organization? Promotion doesn’t result in instant competence. A mentor or a coach are excellent ways to support the transition and prove to be a good investment.

Some candidates, however, will not have had the advantage of participating in a management development (i.e. “grooming and growing”) process. Some may never have held a management position. Some may have agreed to a promotion reluctantly.

Creating a formal talent integration process for newly promoted managers is a wise business practice.

Talent integration involves:

1. A formal transition plan to help the manager/executive integrate into the new position. Formal and purposeful discussion between the new manager/executive and their immediate supervisor on how best to work with each other and to define clear expectations regarding job performance and expected results.
2. Internal mentorship to help the manager/executive better understand how to deal with peers, how organizational politics work at the managerial level, and “how work gets done here” from a manager’s perspective.
3. Coaching (best done with an external/neutral executive/performance coach) — to help with the transition, especially for developing the management skills required in the new position (i.e. technical/clinical person being promoted to manager)

Recently highlighted in the Wall Street Journal, 26% of managers aren’t trained to manage, according to the Rasmussen Report. Now consider the even greater likelihood of this when technical people are promoted to management. For internal promotions to be highly successful, a rigorous internal promotion process must be established and a formal transition integration process must be put in place. The cost of not doing so is simply too great. Unless your funding and talent are abundant and not a concern, you can’t afford not to.

No matter how enthusiastic your employees are about participating in an internal movement program, they are bound to be somewhat frustrated if there aren’t a wide variety of assignments available for them to choose from. Even if you successfully excite your managers and other rotation program participants, you can’t automatically assume that they know how to identify or develop exciting assignments or rotations.

As a result, the rotation program manager needs to design a process and provide managers with a variety of suggestions and tips in order to make it easy for them to create internal movement projects, assignments, and rotations. This section highlights over 20 of the approaches that I have found to be effective in helping managers create more and better rotations.

Approaches to Help Managers Identify New Projects and Assignments

The various approaches that can help managers either identify or develop rotation projects can be classified into four broad categories that include:

1. Piggybacking off of existing business processes
2. Soliciting help from individuals and groups
3. Creating information sources and events
4. Other miscellaneous approaches

Category I — Piggybacking Off Of Existing Business Processes

The basic premise here is to take existing business processes and tools and to use them to identify potential short and medium-term projects. Some of the approaches to consider include:

A manager’s “to do” list — every manager creates some variation of a “things to do list,” so this list is a great place to start when looking for projects. Encourage managers to go over their list once a month. They should identify the things that need to be done that employees from other areas or functions might be able to carry out — things that they simply do not have the resources to complete. By providing managers with a checklist of factors for identifying potential projects, it will make it easier for them to “visualize” the projects that are most likely to help them achieve their business goals. The factor list for identifying new rotation projects should include:

• Projects related to their high-priority goals
• “Things that are not getting done” and that will likely languish without outside help
• Problems that require a relatively small number of hours to complete
• Projects that can be done by outsiders with less experience or knowledge of the function
• Projects that can be done remotely
• Assignments that require few resources or budget dollars
• Projects or assignments where “outside thinking” (that would more likely come from an outside the function person) would be most beneficial
• Planning and research-related projects that are almost always “put off” until there is adequate time to begin them

Goals, budgets, and strategic plans — managers should be periodically encouraged to review their list of yearly goals and their budget in order to identify potential problems or opportunities that might be amenable to rotation assignments. They should also be encouraged to look at plans and forecasts to identify upcoming opportunities that could be “started on” by outside individuals participating in a rotation assignment.

Converting contractor, part-time and internship projects — managers should be encouraged to periodically look at both their current and their past list of short-term projects that they have assigned to contractors, part-time individuals, or even interns. Managers should first consider reassigning some of these projects to rotatees. In addition, managers should be encouraged to look at these lists of previous projects in order to stimulate their thinking toward developing similar or even follow-up projects that can be done by current employees who need growth opportunities.

Teaching assignments — because one of the best ways to become an expert is to develop the capability for teaching others what you know, the development function should be asked to identify a number of teaching and coaching assignments each quarter for rotatees.

Category II — Soliciting Help from Individuals and Groups

Ideas and suggestions that fall under this category relate to providing direct help and support to managers.

Assignment development consultants or mentors — consider providing managers with a list of “assignment development consultants,” i.e. other managers who have volunteered to help others find and develop assignments. In my experience, most managers who have had success with job rotations are more than willing to help their peers develop similar assignments. The list might also include some individuals who have been trained to be peer mentors from the development function.

Recently developed leaders — make it an integral part of all major job rotations for the individual in the rotation to look for additional assignments both for others and for themselves. Even after the rotation assignments are complete, these individuals should be asked to continually “scout” for future opportunities for others.

Mentor suggestions — mentors throughout the organization should be asked periodically to help identify or develop rotation assignments.

Affinity groups — solicit the support of corporate affinity and diversity groups in identifying both projects and individuals that could benefit significantly from participating in the rotation program.

Corporate alumni – if your organization has a corporate alumni group, ask them to help in identifying possible rotation assignments outside the organization.

Retiree groups — if your organization has a corporate retiree group, ask them to help in identifying possible rotation assignments both inside and outside the organization.

Senior executive projects — because working directly with the CEO or with other top executives is always stimulating and exciting, these individuals should be asked to provide a targeted number of assignments each quarter.

Employee-generated projects — in many cases, the best source for identifying projects are your employees. Encourage managers to hold periodic meetings with their employees in order to educate them about the availability of “help” from individuals on develop assignments. The employee should be provided with a list of previous projects and a template to help them understand the characteristics of a great rotation assignment. Employees should also be encouraged to network with their professional contacts at other firms to identify rotation assignments that they have found to be stimulating or impactful. In addition, managers should encourage their own employees to propose their ideal departmental or external rotation assignments.

Approach top performers — use “forced-ranking,” bonus lists, or performance appraisal results to identify your organization’s top-performing managers. Approach these top performers directly and ask them to help to identify and develop rotations.

Assign interns — hire more select current college interns from college academic programs that teach leadership development and train them how to seek out possible projects and rotations.

Category III — Creating Information Sources and Events

Suggestions that fall under this category cover creating rotation-related information sources.

Provide examples of previous assignments — providing managers with a list of past successful projects can help stimulate thinking. By looking through the list they might see a project that causes them to think “I need that.” When possible, this list should also include examples of projects from other firms (especially customer firms and strategic partners) that were identified through benchmarking.

Project availability website — some firms (Whirlpool and Google are leaders here) have developed internal processes that “market” available projects on an internal website, so that internal talent can “apply” (or even bid) to work on short-term projects. An “available project” marketing process and website can stimulate managers into action by reminding them that others are actively developing project assignments. This website can also provide them with a range of project examples that they can use as a basis for developing their own.

Job rotation help website — develop an internal website designed specifically for managers that provides education and tips on how to develop stretch into teaching assignments. Include frequently asked questions and web links to help resources both within and outside the firm.

Job rotation forum — develop an online forum or listserv that allows managers to bring up issues and ask questions. Encourage managers, mentors, and leadership development experts to participate in the forum. Internal social networks “groups” can also be used to exchange ideas and questions.

Rotation wiki — provide managers with the opportunity to develop an internal “wiki” knowledge site on developing rotation assignments. A wiki, following the Wikipedia model, allows managers to build a knowledge base. This knowledge base will likely be more usable and credible, because it is built and enhanced exclusively by managers.

