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Using the recession as an excuse, organization after organization has cut out or reduced their tuition reimbursement programs and their support for additional education. But, I have not seen any company close down the fancy cafeteria and many maintain a fitness center and other perks of marginal value for retention or motivation.

At the same time, CEOs and VPs of HR complain about how hard it is to find good employees and retain them. It seems obvious to me that we need to invest more in employee education and less in other areas.

It is a strange and almost uniquely American trait to dislike learning and limit an employee’s ability to learn by not providing time or money. keep reading…

Even in this recession, everyone I speak with is moaning about not being able to find the quality candidates they think they need. Maybe they have caused their own problem by narrowly defining jobs, by using yesterday’s criteria to solve today’s problems, and by a lack of imagination.

We (hiring managers, executives, HR folks, and recruiters) set up expectations and define jobs based on what is traditional. We work from habit and past experience. This is not necessarily bad, but may not match our current needs or the available supply.

Some of us say that we cannot find qualified C# programmers, for example, when we all know that there are very few people with good skills in this area. We are left with choices: hunt like crazy on the Internet and elsewhere to find someone we can influence to leave their current position, wait to find a disgruntled one, or decide to do something different. Something different might be to rethink the job entirely so that it more closely matches someone we already know is available. It might be to increase the supply by developing training programs or taking on apprentices. It might be to merge the job with another one. There are lots of possibilities beyond just doing what we have always done. keep reading…

In the first HR merger of the new year, Peopleclick and Authoria are combining to create a new company that will integrate the offerings of both companies into a comprehensive talent acquisition and management software suite.

The merger was announced this morning by Bedford Funding, a private equity fund specializing in IT services and software. Bedford paid $100 million for Peopleclick. It owns Authoria, which it bought in September 2008 for $63.1 million.

Named Peopleclick Authoria, the new company says it’s the largest privately-owned talent management company in the world with $100 million in revenue, and some 2,400 customers worldwide, including almost 60 percent of the Fortune 100. keep reading…

Last week I introduced this series by talking about how general business changes have rendered what many might consider traditional strategy development in talent management more of a hindrance to organizations than a benefit.

I did not say that strategy is not important, or that delivering a strategic impact is not important, but rather implied that how most organizations are approaching talent strategy today is out of touch with the times.

As the general business environment has become more turbulent, and technology combined with consumer demand has driven significant shortening of most product lifecycles, the complexities of delivering really strategic impact through talent management have ballooned. While competency management systems, career path planning, and multi-year development cycles may have made sense decades ago, that simply is not the case today.

Organizational agility is something the majority of human resource functions are not designed to enable or support. In fact, most traditional HR systems, including those in talent acquisition, hinder agility by imposing rigid control structures with process cycles that take months and even years to execute.

You can’t hit a moving target that changes location unpredictably every six months using processes that take 18 months to execute!

In this installment, I expand beyond the six capabilities of agile talent management introduced in Part I by talking about the critical elements of such a strategy.

However, before launching into the elements, let’s first take a look at a few examples of agile talent management in action.

keep reading…

Early Greek mythology tells tales of sailors lured by Sirens. Their sweet music mesmerized the sailors and led them to believe that the illusion was reality. Ultimately, those sailors who blindly followed the tunes crashed their ships on the rocks and their boats sank.

Sirens lure business executives and small business owners too. The song that the Sirens sing has one line … “Promote my top salesperson, put six people underneath them, and generate six times the sales.” And, like the sailors, many business executives and their companies have been led into harm’s way. keep reading…

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy has gone to hell.

It’s been up and down like a yo-yo for the last decade, a fact that led Time to declare the first decade of the new century “the decade from hell” in a recent cover story. If you work in talent management or HR, this yo-yo pattern certainly isn’t news to you. Surprisingly enough, it’s times like these that present the best opportunity to become more strategic as more managers open their minds to alternative solutions to improve productivity, save money, and move their organizations forward.

This article is intended to get you to rethink your current talent management strategy and to change it so that it better fits turbulent economic conditions and trends that are most likely to stick around for awhile.

Times Change; Strategy Isn’t What it Used to Be

As a professor of management in a college of business, I must remain knowledgeable on economic trends and the strategies organizations can leverage to survive and, in many cases, thrive during various economic situations. While some might argue that a PhD is needed to understand the complexities of the global economy, it doesn’t take a great deal of education to realize that for as long as man has recorded details on trade, there have been oscillating cycles of growth and decline.

