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This “think piece” is part of a series of articles I wrote to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

If you haven’t seen it in the news lately, there has been an uproar over the practice of secret “no-recruit” agreements between major corporations. A significant number of notable firms including Google, Apple, Intel, and Pixar have been accused of restraining the movement of employees between firms. But don’t be misdirected by all of the legal issues.

The real damage that these agreements can have is on your firm’s business results, and at a large firm, these damages could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. If you work in HR or recruiting, you need to be able to advise senior managers of the unintended consequences related to these agreements. If you currently use no-recruit agreements or you are considering one, this article covers the numerous potential business problems and impacts associated with them.

Potential Problems and Issues Related to Using “No-recruit” Agreements

The 25 problems are broken into two categories, 1) ways that these agreements can hurt your firm and 2) reasons why the agreement may not even work. keep reading…

The New Year is an opportune time to “raise the bar” by doing something strategic in talent management. In many corporations, new plans and budgets take effect at the first of the year, so the holiday period preceding the New Year is an ideal time to review the potential strategic actions to put in front of your team. Unfortunately, many talent management leaders are risk adverse, and although they constantly talk about the need to “be more strategic” they all-too-frequently find excuses that indefinitely postpone those dramatic and strategic actions.

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. keep reading…

Join ERE and Heather for a energized discussion about what dedicated HR Professionals can do to help your organizations keep and engage their employees who are currently peeking over the fence!

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

It’s always better to be prepared than surprised.

By definition, being strategic requires that you look forward — identifying trends, opportunities, and threats. With the December lull looming, now is a great time to plan for the future. I’ve listed the “top 10 talent management trends” I foresee that require your attention. keep reading…

Whether a sign of confidence or desperation, the number of workers quitting without having another job is growing. Last month alone nearly 1.1 million workers left their jobs.

It’s the largest number of  “job-leavers,” as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, in more than a decade. Included in the count are workers who took buyouts, some who quit ahead of a dismissal, and others who may be taking time off before starting a new job. The bulk, however, are those who decided to leave a job without having another lined up.

There’s no way of telling what kind of workers these job-leavers are. However, any number of surveys over the last few years show there’s a gathering wave of intentions about leaving, if not actual departures. keep reading…

Despite all of the recent talk about the need for openness and corporate transparency, there is still one area where corporations tightly hold on to secrets … revealing who is/isn’t designated as “high-potential.” According to Towers Watson’s 2011 Talent Management and Rewards survey, a scant 28% of employers let employees know their designation.

If you are a proponent of transparency, you’ll be happy to know that despite this low percentage of openness, there are many benefits associated with making managers and the high-potentials themselves aware of who is on the high-potential list for succession planning and leadership development. keep reading…

A Washington, D.C. nonprofit has a new turnover calculator out, allowing you to calculate the cost of turnover online.

It’s a quick and dirty worksheet, admittedly not including all the costs and after-effects of someone leaving, like frustrated customers or clients, the costs of staffing the job temporarily, and so on.

It does include things like some recruiting costs, as well as the time it takes the newbie to get up to speed. You can find it at The Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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: keep reading…

This webinar will feature three members of the Compensation Café blogging team – Ann Bares, Jim Brennan and Laura Schroeder – joining forces to examine where compensation practice is headed in the next year and beyond.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on HR be sure to check out TLNT!

Most executives assume that low employee turnover is an indication of great management. While that could be the case, there are many other reasons for low employee turnover, not all of which are good. For instance, it could indicate that talent competitors find little value in the people that comprise the organization: they simply are not desirable.

Turnover Rates Are Impacted By Employee Desirability

High turnover rates do not always mean that you have bad managers or that you are not a great place to work. Firms with great brands and industry visibility are often the target of recruiters. In fact, it is not unusual for hiring managers to direct recruiters to only target employees from the top five firms in their industry. That being the case, you need to consider the reverse: employees may stay only because they have few options to leave.

Reasons Low Voluntary Turnover Might Be Bad News

Every organization needs to understand “why” recruiters opt for and against targeting the employees of an organization, and why employees stay. Some possible drivers of low turnover include: keep reading…

There is going to be an exodus of workers soon from businesses all across the U.S. It seems that for all the work recruiters do at the front end, organizations are undoing it at the backend. Frustrated employees are seeking new opportunities in record numbers, but if you are prepared, your talent shortages may be over.

Earlier this week, Mercer released its What’s Working survey that found that “one in two U.S. employees [are] looking to leave or [have] checked out on the job.” Other surveys support these findings, including ones by Right Management.

Is this simply the grass-is-greener syndrome, or is there something else going on? Even though there are plenty of jobs for certain types of people — Amazon is adding 5,000 people, and McDonald’s, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple are just a few others that have announced fairly large hiring plans — we are not actually out of this recession, and changing jobs is a risky business.

While money and benefits are not the primary reason people leave their employers in normal times, these times are very different. keep reading…

About 82 percent of U.S. hospitals say their annual RN attrition is between 1 and 20 percent, with an average rate of about 14 percent.

Those numbers (click to enlarge the graphic at right that breaks it down) are from KPMG’s new survey on labor costs for full-time nurses in hospitals. It got surveys back from 120 CEOs, CAOs, COOs, CFOs, and HR directors.