Characteristics of a great assignment template — in addition to a template that outlines which projects would be best for the manager, there should also be a checklist of the factors that make a project exciting to an individual employee. That checklist can be used to develop or to improve projects so that they are exciting, challenging, and attractive to employees. The rotation program should include a process for stimulating the managers’ thinking relating to the characteristics of a possible project. The characteristics that interest employees looking for growth or development were highlighted in a previous section entitled “elements of a well-designed individual job rotation” but a shorthand version of that list includes:

• The length of the project (short-term duration).
• The quality of the coworkers that you will work with.
• The amount of flexibility or input that the person accepting the assignment will have.
• The skills to be learned, especially if they are leadership, organizational, or people-managerial skills or skills that make an individual more promotable.
• The high-level contacts the individual will make.
• Whether new technologies or tools will be used.
• The visibility of the assignment in the organization.
• The impact the assignment will have on the business.

Remind managers about “always impactful” rotations — the rotation program manager should provide managers with a list of typical “always impactful” job rotations. Some of these “can’t miss” rotations include:

• Rotating overhead professionals into line functions to improve understanding and cooperation.
• Rotating technical professionals into HR in order to develop their understanding of people-management issues and people skills.
• Rotating individuals between highly interdependent business functions in order to improve communications, cooperation, and understanding.
• Rotating tactical employees into strategic planning and forecasting functions in order to improve their “big picture” vision.

Rotation development workshops — the rotation manager should design and periodically offer both face-to-face and web-based workshops in order to provide managers with help in identifying potential rotations and stretch assignments.

Category IV — Other Miscellaneous Ideas

Internal competitions — the manager of job rotations should consider setting up an internal competition to generate new projects and assignments from all of your managers, with recognition for those departments that develop the best quality and the most rotations for development. Periodically posting the success record of each manager and department might help spur their collective competitive juices.

Focus on growth departments — because departments undergoing rapid growth are the most likely to have a significant need for project help, the rotation program manager should target these departments for developing new assignments.

Rewards — one of the most effective ways of increasing the number of rotations is recognizing and rewarding managers for identifying and developing high-quality rotations and stretch assignments for employees outside of their team. Identifying and developing assignments could also be made a key bonus or promotion criteria. Quotas for each manager could be set in order to encourage them to identify and develop a targeted number of assignments and rotations each quarter.

Final Thoughts
Throughout this series of articles, I’ve attempted to highlight some of the best and emerging practices in internal movement. In a time where most companies are focusing on “building talent” rather than “buying it,” it is important that those in talent management shift their focus towards efforts that positively impact redeployment, development, and retention. “On-the-job training” has been and always will be the most effective tool for both exciting and developing workers. Now is an ideal time to revisit and update your program for creating and filling development assignments, stretch assignments, and job rotations.

In this part of the series on job rotations and stretch assignments, I will highlight three key tools or approaches that rotation program managers can use to make an organization’s job rotation program more effective. These approaches include: 1) the critical elements of a well-designed individual job rotation; 2) tips for increasing employee participation in the program; and 3) a checklist for assessing whether your organization is a good “fit” for implementing a job rotation or stretch assignment program.

APPROACH # 1: THE ELEMENTS OF A WELL-DESIGNED INDIVIDUAL JOB ROTATION
Not all rotational assignments turn out to be great experiences, and a poorly designed experience might be more than just a waste of time; in the extreme, it might even damage someone’s career. The key to ensuring that your employees have well-designed assignments is to identify the elements of a great assignment and to use those elements to help design all subsequent assignments. Every organization must determine on its own what a “perfect” assignment is, but I have compiled a list of elements or factors that can serve as a starting point.

Critical Elements in a Well-Designed Stretch Assignment or Job Rotation
When designing an individual job rotation or stretch assignment, you should include the following structural and content elements in order to make it a more impactful experience.

Structural Elements

• Pre-assessment — prior to the rotation, the rotatee goes through a formal assessment process in order to determine which areas need to be strengthened during this rotation.
• Input — the employee (rotatee), their manager, and the supervisor of the rotation are all consulted about their needs and interests.
• Goals with metrics — the goals of the assignment are clearly spelled out, prioritized, and agreed upon by all. The metrics to measure whether each goal was met are also agreed upon in advance.
• Rotation plan — the rotation or assignment has a written plan. That plan outlines the skills to be enhanced, the scheduled rotation “stops,” the major activities, the deliverables, and a detailed timeline. The factors that excite the rotatee are emphasized and any potential “frustrators” are minimized. The plan includes an opportunity to abandon the rotation or assignment if the goals are not being met.
• A learning plan — a written plan is compiled outlining the knowledge and skills that will be gained and the problems or opportunities that you will have an opportunity to address.
• Exposure plan — there is a plan outlining the opportunities that the rotatee will have to have their work exposed to key executives, customers, peers, and managers of other business units.
• Two-way communications — rotation contains pre-scheduled meetings and opportunities for two-way communication with the rotation supervisor.
• Accountabilities — the deliverables of the rotatee and the responsibilities of the supervising manager and permanent manager are all clearly spelled out.
• Duration — the length of the assignment is long enough to allow unrushed learning but not so long that the assignment becomes repetitious.
• Flexible elements — the rotation design includes flexible elements so that both the duration and the content can be adjusted to fit the changing needs of the rotatee in the business.
• Periodic feedback — mechanisms are agreed upon in advance to provide periodic candid feedback.
• A mentor is provided — in addition to the rotation supervisor, a mentor or coach is provided.
• Sufficient resources are provided — the rotatee is provided with sufficient budget and resources, so that they have a reasonable chance of successfully completing the assignment.
• Strategic impact — the assignment problem or opportunity will have a significant strategic impact.

Content Elements

• Opportunities for the rotatee to work with key individuals have been prearranged.
• A chance to lead — the rotatee is provided with an opportunity to lead a team or project.
• Decision-making — opportunities to make significant decisions are outlined in the rotation plan.
• Technology and tools — the rotatee has an opportunity to use the latest management approaches, tools, and technologies.
• An opportunity to innovate — the assigned problem or opportunity is designed in such a way to allow creativity and innovation.
• Opportunities to travel — when appropriate, the assignment provides opportunities and sufficient resources for travel.
• Post-assignment opportunities — the range of potential opportunities that will be available to the rotatee after successful completion of the assignment are spelled out (i.e. an opportunity to permanently stay in the role, promotional opportunities, “return” opportunities, and possible “next” development opportunities).

APPROACH #2: FACTORS THAT MAKE AN ORGANIZATION AN “IDEAL CANDIDATE” FOR A ROTATION PROGRAM
Although job rotation and internal movement programs can be effective in any organization, the impacts will be greater and be achieved faster in organizations with certain characteristics. If you’re trying to determine whether your organization is a prime candidate for developing a new or updating an old internal movement program, I recommend that you use the following checklist to help make that determination.

Organizations that are likely to benefit the most from sophisticated job rotation and internal movement programs display a majority of these characteristics:

People Management Factors

• Low internal hire percentages — if most of your positions are filled externally through recruiting, an internal movement program can help shift that ratio.
• A weak leadership development function — if you are constantly facing a shortage of developed leaders or if your leadership development function is weakly supported and poorly funded, you are an ideal candidate. If only a small percentage of your leadership development is “on the job,” a job rotation program can help.
• Weak recruiting — if your organization has a weak employer brand image or it has difficulty recruiting top talent, having a “talked about” internal movement program can really help.
• High new-hire failure rate — if new hires frequently fail because they have a hard time adapting to the culture, then speeding up internal movement could help by exposing new hires to more situations, one of which may be easier to connect with.
• High turnover rates of top performers — if you have identified the reasons that top performers are leaving and they include a lack of learning, growth, and career opportunities, you can significantly improve retention rates by increasing internal movement.
• Slow best-practice sharing — if there is a slow rate of benchmarking and best-practice sharing between business units, a rotation program can have a major impact.
• Workforce productivity — if your firm’s average revenue per employee is significantly below last year’s or the industry average, internal movement program might help increase productivity.
• Low rates of innovation and change — if your organization operates in a fast-changing environment but it is known for its slow rate of innovation and its resistance to change, improved internal movement could help significantly.
• High “college hire” frustration rates — if your recent college hires are frustrated or leave at a high rate, a rotation program for your interns or college hires might help.