If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember the recessions of 1970, 1975, and 1983, followed by growth spurts in 1977 and 1984. Despite blips here and there, the U.S. economy and Western economies in general have grown at a relatively stable rate for some time.

However, if you look at the deviations in growth, you would note that since 1983, the cycles of economic growth and decline have become much shorter and for the most part less severe.

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…

Over the past few months I’ve been describing a new approach for determining quality of hire, and using changes in this to justify any new expenditures on an ROI basis. While the methodology is pretty slick, the pushback is coming not from the process, but from the idea that HR/recruiting is responsible for quality of hire at all.

If not HR/recruiting, then who? keep reading…

A survey released this morning says employers are fooling themselves believing workers are content simply to have a job.

According to the survey conducted by Monster and Human Capital Institute, 84 percent of employers indicated they thought their were workers content because they were working. However, only 58 percent of workers said that.

For workers, the disconnect extends to their feelings about their workload, the longer hours required of them, and their willingness to give their employer the benefit of the doubt for layoffs.

“Today’s employers feel that employees are loyal due to the economic times, but the reality is they are not,” said Katherine Jones, HCI Research Fellow. “Because of this, there is a strong likelihood that when the economy turns for the better, employers could find themselves with valued employees jumping ship. This places pressure on them to put retention measures in place now.”

Monster and HCI conducted the survey in May and June to assess the impact of the recession on workers and companies. More than 700 companies and almost 5,000 passive and active job seekers participated, responding to questions about their attitudes to work, employees, their post-recession expectations, and purchasing plans. keep reading…

Every vendor in the recruiting space touts their latest recruiting and sourcing tool as the next killer app. If you were there, you saw many of them at the last ERE Expo in Florida in September. As the economy recovers, there will be many more at ERE’s Expo 2010 in San Diego next March. Some of them will be superb and worthy of serious consideration.

However, while many will work as advertised, getting budget for them is a different matter entirely. In the past, the only way to get any significant new expenditures past the CFO was with some type of rigorous cost-savings analysis. However, this approach ignored any improvements in candidate quality as possible justification due to its “intangible” nature.

But as Dr. John Sullivan has been ably pointing out for these past 10 years, improvements in candidate quality dwarf potential cost savings. In fact, one could easily justify a cost increase if quality of hire could be proven.

In this article, I’m going to introduce a means to calculate the ROI of any new recruiting program on a quality-of-hire basis. Further, I’m going to suggest that once you have a means to measure quality of hire, you’ll shift your focus toward improving it, and consider cost per hire a secondary priority. keep reading…

It’s hard to argue against the concept of strategic integration.

Having related business units working closely together, rather than operating as independent silos, almost always increases efficiency, reduces errors, and improves overall results.

There’s no better example of what integration can accomplish than the modern-day supply-chain organization, which used to operate as four independent functions (purchasing; inventory management; warehousing; and shipping).

The integration of these functions into a single function with cross-activity analytics and shared goals turned an “overhead function” into a profit center at companies like Wal-Mart, Toyota, and Dell. The customer-service function also demonstrated the value of integration when it created single points of contact for customers using “customer contact centers” capable of addressing a wide range of customer needs from technical support to warranty registration and billing inquiries.

The result of all these innovations was a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction and loyalty/retention. City governments also strive to increase capacity, reduce errors, and save scarce resources when they closely coordinate police, fire, ambulance, and hospital services for handling emergencies.

When executives contemplate what function would benefit the most from breaking down silos and driving integration next, talent acquisition is almost always on their list. Given that numerous organizations are currently engaged in process reengineering efforts and that the budgeting cycle for 2010 is just around the corner, what better time could there be to start integration efforts?

While recruiting continues, requisition loads per recruiter are down and non-essential programs are on hold in many organizations.

keep reading…

Kristen Carroll, of Elliot Health System, provides six questions to ask yourself about the role of human resources in your organization. We don’t have a scorecard on us, but suffice it to say if you give yourself a zero, that could be a bad sign.

• Does your top HR leader report to the CEO?

• Are HR reports and metrics reviewed and analyzed? Do they drive the company’s talent strategy?

• Do you have a compensation philosophy? Was it driven internally?

• Is the top HR leader involved in decision-making for C-level searches?