Other findings: keep reading…

Have you thought about how much it costs to fix a problem after the fact vs. preventing it from happening in the first place? In a February 2011 McKinsey report one of the companies interviewed for the article had a struggling executive team. McKinsey reported about the executive team and their company: “Fewer than one in five of its members thought it was highly respected or shared a common vision for the future, and only one in three thought it made a valuable contribution to corporate performance. The company’s customers were very dissatisfied — they rated its cost, quality, and service delivery at only 2.3 on a 7-point scale — and the team couldn’t even agree on the root causes.” Ouch! That smarts.

Here’s a team and company way out of alignment, and it realizes it. It was unable to agree on the causes of their problems, which is very unfortunate. I wonder how many of them may be thinking about running for the door? Do you think they’ve considered what it has cost them thus far in time, dollars, and productivity to have issues so detrimental to the health of their organization? Why aren’t they discussing how to fix the problem? Given my experience, I’d assert they are just so overwhelmed with the idea of fixing their problems that they’re paralyzed.

Companies can take a proactive approach making the time and spending money to build their organizations the right way the first time. keep reading…

Whether the economy is strong or weak, no matter the time of year, and no matter how much they are paid, many of our best employees decide to leave. The question we all grapple with is why.

Why do people stay at a company or leave? What motivates such behavior, and how can employers motivate people to stay longer? What is a “good” rate of turnover and how do we know who to entice to stay and who to let go? While this article cannot hope to answer these questions in any detail, let’s take a quick look at the subject and see what we find.

First of all, when employees are asked why they leave, they usually give reasons like these: They want a better work/life balance, more money, a better opportunity for career growth, more independence and control over their own work, and of course job security.

For most of the past decade, employers have worked hard to give employees more time off and more benefits aimed at the family. They have increased salaries and offered stock options, enriched and enlarged jobs until some employees are now complaining that their jobs are too enriched, and they have offered employees more autonomy over the kinds of work they do, where they do it and how they do it. More pay is “at risk,” meaning the employee has to perform to get it, and this is at least loosely coupled to job security.

What is surprising is that turnover, which should be at an all-time low given this slow economy, is about the same as always. Sure, the rate has slowed a bit and few firms are experiencing the 25%-20% turnover rates of the past two or three years, but people are still leaving — good, valuable people who we want to keep. And as the recession eases, more will decide to leave: the grass is always greener.

So the question becomes: what are the real reasons people leave and what can employers do about it? keep reading…

On this week’s webinar, Stacey Harris, Director of Strategic HR and Talent Research for Bersin & Associates, shared recent Bersin & Associates data and trends on Employee Engagement and the practices of High-Impact HR organizations.

For more podcasts, webinars, and articles on recruiting be sure to check out ERE.net!

This is a story about how CashAmerica saved millions. And how your company might be able to save money, too.

Like so many companies, CashAmerica, a nationwide chain of loan and pawnshops, had a retention problem. By the middle part of the last decade the problem had become acute enough that the company regularly operated at 80-90 percent staffing.

That might have been good for the bottom line, but the cycle of hiring and training, not to mention lost productivity, had a cost.

Clint Jaynes, when he took over as SVP of human resources in 2006, figured the cost to be about $2,000 in training costs for every new hire.

As Jaynes studied the matter, he found many newly minted clerks left within the first 90 days; more within six months. By the end of two years, somewhat more than half of all new hires were gone.

Store managers, who cost five times as much to train, had a lower, but still significant turnover rate. keep reading…

Buck Consultants asked 91 companies what they’re doing to retain top performers. In a nutshell: keep reading…

Our country has gone from conversations about how to recruit and retain quality employees in a market with low unemployment just a few short years ago to conversations about how to find a job in a market with record unemployment numbers.

What’s missing is the most important conversation, regardless of our economic situation.

No one is talking about what needs to be done by companies to optimize their organization with the highest number of “A” players possible. What percentage is possible? If done properly, 80-90%. In our current economic climate it is especially important to move away from mediocrity. The 80-20 rule, as it relates to sales, is just not acceptable if you truly want to be successful in today’s market. For those who aren’t familiar with the 80/20 rule, it says that 20% or your sales organization will produce 80% of your revenue. Is this really what you’re company is committed to? Have you considered the possibility of what your revenues would look like with 80-90% of your sales organization achieving quotas vs. 20-50%?

Optimization Checklist

These questions are just some that you need to be asking yourself. If you’re not asking these questions, you are headed for mediocrity or possibly even failure.  keep reading…

Talent managers are increasingly borrowing from the practices of casinos, which have a well-earned reputation for effectively attracting, engaging, retaining, and directing the behavior of their customers. Casino customers lose money, spend hours engaged, and in most cases leave satisfied and eager to return. The same design principles that keep casino patrons engaged are increasingly playing a role inside organizations.

Firms like Microsoft, Google, Starbucks, Facebook, and Pixar have successfully used physical layouts, food offerings, social settings, and perks similar to those found in casinos to attract, maintain, and manage their customers/employees. According to one study, the number of corporations that offer “outrageous perks” nearly doubled between 2006 and 2011. So before you reject the idea, learn more about it.

Understanding the Casino Approach to Talent Management

Time clocks, policies binders, and rigid work rules may have worked long ago with regard to keeping employees at their desks, but times have changed. The casino approach focuses on using positive factors and “productivity perks” to influence behavior, including: keep reading…

Talent management is a broad and contentiously defined discipline, so new approaches and tools are continually emerging. Staying on top of the latest definition or the newest enabling technologies can be overwhelming. As an evangelist of “next practices,” I’ve kept a running list of cool approaches that the average practitioner may never have heard of. keep reading…