Geographic Dispersion

• Dispersed facilities — when organizations have multiple facilities spread across large geographic areas, there are obviously fewer opportunities for face-to-face contact. This can decrease cooperation, communication, and understanding between the separated units. A job rotation program can help minimize the impact of silos by creating peace brokers with cross-silo experience.
• Global reach — in addition to the distance separating them from headquarters, the different cultural and economic environment that international facilities experience can lead to an “us against them” mentality. Rotation can be used to help squelch such notions.
• Remote work — if your organization has a significant percentage of your workforce working remotely, the rotation program with remote capabilities can have a significant impact.

Organizational Factors

• Larger-sized organizations — the larger the organization and the more diverse the business units, there is a lower likelihood that your employees will be aware of the appropriate opportunities to pursue in other business units. As organizations get larger, they become more siloed and less agile.
• Diverse business units — if your organization has diverse business units which produce significantly different products and services or that operate in different parts of the business cycle (startup to commodity business) then job rotations can help you increase best-practice sharing amongst them. In the same light, if some business units are growing rapidly while others are shrinking, the redeployment of employees might significantly improve the impact of your talent.
• Isolated overhead functions — if your overhead functions are given lower priority and there is little or no movement of employees from overhead functions into line business units, then the organization is likely to be helped with this program.

Political Factors

• Political infighting and posturing — if your organization suffers from significant political infighting, high rates of bureaucracy and “turf wars,” you are an ideal candidate because improved internal movement can make your organization “boundary-less.”
• Silos and empire building — if your organization is well-noted for individuals who over time build “empires,” then your firm is a good candidate for job rotations, because rotation programs help to break down organizational silos. If your organization is well known for strong internal politics and hoarding information in order to build power bases, your firm is a great candidate for an internal movement program.
• Managers hoard talent — if your managers act relatively selfishly because they are not rewarded based on overall corporate results, then they are likely to hoard or shelter any talent they hire or develop. In the same light, if you have a large number of “bad managers,” speeding up internal movement will likely have a high impact by minimizing a rising stars contact with them.

APPROACH #3: TIPS FOR INCREASING EMPLOYEE PARTICIPATION IN JOB ROTATION PROGRAMS
Even if you successfully excite managers about participating in job rotation or internal movement programs, you still must identify ways to excite individual employees so that they’ll want to participate. It’s important to realize upfront that many employees are reluctant to participate because of uncertainty or fear of failure. Some of the approaches that you should consider for increasing employee participation rates include:

Educate and Reward Them

• Show the impact — show them the average impact that participating in rotation programs can have on their career, pay, job security, and rate of promotion. Provide a list of the many benefits that can accrue to employees in your educational materials.
• Reduce the fear — show them the high success rate of job rotations. Survey employees periodically to identify their fears and provide answers to counter each individual fear on your company’s job rotation website.
• Team impacts — show them how their current team will benefit from their expanded contacts, increased skills, and better understanding of other business functions.
• Educational events — hold periodic in-person and online educational events that describe the program, and answer “frequently asked questions” that potential participants have. Also consider providing information that they can give to their family in order to answer any of their concerns or questions.
• CEO — encourage the CEO and senior managers to talk about the program and to highlight how it helps both the company and individual.
• Rewards — provide recognition and small bonuses for participating in the program. Make program participation part of the employee’s performance appraisal process, bonus formula, and promotion criteria. Also consider rewarding managers and their teammates for superior program participation rates.

Provide Help

• Alumni mentors — provide a list and contact information for other employees who have successfully completed job rotations and encourage them to talk to each other. Develop social network groups, wikis, online forums, and listservs to facilitate communications between employees.
• Report participation — post-program participation lists so that other employees can see who is participating and to get an idea of some of the projects and assignments that others have undertaken.
• Post available assignments — post a list of current and past assignments to give curious employees a sense of what kind of learning and development assignments are available.

Provide Flexibility

• Start with part-time rotations — in order to encourage full participation, provide short-term rotation opportunities for participation in small assignments and projects. Give them a small taste of the program to encourage them to accept other more extensive assignments.
• No-fault divorce — for noncritical assignments, allow employees to drop out early if they find the assignment doesn’t fit their needs.
• Mid-course correction — for noncritical assignments, provide a midpoint reassessment so that the rotation can be restructured to better fit the company’s and the employee’s needs.
• Develop their own — allow high-potential employees to propose their own unique assignment or rotation that best fits their needs. In addition, you should give employees and their current manager significant input into any rotation assignment.
• Prequalify employees — provide a process where employees who may be interested in a future rotation can be preprocessed and prequalified, so that they can quickly choose an available assignment when they decide they are “ready.” Also consider allowing employees to select the “start time” for non-mission-critical rotations until it better fits their current work load.
• Remote assignments — work with managers and leadership development to provide a number of assignments and rotations (including global assignments) that can be done 100% remotely, in order to encourage participation by those who can’t relocate or travel.
• Buddy participation — when it’s feasible, consider letting an employee participate in an assignment with a coworker.
• No ties — allow employees to participate in the leadership rotations and assignments without an absolute requirement that upon completion they accept a promotion. This option can alleviate the fears of employees who feel that they’re not ready for leadership roles.

Identify Potential Concerns

• Employee involvement — periodically conduct employee surveys and focus groups to identify potential program problems. Where feasible, involve employees in the design of the program and subsequent rotations to address these issues.
• Postmortems — conduct postmortem assessments of your rotations and assignments, in order to identify and fix any problems with the process.
• Union participation — in situations where unions might encourage employees to resist participating, educate union leaders and solicit their input into the process.

Next week, Part Six of the series will highlight some additional tools and tips that you can use to improve your rotation program.

This series of articles started out listing the pain points that many organizations are experiencing today as a result of rotation-based development initiatives rooted in history and antiquated by Henry Ford’s standard.

It then progressed into program goals and key elements that characterize more modern second-generation programs under development. Last week’s installment explored the many program variations that are expanding the scope of rotation programs, making them more relevant as tools capable of addressing retention, motivation, and productivity improvement.

This week’s installment looks at emerging best practices and program metrics that can be used to assess your program’s performance.

Best Practices in Job Rotations and Internal Movement

Over the years, many firms have used job rotations in a variety of formats.

The most famous firm that has used internal movement for development is General Electric, but other firms have developed some best practices that can also provide learning.

(As HR leaders change, not all opt to retain programs installed by their predecessors no matter how successful the programs may have been. As a result, some of the programs mentioned here may no longer be in operation.)

