ERE.net

Time for a guessing game. We’re playing “Who am I?” Here are the hints:

I get nearly free health care and pay only a pittance (relatively) for great child care. My cost for education is small. Since I work on average, 35 hours a week, I have time for my family and recreation, which includes free gym access and a summer camp for the kids. Oh and I have no fear of being laid off.

So who am I? Did you say citizen of Sweden or some similar place? Nope. I’m an employee with SAS, America’s best place to work, as declared by Fortune magazine.

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by Dr. John Sullivan and Master Burnett

On January 13, 2010, nearly 800 ere.net community members converged online to participate in a webinar (embedded at the bottom of this article) discussing the trends Dr. Sullivan predicted will impact the talent acquisition profession in 2010. Over the course of that webinar a number of questions were raised, each of which is addressed here.

Q1. Your trends article highlighted what is likely to happen during 2010, but you can you go further and tell us what are the top 10 overall actions steps that you would recommend for corporate recruiting leaders take?

To summarize, we would recommend the following actions in 2010: keep reading…

It’s not enough to say that if you want to keep the best people when the economy improves, you just need to communicate more. It matters what you say and how and when you say it. Communication occurs in the context that you’ve created over time, and how your communications will be received will depend a great deal on that context. If you want to keep your best people, then you need to do your homework. (Or, conversely, if you want to recruit someone else’s key people, find companies that did not do the homework suggested in this article.)

Fortunately, it isn’t terribly difficult to communicate better. It does, however, require recognizing that emotion, not logic, is the driving force, and it requires starting now — not next week, next month, or next year. If you wait until people are leaving, it’s too late.

So how do you highlight someone’s contributions? I offer more, detailed suggestions in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, but for now, I suggest the following in brief. keep reading…

We have all heard the recent statistics of rising unemployment rates, along with candidate-to-position ratios being the highest we have seen in decades. Almost every time I open the paper there is a depressing story of how one job posting attracted hundreds of applications. One story even told us of a job posting for a single position that attracted more than 14,000 applications in five business days — almost 3,000 applications a day!

What is even more interesting than the actual volume of candidates is the response I hear from business leaders as to how they are dealing with this issue. keep reading…

Good people know that even in a recession, they can find another position.

In fact, signs point to increased opportunities for currently employed people with specific skills and experience, and many of your top performers are most likely being actively recruited without your knowledge. As the stock market improves, so do attitudes about hiring. Every day I see signs that companies are starting to hire selected people more aggressively than they have over the past six months. Google has (or had) openings for 200 recruiters; do you wonder why? Facebook is ramping up hiring; wonder why? Even in Silicon Valley, the keenest firms are hiring people even when they don’t really need them!

Facebook, Google, and others continue to hire large numbers of top people for two reasons: first of all, to keep them from the competition. Top people employed by you are not going to be contributing to someone else’s’ success; and second, they are “stockpiling” talent to have it ready when things start growing again, which is already starting to happen.

In many areas, including healthcare, telecommunications, marketing, computer security, and computer engineering, demand remains strong. Biosciences and pharmaceutical companies are hiring, as are the movie and media industries despite layoffs, recessions, and slumping consumer demand.

So what can recruiters so about retention? Isn’t it a fact that once people are hired they are out of your hands? While this may be the case in some firms, I believe for most of us there are several ways to help your organization keep the best people and help yourself by reducing your workload and keeping your internal networks alive.

Most basically, you can make a real difference in any employee’s attitude who you have helped to hire. Employment is about relationships, and the strongest relationships are built on trust, respect, and open communication. As a recruiter, you most likely have an advantage with the employees you helped to hire. You spent time with them, got to know them more deeply than many others in the company, and may have given them advice about accepting offers or on how to deal with an interview. By simply checking in with these folks, you can get a sense of their mood, concerns, and what the issues are they may have with the organization. You may be able to change negative attitudes or to pass on information that might help “save” one of them from leaving.

But here are a few other things that you can do, as well. keep reading…

Wouldn’t it be great to have access to an off-the-shelf, easy-to-execute morale-boosting program, one that includes two “employee engagement killer apps”? Given how challenging—and important—it is these days to keep employee morale high, wouldn’t it be great to have this morale boosting program, and not pay a fortune for it?