• Proactive intraplacement. This best practice increases the speed and accuracy of internal movement by assigning a team of recruiters to recruit for key roles using only the existing employee population as their talent pool. The key to this concepts success is that it identifies individuals who might not move on their own, or might not be visible to traditional succession planning processes for any number of reasons, including talent hoarding by managers. The goal of this type of program is to move top talent from areas of lower return to areas of higher return, ultimately improving the performance of the entire enterprise. Firms that have used this approach include Booz Allen and Microsoft.
• Redeployment. The business needs of organizations change on a regular basis. As a result, have a permanent process that works to redeploy valuable talent from areas of the business being discontinued to other ongoing areas throughout the enterprise. The concept of rapid redeployment has been honed to near perfection by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps. Other firms like Intel have developed redeployment processes that allow not only “surplus” talent to be effectively redeployed, but that also allow great hires who prove unproductive in the initial roles to find a more suitable role internally.
• Movement related to business cycle. Most large organizations have business units in various life cycle stages from seed to exit. In the first few years of this century, Microsoft used a model partly attributed to the work of Clayton Christensen that helped to ensure that talent most appropriate for a particular stage of business life didn’t get stuck in a unit that had progressed beyond that stage. In other words, it didn’t keep developers capable of bringing next-generation products to market stuck in irrelevant business units. This type of rotation program helps ensure that talented individuals never need to search for work more relevant to their skills and desires outside the organization by making sure they are deployed to business units and projects with work in the right life cycle stage.
• Competition for employees. While every firm competes externally for talent, a few have brought the same level of competition inside, allowing managers to openly recruit from within the firm or to have a bid or “draft” process. National Oilwell Varco developed such a process for college hires, where after a one-year initial placement, the hires’ next placement was determined by an internal draft for talent.
• Right job placement. Firms like Motorola, Valero, and Microsoft have in the past developed an internal movement process that I call “right job” movement. The premise is simple…you can’t have a successful rotation into a job if the employee and manager are not a proper fit. An “A-level” top performer can’t be expected to work well with a “C-level” manager. Other “right job” placement factors include whether the employee and the job “match” with regards to innovation, available motivators, the strength of coworkers, and the track record of the team.
• Involve your recruiters in retention. It’s quite common for firms to hire a great individual but to place them in the wrong job. The best firms extend onboarding for a period of up to six months in order to ensure that the initial placement of the new-hire is maximizing their output. Other firms like Intuit, Valero, and Memorial Care Health have developed programs that keep the initial recruiter tied to the new-hire for up to six months in order to ensure that top performers don’t leave the firm as a result of a bad initial job placement. Placements that are not working out can be remedied a majority of the time by rotating the individual into a similar role with a different manager.
• Interest and skills inventories. Numerous firms use “skills” inventories for use in identifying individuals who could fill a vacant slot with the right skill set. However, the best firms expand their inventory to include employee interests in order to be able to identify individuals for rotations who are interested, but not necessarily highly skilled in a job or project where training or development can increase the skill level in a relatively short period of time. IT Consulting giant EDS has leveraged this approach and found that adding this dimension helped entice employees to keep their skill profiles more current.
• Return ticket for internal transfers that don’t work out. One of the primary reasons individuals who could deliver more to the organization opt out of development rotations that follow a non-standard path is fear of failure. They fear that, should the job change, be too dramatic, or too much of a stretch, they may lose seniority, friendships, and “ding” their career with the organization. To counter these issues, Becton Dickinson created a program called “take a risk” that enabled top performers to opt into a rotation that would develop them in a new function (i.e., marketing to finance or operations to IT). Top performers making the switch were provided a six-month period in which to master the new role. If they or their manager felt that the change wasn’t working out, they could rotate back into their previous role with no negative impact on their career.

Benchmark Firms to Learn From

Whether you are developing or improving your internal movement program, it’s important to study the successes and failures of other firms. The following is a list of firms that have at one time been recognized publicly for excellence in internal movement or job rotation programs:

• GE
• Becton Dickinson
• Booz Allen
• Microsoft
• Google
• HP
• Eli Lilly
• General Mills
• IBM
• Intel
• National Oilwell Varco
• U.S. military (rapid deployment forces)
• EDS
• Aviall
• U.S. Census Bureau
• Henkel
• Air Products
• RJR Nabisco
• Motorola
• American Greetings Corporation
• Mobile Valero Energy
• Intuit

Metrics for Assessing Internal Movement Activities

All effective programs rely heavily on metrics in order to continually improve. Rather than overdoing metrics, it’s best to use a small number of powerful metrics. The key is to tie your metrics to program goals. You need to have a success measure for each major goal that you set, so before you begin selecting metrics, go back and make a list your program’s goals.

Some metrics to consider include:

• Goal: improving employee performance. The percentage increase in the actual performance, forced-ranking placement, or performance-appraisal ratings of those who complete rotations versus those who don’t.
• Goal: to increase promotion speed. The percentage increase in promotion rates of those who complete rotations versus those who don’t (alternative: the percentage of promoted employees who had a rotation during the last three years).
• Goal: high participation rates. The average percentage of employees, managers, and departments that participate in the rotation program each year.
• Goal: to have satisfied rotatees. The average percentage who rate the experience as “very effective” or above when asked, “How effective was your rotation in improving knowledge, skills, contacts, and performance?”
• Goal: to have satisfied managers. The average percentage of home and sponsoring managers who rate their experience as “very satisfying” or above when asked in a survey.
• Goal: to retain rotatees. The average percentage of rotatees who remain with the firm for at least three years following a rotation compared to the retention rate of non-participants.
• Goal: to increase diversity participation. The average percentage of diverse rotatees compared to the percent who are diverse in the entire employee population.

Other Measures Related to Quality

• Quality of the participants. The average quality of rotation participants as judged by their average performance appraisal scores, bonus percentages, position levels, or 360° appraisal scores.
• Correlation with business success. The statistical correlation between the percentage of employees in a business unit of that participate in the program and the percentage of the business units goals that were successfully met.
• Succession plan participants. The number (or percentage) of people who are on the corporate succession plan who participated in a job or project rotation.
• Leadership development plan participants. The number (or percentage) of people who are part of the corporate leadership development plan who participated in a job or project rotation.
• Superior results. The percentage of program participants who rate on-the-job rotations as superior to other leadership and training options.
• Ratio of internal hires. The percentage of all open positions filled internally (versus external hiring) as an indication of the preparation levels provided by all development programs.
• Cross-business rotations. The percentage of all rotations and project assignments that occurred between different business units or geographic regions.

Other Measures Related to Volume

• Number of hours. The total number of hours that program participants spent on their projects and in their rotations during this program year.
• Number of stops. The total number of “stops” or job placements that program participants passed through during the program year.

Other Measures Related to Process Effectiveness

• Failure rate. The percentage of participants who dropped out or are removed from the program.
• Time to fill. The average number of days it takes to fill an internal transfer, job rotation, or project assignment.
• Rotation “stop” quality. The average number of rotation stops that individuals must complete before they received a promotion.
• Postponed placements. The percentage of individuals who apply for a rotation that are not placed during the program year.
• “Non-obvious” choices. The percentage of all individuals selected for a job, rotation, or assignment who were “non-obvious” choices (not a direct report on the organizational chart of the supervising manager).
• Remote projects. The percentage of rotations, jobs, and assignments that can be completed remotely.
• Complaints. The percentage of participants who filed a complaint about the process.

Other Measures Related to Process Cost

• Cost per participant. The total program budget divided by the number of disciplines this year.
• Program ROI. The dollar value of the program’s benefits and results compared to the total program costs.

When corporate revenues are down or stagnant, talent managers typically shift their focus away from volume hiring to developing and improving existing employees.

Executives are always challenged to make the correct “buy or build” decision, but when hiring is frozen, organizations must place an increased emphasis on internal movement and job rotations to close critical gaps in talent supply and demand.

Unfortunately, many rotation programs are doomed from the start to produce mediocre results, because they employ a “one-size-fits-all” model that guarantees lower program participation rates.

As with most products and services, offering different program variations makes it more likely that your target employees will find a job rotation that fits their needs as well as the organization’s. Since the war for talent began more than a decade ago, the type of job rotation formats have expanded dramatically. It’s important to be aware of the various development opportunities available and the benefits and risks associated with each.

Here is a list of 26 different types of internal movements to consider.

Obviously, not every firm can offer employees all of these options, but it is not uncommon to develop programs that incorporate a handful.

The different program variations presented here are categorized into four groups including 1) “whole job” rotations; 2) location-based rotations; 3) time-based rotations; and 4) less-common rotations.

“Whole Job” Rotations

This category includes rotations where the individuals in the rotation literally change their job title (these are often semi-permanent placements):

• Skill-based job rotations. A planned process where regular employees are moved through jobs in the same job family and business unit in order to build skills, knowledge, and capabilities of individuals.
• Leadership-development based job rotations. A planned process where high-potential individuals are rotated through jobs in different functions, business units, or regions in order to build their decision-making and leadership skills. The process is also used as part of succession planning to assess the capabilities of developing leaders.
• Redeployment. A formal process for internally moving entire teams or large numbers of employees from areas of low return to areas of higher return.
• Job-posting systems. A formal, organization-wide process designed to objectively select internal employees for transfers or promotions to vacant jobs. Sometimes also called “job bid” processes.
• Team leader rotations. A planned process for rotating different employees in a team for a fixed duration into the leader or manager role. The goals can include leadership development, understanding the complexities of management, or simply “sharing the load” in situations where the management role is not a desirable career move.
• Two in a box. An assessment and development process where a potential leader is rotated into an existing management job where they jointly share responsibilities on a medium-term basis with the current position holder.
• “Gear down” rotations. Where an employee decides to rotate down to a lower-level job in order to have more free time or less stress.

Location-Based Rotations

This category of job rotations focuses on situations where the employee physically moves to a new location:

• Strategic partner job rotation. Rotations where employees are assigned to work on a medium-term basis at one of the firm’s strategic partners, joint ventures, newly acquired organization, or major customers in order to benchmark, learn, develop new products, and build relationships. Rotating individuals through university teaching and research assignments are another variation under this model.
• Geographic job rotations. Rotations between different geographic regions or countries in order to build relationships and to develop understanding between diverse regions.
• Virtual rotations. Rotations where the individual is moved into a virtual job where they work remotely. These rotations can be for motivation/retention purposes or to develop remote communications and management skills.

Time-Based Rotations

This category covers the types of rotations that have a short- or medium-term duration:

• Project rotations. A series of temporary assignments or projects where an individual maintains their current job while taking on additional stretch assignments to build their capabilities. The rotation can be full- or part-time, and it generally lasts until the project is completed. Both stretch goals and stretch assignments generally fall under this category. In matrix or project-based organizations, these rotations are continuous.
• Stretch assignments. Short-term development assignments that are part of a long-term development plan; stretch means they significantly increase current skills, add new skills, or increase the goals/ results by between 10% and 25%.
• Part-time job rotations. Also known as partial job rotations, under this plan individuals work for a fixed period during the week (i.e., half a day) in another position while maintaining their current job title, location, and pay level.
• Cross-functional rotations. Planned short- to medium-term rotations where employees move between related or interdependent functions. A typical variation is an “overhead to line” rotation where an individual moves from non-mission-critical or overhead functions like HR, finance, and supply chain into a critical business unit (i.e., product development). Similar rotations can also occur between research and production. Although less common, the rotations can go in reverse order.
• “Understanding the customer” rotations. Planned short-term rotations that occur between any function into sales and/or customer-service roles in order to increase an employee’s understanding of the customer and their needs.
• Multi-stop job rotations. As part of summer, six month, or one-year tours, where multiple short-term “stops” in different functions are planned in advance. This process is commonly used for interns and new college hires in order to increase their exposure, excitement, and skill levels. A multi-stop rotation requires a plan that specifies what will be learned at each stop and how the “handoff” between stops will be handled.
• Variable duration. Under most job-rotation programs, the duration of the rotation is predetermined. Under this process, the length of the “stop” is determined based on the performance and the interest of the rotating employee as well as the needs of the manager.
• Overload assignments. Short-term placements for short-term business “overload” needs. These overloads may be seasonal or “sudden” problems that require a quick infusion of talent. Often they involve call center, sales, or customer service overloads.
• Intern and college hire rotations. Formal rotation programs with defined periods designed specifically for college interns and recent college grads.

Less-Common Rotations

• Temp to permanent. Rotations where a temporary or contract employee is purposely placed in a position for a fixed period in order to assess their capabilities. After completion of the assignment, they are either released or made into a regular employee.
• “Fill in” rotation. Temporarily rotating an individual into a job to “fill in” as a result of a temporary position vacancy due to vacation, illness, or other short-term need.
• Fatigue-related job rotations. Job rotations that occur during a single day in order to relieve the physical fatigue or stress that can occur in life-threatening or dangerous jobs. Employees rotate to related jobs throughout the day in order to reduce errors and accidents.
• Fraud rotation. Requiring an individual in a position where fraud or theft is a possibility to rotate out for a short period. The individual is replaced with someone who has the capability of identifying irregularities. Most commonly used in accounting, investments, or finance.
• Up-out-and-up rotations. An assessment and development approach where individuals are actively encouraged at a certain position to actually leave the firm as part of a planned assessment and development process. After succeeding at another firm in the industry, they are invited back to the firm.
• Informal job rotations. Rather than being formally planned as a corporate initiative, these are rotations developed informally on an ad-hoc basis by individual managers.
• Job enrichment. Technically not an actual job rotation but instead a formal process for expanding job functions to make a job more stimulating.

As you can see, there is a wide array of rotations to consider. Before settling on which one is the most appropriate for which employee, determine your goals and pick the variation that best fits the needs of the individual and what you are trying to accomplish.

Common Problems Associated With Internal Movement Programs

When you are assessing the effectiveness of existing internal movement processes, periodically conduct an audit in order to identify typical system-wide problems.

Survey managers and employees, benchmark other firms, and use existing metrics to identify current problems:

• Performance improvement. Heavy users of the program do not improve their performance or have higher bonus, promotion, or retention rates when their performance is compared to non-participants. Departments that are heavy users of the program do not improve their business performance beyond the rates achieved by departments that do not heavily use rotations.
• Participation rates. Individual employees frequently abandon the process after one failure due to its lack of transparency or the political/subjective nature of the process. Less than 30% of your workforce ever formally participates in it. A significant percentage of managers, when given the opportunity, avoid or circumvent the process.
• Speed. The time-to-fill for internal movements and placements exceeds 50% of the average time-to-fill days for external hires because of bureaucratic processes and a lack of interest among hiring managers.
• Satisfaction. Manager and employee user and non-user satisfaction rates are not periodically assessed.
• Favoritism. There is the perception among employees that the process is subjective and that management favorites get the choice rotations and projects.
• Time away from their job. The program does not monitor the negative impact that the rotation or internal movement has on the performance of the employee’s base or original job.

Problems Related To Eligibility and Who Is Targeted

• “Non-obvious” choices. The process does not proactively seek out “non-obvious” choices (meaning they were not a direct report on the organizational chart to the supervising manager).
• Eligibility. Eligibility for movement is limited to permanent full-time employees and excludes part-timers, contractors, temps, and retirees. Poor-performing employees and those on performance-management plans are still allowed to participate. Managers that violate the program’s rules or “hoard” talent are not restricted from future participation.
• Selection criteria. The selection of which individual should be “moved” is based primarily on non-performance criteria including seniority, current job title, or subjective management preferences. Managers get top priority for selecting candidates not on business need and how they handled previous placements, but instead based on their title, business size, or political pull.
• Fit criterion. The individual and the hiring manager make their movement decisions based primarily on their own individual self-interests, rather than overall corporate needs.

Problems Related to Program Policies

• Voluntary. The process depends on the individual volunteering for movement.
• Start-up trigger. The process does not begin until a full-time permanent job opening occurs.
• Education. The process does not provide employees or managers with information on past growth and critical areas.
• Approvals. There are policies that allow managers, unions, or administrators to block or impede internal movements between business units.
• Decisions. Placement and process decisions are based on emotion or tradition rather than facts, statistics, and metrics.
• Employee involvement. Employees cannot contribute to the process by offering internal referrals or nominations of employees who should be rotated.