Well you can.

It’s called: keep reading…

Parts one and two of this three-part series introduced why focusing on retention is and will be a mission-critical activity as economic recovery continues. The series introduced retention strategies categorized as 1) laissez-faire and 2) all-employee.

In many organizations, the subject of prioritizing positions and people is a highly political one. While many accept that certain roles may exert greater impact on the organization, treating people in those roles differently is a challenging and often avoided activity.

If your organization is looking for truly strategic HR, delivering highly targeted or personalized retention solutions is essential.

Category III: Targeted or Personalized Approaches

This last category, in contrast to the all-employee approach, focuses retention efforts on high-priority individuals and jobs. Once prioritized, it then personalizes or customizes treatment to fit the individual needs of the targeted employee. The primary success measures for this category are turnover rates among targeted individuals and the average time-to-fill high-priority roles voluntarily vacated.

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No matter how long you have been in the HR profession, this might be the only comprehensive list of retention strategies you have ever seen.

This is true because retention is not yet a distinct discipline, and because most retention managers and consultants laser-focus on their favored approach.

In order to provide you with a big-picture view of the available strategies, I’ve used my extensive experience and research in retention to compile a comprehensive list. It provides a brief overview of each of the major retention strategies that corporate leaders can employ.

Classifying Strategies Based On Their Primary Retention Lever

Retention strategies are best classified based on the primary lever (or treatment) that the firm uses to motivate employees to stay (the other option is to classify them by the causes of turnover that the strategy is trying to counter). Typical retention levers include pay, benefits, engagement drivers, promotions, and development actions.

Individual levers can be combined into thousands of situation-specific solutions. The following list of strategies has been separated into three broad classifications: laissez-faire, all-employee, and targeted approaches.

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As the economic turnaround picks up steam, turnover rates in many organizations are likely to skyrocket and recruiting replacement workers of the same caliber will be extremely challenging.

Study after study has confirmed the notion that many employees would have left their employers months/years ago had the option to do so been viable. The economic downturn, combined with the mortgage crisis, has forced many frustrated, disappointed, and unmotivated employees to stay put. The trend is not a new one and is consistent with past downturns.

While turnover rates are at an all-time low, they most certainly cannot be taken as an indication of a firm’s status as a desirable place to work.

Just as in years past, when job opportunities become more prevalent, employees will exercise their right to demonstrate just how much they appreciated the treatment they received throughout reductions in force, furloughs, clumsy mergers, travel freezes, and budget cuts. The level of animosity among many will render most traditional retention approaches ineffective.

Some studies indicate that as many as two-thirds of employees are ready to go. Unfortunately, few corporations are preparing today to handle the dramatic increase in voluntary terminations that will come tomorrow.

While few organizations completely decimated their staffing functions, the majority have cut back to the point where capability has been negatively impacted. Strategic programs that deliver retention have been cut, and in most cases, no one is held accountable for retention solutions. It might seem outrageous, but unless you consider the phrase “let’s keep them all” to be a retention strategy, it’s a fact that most HR and recruiting executives can not even list common retention strategies, let along devise their own.

Retention Is One of the Most Poorly Managed Goals in HR

It’s hard to argue that retaining key employees isn’t a high-value activity, and I can’t say that I have ever visited an organization that would argue otherwise. In fact, most HR leaders and recruiters talk a lot about the importance of retaining the very best employees that the organization has invested so much time, money, and development resources in. Unfortunately, talk is where most HR organizations end when it comes to formalizing retention efforts.

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A troubling new report from ExecuNet says executive longevity continues to decline at just the time companies most need an engaged, knowledgeable C-suite at the helm.

The survey of some 5,000 executives, search consultants, and corporate HR professionals says the average tenure of a business executive declined 15 percent between 2005 and 2008 to an average of 2.3 years. Meanwhile, only 29 percent of the HR professionals surveyed say their company has knowledge management and succession plans to address the loss of management skill.

“It takes roughly three years of deep entrenchment in a job to reach peak performance. With executives spending less time in organizations and often being judged on short-term stock price performance, they stop short of reaching their full potential,” says ExecuNet Vice President and Executive Editor Lauryn Franzoni.