Internal Program Administration

• Technology. The system is not 100% paperless and managers do not have laptop or mobile phone access.
• Global. In large organizations, the process does not move people between countries.
• Rewards. Managers and employees are not measured, recognized, or rewarded for successful participation in the process.
• Policies restricting movement. There are policies that limit the timing or the number of movements that individual can make. Managers are prohibited from proactively seeking out internal talent.
• Program manager. The internal movement processes do not have an overall manager or coordinator that is accountable for program results.
• Budget. The budget is not independent, nor does it change when quality and volume goals are increased and program performance improves.
• Appeal process. There is no formal process for identifying why you are not selected for a job rotation or an appeal process if you feel that you were unjustly treated.
• Continuous improvement. The program does not utilize metrics to identify potential problems and opportunities in order to continually improve participation rates and overall workforce productivity.

In reality, most current approaches are relics from years of tradition, loosely defined, poorly integrated, and barely managed.

During this installment, I will build upon the goals and key elements of more effective second-generation programs discussed in Part 1 by focusing on the benefits of adopting second-generation approaches and methods to increase program participation rates.

Despite the current economic lull, consumers and top talent around the world expect organizations to continue innovating. No matter how well-staffed you may be, talent shortages or gaps will arise due to unexpected turnover, retirement (yes, a few people are still retiring), introduction of new technologies, and global expansion.

Now is the ideal time to restructure and re-engineer your internal movement processes to help mitigate the risk of key talent shortages. Fortunately, making such processes more effective is a relatively easy task.

The Definition of Intraplacement

As mentioned in Part 1, “first-generation” internal movement programs traditionally relied upon voluntary application by employees to jobs posted internally, except for a relatively small percentage of executives participating in rotation-based executive development programs.

Under such programs, internal movement really meant the permanent movement of individual employees into vacant jobs. This very narrow approach leaves out numerous developmental opportunities that are more in line with how work actually gets done today (i.e., projects).

If you’re attempting to re-engineer your process, start with a name change (i.e., Intraplacement) and a broader program scope.

Consider defining your new program as “an integrated set of corporate processes that are designed to proactively increase and broaden the options for re-assignment of critically skilled individuals based on rapidly changing business need projected talent ROI.”

The primary goal is to measurably improve employee productivity and innovation by increasing “right assignment” placements (i.e., right person, with the right skills, in the right assignment or job, at the right time).

The nature of the assignments may be part-time, temporary, seasonal, or permanent. Assignments may focus on individuals (i.e., individual movement) or groups/teams (i.e., redeployment).

Additional goals may include improving retention, accelerating leadership-development, driving best-practice sharing, improving recruiting, and intra-function cooperation. Intraplacement borrows and adapts its strategies, processes, and tools directly from external recruiting.

The Benefits of Adopting Second-Generation Internal Movement Systems

There are many reasons why firms should invest in Intraplacement. Improving internal movement can positively impact a broad range of business and HR issues, including sudden business problems, seasonal surges in workload, workforce productivity, employee retention, development, and individual motivation.

I) Business benefits and impacts

• Business results. Effective systems improve business results especially in the areas of sales, product improvement, and customer service.
• Increased productivity. Because highly skilled innovators and top performers are placed in “the right job,” the effectiveness of these individuals is multiplied.
• Better business-cycle fit. In larger organizations, some parts of the business are in different lifecycle stages (i.e., seed, start-up, established, expansion, decline, and exit). Proactive and targeted movement better ensures that an individual is placed in a business cycle where their skills and interests are a better fit.
• Increased innovation and idea generation. Moving individuals into new situations provides them with an opportunity to “view things as an outsider” and to propose new approaches that insiders might not see.
• Best practice sharing. As more individuals rotate between business units, the likelihood that best practices will be shared rapidly increases. Increased internal movement can result in the cross fertilization of ideas between previously isolated business units.
• Increased agility and flexibility. Having the capability of moving talent from areas of low return to areas of high return increases organizational agility, as well as the ability of management to shift resources as needs change.
• Better understanding and cooperation. By rotating individuals between disparate business units, individuals from both units can learn to better understand and appreciate the perspective of others. For example, purchasing professionals can better understand the problems faced by the individuals who have to operate under purchasing guidelines if they occasionally rotated into those business units.
• Improved contacts and relationships. Increasing internal movement allows individuals to build their contacts and to strengthen their relationship with individuals outside of the direct team.

II) People-management related and HR-related impacts

• More talent is available. Because individuals are proactively selected and moved faster, there are more and better qualified individuals available to managers with sudden or new strategic needs, than when individuals self-select themselves for movement.
• Higher retention rates. Rapid movement minimizes frustration and burnout. People working in their “ideal job” are unlikely to find a superior opportunity outside the firm.
• Leadership development. Multiple on-the-job learning opportunities are likely to develop leaders faster and more effectively because the development assignments will include opportunities to lead more teams under a variety of circumstances.
• Increase motivation and excitement. Not only is the individual more excited because they have a chance to grow, but each permanent internal movement also provides an opportunity to “back fill” that position, further motivating others to strive for promotions and transfers.
• Increased learning. As individuals move more frequently not only will they gain more knowledge but they will also develop mechanisms for learning faster when they enter future situations.
• Increased technical skill development. Moving between diverse projects provides an increased opportunity to develop current technical skills and to learn new skills.
• Increased exposure for top talent. Increased movement across broader areas allows more managers a chance to work with top talent. This provides individuals with more opportunities to be coached by multiple managers while giving individual managers a chance to observe and assess talent they might someday want to add to their organization.
• Reduced time to fill. Transferring people internally allows you to just fill jobs faster; assessment can be done more quickly because you already have a great deal of information about a current employee’s skills, performance, and weaknesses. Because few internal candidates reject internal offers and it takes them less time to accept, the overall hiring process takes less time.
• Decreased time to productivity. Your current employees already know the culture, the company jargon, and they already have a range of contacts. As a result, internal transfers and promotions can begin the job sooner because they don’t need a great deal of orientation, and they don’t need to give notice before they begin learning.
• Lower cost of hire and salary. Internal searches don’t require expensive external advertising and other recruitment costs. External reference checks are not needed and interviews can often be shorter. Internal candidates generally have no other external offers, so there is less likelihood of a bidding war and they are less aware of market salaries.
• Lower “job failure” rate. Because you’re hiring individuals who already know the culture, the job failure and termination rate is generally lower with internal transfers. External hiring costs are significantly higher than the cost of internal transfers.
• Improved employer brand image. Having a high-promotion-from-within rate generally improves your external brand image as a good place to work because you focus on the needs of your current employees. The increased security that it offers to current employees can also help your image.
• Allows for more entry-level hiring. By filling most jobs internally through transfers or promotions, you allow the firm to do almost all of its external hiring at the entry level. This is a good thing because entry-level jobs are cheaper to fill, have a larger candidate pool, and give the firm more time to train and assess “unknown” external hires while they are in jobs where they can do less damage.
• Decreased need for layoffs. Having a large percentage of your workers with a broad set of skills as a result of frequent movement means they are more capable of moving into new jobs or business units. This added capability and flexibility means that more workers can be transferred rather than laid-off from business units that need to be reduced or shut down.
• Individual employee benefits. Workers get more opportunities for development and learning as well as a faster overall career movement because they are proactively placed in the “right” job.

Before you implement any new process, identify the benefits that a firm can receive when the process is operating perfectly. The manager in charge of the process should set a specific program goal for each benefit. They should also identify a key metric for measuring and for assessing whether that benefit or goal was actually met.

Ways to Increase Program Participation

Despite this impressive list of benefits for both the company and the employee, you might still encounter some difficulty in getting managers and employees to fully participate in an Intraplacement program.