While the economy may have tamped down the voluntary turnover rate for 2009 — executive recruiters expect their searches to be down 14 percent for the first half of the year –  it has also increased the length of time executives spend searching for a job. The report says executives now expect to spend an average of 10.1 months looking before landing. keep reading…

It’s hard to find a more misunderstood and mismanaged human resource area than employee turnover. Executives are constantly sounding off about how “bad” employee turnover is, but in some cases, employee turnover is actually a positive thing.

Imagine, for example, that you had a poor-performing worker like Homer Simpson. If Homer walked in late one day as usual and announced that he was leaving, would you consider that a bad thing, or would you secretly celebrate his departure?

Even better, what if he left your firm and immediately went to work for one of your direct competitors; wouldn’t that be additional cause for celebration?

On the flip side, what if you ran a golf team and one of your star performers left, would that not be real cause for frustration?

The purpose of this article is to open your mind about the silliness of measuring only aggregate turnover. I can think of no better indication of a so-called expert’s lack of true understanding of employee turnover than when I read an article or a book on retention and the author invariably expounds on the need to keep everyone.

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Yesterday, I read one of those “10 Tips for…” type of articles on how to manage the Millennial or Gen Y employee. They included recommendations such as:

• Provide leadership and guidance.
• Listen to the Millennial employee.
• Provide challenge and change.
• Provide structure (i.e. clear expectations, goals, assessment of progress, etc).

One of the website’s readers posted a point-by-point criticism of the article, concluding with: “The advice given is good for employees of all ages. Contending that it is uniquely applicable to a new generation is nonsense.”

While I agree with the rather prickly poster’s perspective that the author’s advice applies to all employees, I do think he missed the nuances the author was trying to convey.

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What’s hot in talent management changes quite often. Right now, there’s no hotter topic within the talent management community than workforce planning.

The reasons are simple: with the current economy driving revenues down dramatically, many senior executives are examining how to plan ahead in order to increase their firms’ capabilities, reduce costs, and survive the economic chaos likely to continue for some time.

Organizations need an effective talent management plan that will allow them to “explode out of the box” at the first sight of economic recovery, yet one that doesn’t threaten economic sustainability in the short term.

While most in talent management are continuing to react with stale cost containment approaches developed decades ago, strategic talent managers are stepping forward with robust workforce planning solutions and new work models that account for the significant changes in both how people work and live that have occurred in the last 20 years.

If you are interested in doing more than talking about being strategic, here are some recommended action steps to help improve your organization’s workforce planning.

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Any manager who takes an honest look at individual performance knows all employees are not created equally. About 20% of employees rise to the top of the heap; 20% drop to the bottom; and the rest hang around in the middle doing only enough to attract attention.

Employee-productivity differences have attracted their share of researchers. Most agree that folks in the top half of workers out-produce the bottom half by about 2:1 (i.e., it makes no difference if people are shuffling papers or making widgets). And, when managers and knowledge workers are examined separately, the productivity ratio rises to 3:1, 4:1, or higher (i.e., responsible jobs have bigger ratios).

Productivity is more than a mental exercise. It shows up as absenteeism, errors, reduced throughput, turnover, low morale, rework, an excess number of employees, and so forth. Productivity losses are also sneaky because they are not easily seen; yet, they translate into hard cash: between 20% of base annual payroll leaked for unskilled workers to 50% for skilled and managerial employees — enough to separate a successful organization from a flop.

Converting payroll leakage into gross sales can be an even bigger eye-opener. Twenty percent leakage, for an organization that pays out 1/5 of its gross sales in salaries and benefits, would require a 500% sales increase to balance the books. Want to do more scary math? Calculate the incremental sales necessary to offset a 50% leak in managers and professional salaries!

Enter Financial Chaos and Uncertainty

We are in serious financial times. Opinions vary, but experts estimate our financial stress will last throughout 2009 and perhaps into 2010. The prosperity party is over. Like the dot-com bust, the world changed virtually overnight.

We cannot do much about external economic factors except dig in and wait. But, we can do something about employee productivity, especially when it comes to intelligent downsizing.

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Even though there are layoffs announced every day, organizations I am speaking with still need to keep the people who generate sales, create new products, or have the intellectual capital the organization needs to continue functioning. Good people know that even in these difficult economic times, they can find another position. They are most likely being actively recruited without your knowledge.