Some of the successful approaches for increasing participation that you should consider include:

• Business case. Work with the CFO’s office to demonstrate the ROI and business case to individual managers you want to participate. Make sure they clearly see the impact of participation to their own business results and career advancement. If possible, show how quickly an under-performing manager can improve under the program.
• Program champions. Get a senior executive, CFO, or key business unit manager to “champion” the program as a spokesperson. Let them use their visibility, political power, and influence to spread the benefits of the program. Encourage top-performing managers and employees to speak about the program.
• Recognition. Hold a recognition lunch or dinner sponsored by the CEO for all of the managers and employees who participated in the program. Plaques and certificates can also be handed out.
• Rewards. Making program participation and developing talent part of the bonus formula and promotion criteria will get the attention of your managers. Give lower priority or limit participation by managers who abuse the program.
• Communications. Sending periodic reminders to managers in the communications format they prefer can be effective, if you don’t overdo it.
• Reports. Including “ranked” program participation rate metrics in your standard financial reports not only makes your program more visible but it also serves to “expose” those managers with minimal participation. At the same time, it encourages low performers to ask those at the top of the list how to do better. Also show the correlation between program participation and meeting business results.
• Assignment design help. Provide direct help to managers in developing highly desirable project assignments and their descriptions. Provides samples of excellent (and weak) assignment descriptions, and offer coaching for those managers struggling with the process.
• Leadership development. Work with the leadership development program to make your process an integral part of the development program for new leaders so that they learn how to use it. Make the number of successful rotations that an individual employee has completed a key selection criterion for identifying high-potential employees.
• Top-quality replacements. One of the key reasons why managers are reluctant to participate is because they fear losing productivity when one of their key people rotates out. As a result, if you want to encourage managers to “release” their employees, even for a short period of time, you will need an effective “backfill” process that helps the manager to quickly replace their “lost” skill set. This might include a process for identifying those employees a manager is likely to lose and a process for training replacements.
• How-to materials. In addition to developing program materials that explains the process, these materials should be “pre-tested” with a sample of hiring managers in order to make them clearer and easier to understand. These materials should be available in a variety of formats.

Next Week in Part III: Common Problems Associated With Internal Movement Programs

Author’s note: I am putting together a guidebook tentatively called The Job Rotation, Internal Movement and Stretch Assignment Handbook. If you have job responsibilities in these areas and are interested in volunteering to be an initial reviewer, please contact me at JohnS@sfsu.edu.

When corporate revenues are down or stagnant, talent managers typically shift their focus away from volume hiring to developing and improving existing employees. Executives are always challenged to make the correct “buy or build” decision, but when hiring is frozen (the buy option), obviously the only remaining tool available to drive change in organizational capability and capacity is to “build” your current employees.

Such efforts increase the emphasis organizations must place on project deployment for skill building, mentoring, leadership development, and succession planning to ensure that the organization’s capability and capacity evolve — not deteriorate — during the downturn.

The Goals of Internal Movement Programs

The broad goals of “building” your employees through internal movement generally fit into four categories:

1. Increasing employee impact. A primary goal of internal movement is proactively shifting current employees into areas where they can have a higher impact on corporate results. Generally, business results improve because you move a larger number of your highly skilled individuals into growth areas. This is often called “right job” movement because it emphasizes either temporarily or permanently putting the right people with the right skills into high-impact jobs that more directly impact the things that matter the most during slow business periods.
2. Motivation and retention. Periodically moving employees into new rotations or project assignments can increase their motivation and excitement levels. This in turn can lead to higher retention rates.
3. Leadership development. Identifying and developing high-potential individuals is a major goal for organizations that want to ensure talent is available for manager and leader roles when the need arises. A significant portion of leadership development can be done “on the job” through stretch assignments. Moving potential leaders into different jobs also serves as an assessment mechanism.
4. Skill improvement. Internal movement and stretch assignments among current employees can improve their skill levels or add new technical skill sets.

How Do “First Generation” and “Second Generation” Internal Movement Systems Differ?

Internal movement systems to drive employee development are not new. Most programs in existence today are variants of programs developed decades ago. They operate on tradition, have no direct alignment with business strategy, and are rarely called upon to demonstrate an impact on organizational performance.

These traditional “first generation” internal movement programs either rotate newly hired employees through a static group of rotations, push potential leaders through a series of available assignments, or rely upon self-nomination via internal job boards. Their goal is generally quite narrow: to provide employees a mechanism to move throughout the organization when a manager is not driving movement. They usually focus on “whole job” movement, in that most of the offered jobs are for promotions or lateral moves into other full-time permanent assignments.

Many of these legacy programs were designed to give existing employees a preference over external talent by providing a one- or two-week head-start for internal employees to apply, before external applicants are considered.

First-generation programs are merely operational and provide no strategic benefit. During the last few years, a new or “second generation” of internal movement programs has emerged at firms like Booz Allen and Microsoft. Unlike their predecessors, the second-generation internal movement (intra-placement programs) is proactive. Many rely upon teams of recruiters to identify internal employees who should be moving to new assignments and charge them with finding roles where the talent would be of greater value to the organization. They focus on business alignment, accelerated deployment, and retention of top talent. They consider what’s best for the employee and the needs of the organization to ensure that the placement will create the highest business impact. These new systems rely heavily on technology and metrics to ensure that they improve ROI and business impact.

The Key Elements of Second-Generation Systems

Some key elements that differentiate the newer “second-generation” internal movement systems:

• Proactive. Rather than making the decision to move to an assignment on their own, individuals are approached in order to increase both the volume and the frequency of internal transfers.
• Targeted movements. All movement is directed in order to increase its impact. Employees are not encouraged to make placement decisions based on a whim. Instead, individuals are provided with education and guidance related to what is the best placement based on their career aspirations as well as where they might have the most impact. The decision criteria for selecting individuals makes sure that the placement fits objective criteria including learning, retention, development, productivity, and business need.
• Part-time rotations. The process includes the capability of part-time placements. This allows the employee to stay in their current job while working in another on a part-time basis in order to develop or learn (i.e., one-day-a-week).
• Project opportunities. Internal movement may include assignment to specific short-term projects to fit a business need. Project placements can be full-time or part-time, but in either case, the primary goal is to meet a business need. Project opportunities can be “bid on,” filled by volunteers, or assigned.
• Overload assignments. The process also offers short-term placements for short-term business “overload” needs (seasonal needs, advertising promotions, etc.).
• Global. The system includes development and business impact assignments around the world.
• Remote. The rotations or movements can include virtual, work-from-anywhere assignments.
• “Outside the organization” placements. The process provides opportunities to place employees in joint ventures, at strategic partners, or even within a large customer’s organization.
• Non-obvious placements. The process is designed to increase the movement of individuals into “non-obvious” positions (generally outside their current organizational chart, functional area, or business unit).
• Technology. The entire process is electronic and paperless.
• Rewards. The process recognizes and rewards (both in the form of bonuses and promotions) managers for finding, developing, and “releasing” talent to other parts of the business.
• Metric-driven. The process continually improves its results based on metrics and data.

Reasons Why Effective Internal Movement Does Not Occur Naturally

If you believe in free trade and open markets, then you certainly understand the value of open competition. It’s hard to argue against the benefits of “right job” internal movement. Most understand the benefit of having the most skilled and best-performing player in each key position.

For example, you certainly wouldn’t want a great basketball player like Michael Jordan playing baseball when his highest skill and impact area is basketball. In the same light, you wouldn’t want a highly innovative individual working in a commodity business when their impact could be much greater if they worked in a fast-growth business unit.

Unfortunately, most internal movement systems are neither open nor competitive. Managers and HR policies almost universally restrict actively recruiting current employees away from their current assignments. In addition, many corporations allow managers to have veto power over losing an employee to an internal transfer or may require an individual to stay in a new position for at least two years before they can move to another.

It’s important to realize specifically why traditional “job-posting” and internal movement systems don’t work, so that you can design new systems that minimize the traditional weak points or flaws.