I had lunch a few days ago with a recruiting leader who expressed his concern over the spike in turnover among the most critical segment of his company’s workforce. After we chatted for a while it became clear to me that this organization was not doing very much to encourage these people to stay. According to him, even though the company was doing well financially and expected to meet its sales goals for at least the first quarter, many employees were just waiting to be laid off. No information was being shared, and executives huddled in their offices all day.

Employment is about relationships, and the strongest relationships are built on trust, respect, and open communication. When things are difficult, it is more important than ever to make sure your management team is present, is as upbeat as it can be, and that every member of the executive staff is visible and concerned about every employee.

To maintain the employment relationship, employers have a huge responsibility. First of all they need to clearly know who their best employees are, keep them informed, help them maintain and develop skills, and encourage them to build networks and internal relationships.

None of these things costs much when compared to the cost of recruiting and developing new employees, and none of them are really very hard to do. But, to put them into place does require a change of mindset and a willingness to break (or at least stretch) the usual policies and rules that exist in many organizations. Good HR and good recruiting is all about treating people fairly — not necessarily the same.

Here are four ways to build and maintain loyalty and a strong employee-employer relationship.

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UK employees were asked why they feel disloyal to their employers — a disloyalty that results in lower productivity and turnover. Harris Interactive did the survey for CareerBuilder among 656 UK employees (employed full-time; not self-employed) ages 18 and over.

Everywhere you look today, you see the elements of another “perfect storm” for recruiters. The economy is in a free fall. Companies are looking at ways to reduce headcount. Recruiting budgets are frozen. Those sought-after “passive candidates” are hunkering down to try to weather the storm, so they’re not taking your calls, if you’re even making them.

What’s a recruiter to do?

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Whenever there is a downturn in economic conditions, one of the first knee-jerk reactions that many CFOs and senior managers take is placing a freeze on all hiring, pay raises, budgets, and promotions.

The effect of long-term hiring freezes is particularly damaging to the recruiting function, because “no hiring” generally means that a majority of recruiters will be laid off. Historically, budgets for recruiting have been cut so low that the function is literally decimated, making it rather difficult for companies to resurrect a decent function when the economy swings up.

Many executives think that the decision to institute some sort of resource freeze is one that helps the organization because it contains costs; however, the opposite is more often the case.

Poorly thought-out freezes that impact talent acquisition and other talent-management activities may actually harm the organization by:

• Driving increases or vacancies in revenue producing/impacting roles that decrease revenues beyond any cost savings.
• Driving increases in employee burnout/turnover.
• Missing out on new talent opportunities (i.e., not be able to hire a superstar that becomes available).
• Decreasing an organization’s capability/capacity to innovate.
• Damaging the employer brand making hiring more difficult when the economy returns.

Rather than waiting for the inevitable announcement of a freeze, recruiters need to be proactive and preempt any such silliness long before it occurs by making the business case for leveraging this time to re-architect the talent acquisition function, upgrade its strategic programs, and trade up the talent population while salaries and vendor costs can be negotiated down significantly.

(Incidentally, you can tell when a hiring freeze is imminent because they are almost always preceded by the infamous “paper clip memo” from the CFO, which limits the purchase of office supplies, magazine subscriptions, and travel).

Because every organization is unique, there is no one magic way to structure the business case, but I have put together a list of arguments that you can select from:

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WorldatWork surveyed more than 2,700 organizations; members are employed in the HR, compensation, and benefits departments of mostly large North American companies.

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With the Carl Icahn proxy fight averted and the Microsoft buyout dead (today, but check back tomorrow), Yahoo! can resume the reorganization it announced last month. It should be easier than most of the previous reorganizations the company went through as this time several top corporate positions are vacant.

(Watch out, though, for the fireworks expected at Friday’s shareholder meeting when almost anything may happen.)

For the past several months, senior managers and top-level executives have been leaving the company in numbers large enough to attract attention from bloggers and tech writers. In June TechCrunch published a list of 114 director and VP level personnel who left Yahoo!, many in 2008. Not long after the site published another story saying Yahoo! could see another 100 senior people leave in three weeks, after options vest worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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