Pain Points in First-Generation Internal Movement Systems

• Talent “ownership” and hoarding. Most managers operate under the mindset that once they get top talent, they own it. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the talent was hired or developed by them; once they have talent on their teams, they are reluctant to let it go. As part of this “hoarding” behavior, they often discourage team members from even applying for internal positions and some even punish those who try to leave for being disloyal. Breaking this selfish and narrow perspective is critical if you are to get managers to adopt the superior mindset, which is that managers need to be talent developers and “releasers” because it’s best for the corporation to have the agility to rapidly move people to areas of immediate need without having to “fight” silos and political battles. The ultimate goal of any internal movement system is to get individual managers to adopt the role of being “talent launching pads” that find, develop, and then disperse talent to other teams or business units. Essentially, every manager accepts the role as a “farm team” that quickly disperses talent whenever it is ready.
• “Passive” job seekers. Individuals who design internal movement systems seem to lose track of the fact that when you are hiring external candidates, there are two basic types: those who are actively looking for jobs and those who are not (the so-called passive job seeker). It only makes sense that once these “passive” or non-active job seekers become employees, that they would retain the same traits that result in frequent movement. If most of your employees are not “active” job seekers, it is unlikely that they will take advantage of any internal job posting or internal movement system without some prodding or encouragement.
• Frustration with the process. Most internal job posting and movement systems are not particularly user-friendly. Unless you’re an insider, it’s hard to find out much about a job opening beyond the position description. Rejected employees seldom receive any guidance as to what they did right or wrong. Many of the jobs are “wired,” meaning that even though they’re posted, the person who will actually get the job has already been determined. Some internal movement systems make the mistake of limiting future movement (you must stay in the job 24 months before you can apply for another internally), and this hurts the corporation when an urgent need opens up sooner. Other systems even require your current manager’s approval before you can apply or accept another internal job, which certainly discourages free movement. The slowness and frustration associated with many internal movement processes often results in the very best employees leaving the company, because external recruiters are more proactive, faster, and do a much better job of praising and encouraging an individual to switch jobs.
• Targeted movement. Most internal movement systems leave the decision of “who should move to where and when” up to the individual employee or manager, neither of which have enough visibility into the organization’s grand needs to drive effective movement. Most employees have no information or even access to a way of identifying which jobs or business units are both the best for their career advancement and for the growth of the corporation. As a result of this lack of information, individual employees are forced to be self-centered, because corporations give little guidance to employees about skill shortages, growth rates, job security risks, etc. This forces employees to make their own choices about when and where to move. A superior process educates them about key corporate needs and areas that best fit employees’ individual career goals.
• No short-term overflow capability. In a rapidly changing business environment, it’s important to be able to make short-term temporary relocations, as well as long-term permanent ones. Unfortunately, most systems aren’t equipped to handle short-term redeployments. For example, if you have a business situation where you have a short-term sudden influx of customer calls, it’s important to have the “overflow” capability of handling the sudden increase in calls. Most systems just don’t have this capability.
• Weak management of the process. Most internal movement systems are poorly managed or in some cases literally unmanaged. They are often operated by individuals with a “clerical mentality.” Some of the first-generation systems provide no candidate screening, so managers must review every internal applicant. Others arbitrarily and prematurely screen out individuals who could have made an outstanding contribution. Most processes use only rudimentary technology, have no customer satisfaction assessment, and have no strategic metrics that directly assess the business impact of ineffective or “too slow” internal movement.
• Focus solely on employees. The majority of internal movement programs focus on the segment of the labor force that is very quickly becoming the minority. Organizations are becoming much more adept at leveraging contingent labor (temporary workers, contract workers, consultants, outsourced labor, labor on loan from strategic partners, etc.). Unfortunately, none of the talent management systems are being retooled to ensure management beyond the basics of procurement for the growing labor segment. Internal movement is perhaps one of the most critical activities governing this segment, as contingent labor is often leveraged to add immediate capability or capacity related to strategic objectives.

Chances are, you may have experienced many of the frustrations and gaps in logic related to internal movement programs identified in part one of this series. Next week, part two will dive into the benefits of improving internal movement systems.

Some of them will most likely slip into history with little impact, but others will become the new way we do things.

Twitter is a recent example of an application that seemed of little practical use to recruiting until hundreds of people began to apply their creativity and developed interesting and useful ways to use Twitter for recruiting. It is being used by many organizations to announce new jobs to those potential candidates who follow them. It is used to help the recently unemployed stay connected and aware of open positions. It is used to communicate with a select group of prospective candidates or to students on a campus.

Here are three trends that I see as potentially significant. Please leave a comment letting us know what you are seeing, and what other tools, applications, or practices you think are emerging.

Simplicity in Sourcing

The first of the emerging trends is a turn to simpler and more basic ways to find talent. With a rise in applicants, many organizations are finding it less necessary to deploy search specialists or engage in complex sourcing strategies. They can focus, instead, on building their employment brand, often by using Facebook or some other social networking tool. They are also screening existing candidates better and are more focused on building a talent pool or community that can be tapped into as needed. In addition, many are tapping their own workforce for internal redeployment and for referrals.

All of this has reduced the need for in-depth Internet search and it has also lowered the need to post to job boards. In organizations with proactive recruiting teams, internal placements may reach as high as 15% while over 30% may come from referrals. With another 20% being sourced by third-party recruiters for reasons of confidentially or because the particular job is very specialized, only a small percentage needs to be sourced in other ways. A good social network page linked to an interactive career site can probably close much of that gap, leaving a tiny fraction to Internet search or job boards.

As I wrote in my article last week, a comprehensive talent strategy combined with internal development can reduce recruiting requirements significantly. I see this as a continued and growing trend, which ultimately means organizations will employ fewer recruiters but highly skilled in networking, relationship building, and who deeply understand the business.

Social Networks

We are seeing the power of social networking in recruiting growing faster than any other segment. Candidates are able to substitute their social networking profile for a resume at some organizations. Jobvite, an emerging applicant tracking tool listed by Gartner as one of its “Cool Vendors for Human Capital Software 2009,” allows candidates to link to their LinkedIn profiles. No need for a resume or to fill out anything. Jobvite also provides an organization a button to place on their career site that lets prospective candidates see the people in their network who already work at that organization. This provides candidates with ready-made connections into the organization as well as a source of information.

Social networks will become the ultimate sourcing and screening tools. Recruiters and particularly hiring managers will be able to see a more 3-D version of a person and get a much better sense of their past accomplishments and capabilities. But there are negatives, and many recruiters are concerned about candidate privacy and discrimination. The truth is, discrimination can and does occur in face-to-face conversations, in interviews, and even over the phone because of accents and the way people phrase things. Every new technology and application has to pass through a maturity curve, which is happening rapidly for social networks. Laws will change and policies will adapt to accommodate them.

I think that over time candidates will find that they are better treated and more completely able to present themselves than they can today. I think that as social networking matures, candidates will find themselves moving from a generic social network like Facebook to more specific ones aimed at an industry segment or a profession, and then perhaps to organizational-specific ones. We will have to wait a while to see what model eventually takes shape, but the roots are growing and resumes, traditional profiles, and static career sites will fade away.

Internal Redeployment

Smart organizations prevent the needless loss of talent by developing barrier-free internal transfer polices, by shifting talent and skills as jobs change, and by operating development and coaching programs to help employees successfully bridge skill and experience gaps.

They are also beginning to practice sustainable talent management — sizing the workforce for sustainability through good and bad times — and filling peak needs with temporary and contract staff. But sustainability is not just about numbers; it is also about having the right skills spread across all employees. This means development is continuous, internal movement common and often, and that a goal is for every employee to be able to function well in three or four different positions.

The natural result of this will be more focus on employee development, the rise of learning portals with relevant information and on-line training classes; the capturing of the knowledge of experienced employees on videos (using storytelling, talking about how projects were completed and barriers overcome, and by sharing technical knowledge that might be useful to those who follow); and connections to coaches and experts willing to answer questions or provide skill training.

We will see that more and more people will stay with a single employer for longer periods of time, as they find it easy to get refreshed and retrained.