Carroll was speaking at ERE’s Fall conference today. She also spoke at ERE’s Spring conference (those Spring slides are online, by the way. And let me know if you want her slides from today). She also has a good article about succession planning, full of handy tools to tear out, coming up in the November Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.

Here are some of the characteristics that Carroll says are associated with a human resources department that is healthy, influential, and if we can use an overused word, strategic. keep reading…

If you want to be strategic and make quantum steps in performance, look outside your familiar zone. Step beyond the best practices in your industry and find new ways to leverage your resources, including talent.

In fact, the best way I know to learn about radical new approaches and innovations is to examine the best practices from organizations operating completely outside your industry. I call this practice of adapting “unheard of” practices from other industries parallel benchmarking.

It is known as parallel benchmarking because you are learning from completely different industries that still, however, share a parallel problem. The practice that I am suggesting that your firm consider is from baseball and involves “trading” surplus talent with other firms.

If you want to make dramatic improvements in business practice, you need to study how best-performing firms in completely different industries attack your problem.

If you want to go beyond merely talking about outside-the-box solutions, consider changing your approach and focus on “likely to be laughed at” talent-management solutions like those emerging around Twitter and YouTube, and developing a “talent trading” program.

Almost all firms at some point have a surplus of employees that results from changing business conditions. Unfortunately, the typical approaches for getting rid of surplus employees are cost-containment approaches that provide no payback to the firm.

The most common approach, where corporations lay off surplus talent, is a lose-lose approach. You release talent and get no remuneration for it, despite having invested in it for years via salaries and training. At the same time, you also incur huge costs because you pay for severance, outplacement services, and damage to your employer brand reputation.

But what if there was a solution where instead of releasing talent, you could exchange or “trade” talent with other firms and get something of value in return? Now that would be a talent-management breakthrough that would make any CFO smile.

keep reading…

Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, created a stir at the SHRM conference in New Orleans this year by stating: “There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

Organizations worry about being perceived as offering a good balance between work and personal time.

Many career sites and recruiters stress the ways the organization addresses this through flexible work policies, family-friendly HR polices, child care, and so on. And, for many job seekers, finding a company that offers this magic blend is the Holy Grail.

While Jack was addressing women specifically and speaking about their opportunities for promotion and growth within traditional corporate America, he was reinforcing this assumption. He was heavily criticized for talking to women in this way, even though it is an accurate reflection of the thinking in most of traditional corporate America.

My problem is not with Jack as much as it is with the assumptions that work/life balance is based on. keep reading…

Last week in Part 1 of this series, I mentioned that as the global economy continues to emerge, many organizations may find themselves needing to cut labor costs on a recurrent basis. During times of economic decline, the need may be for drastic cuts, which the options presented last week can address, but it is entirely possible that smaller or moderate cuts will be needed even in times of growth.

The following options address those circumstances and are grouped into options for moderate cost reduction and small cost reduction. keep reading…

Recruiter of the year Dan Hilbert must have found the smartest 4th graders on the planet for his OrcaEyes focus group. He says that it took them no time at all to navigate through the OrcaEyes console, generating reports on the cost of vacancies in an Exult Energy division and on the financial impact of an 80 percent improvement in time to hire for that group.

After taking a whirlwind tour through some of the things OrcaEyes can do, I have no hesitancy in admitting that “I’m not smarter than those 4th graders.”

Of course the significance of those reports was lost on the kids. Hilbert just wanted to make sure the navigation was easy to use and the red-yellow-green alert system easy to understand. And they are.

But it’s those reports that make the $200k a 20,000-employee firm can spend on OrcaEyes seem like a bargain.

Before I get into how, here’s a bit about the what, as in just what is OrcaEyes? Hilbert describes it as HR System Management Software. You can think of it as ERP for HR. Either way, the system provides an overarching view of how human capital impacts the enterprise. It does this by connecting to a company’s existing business systems — hooking into finance, sales, operations, supply chain, or an ERP (if there is one), the HRIS, HRMS, and whatever others may be there.

OrcaEyes crunches the data it extracts from these systems and combines it — for certain uses, like recruiting and salary setting — with data Hilbert obtains from such external sources as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census, and private data providers. Thus, in an instant, literally, an HR recruiter and a division VP can tell the cost in lost business for staffing shortages in the North Sea unit of Exult Energy’s refining and petrochemical division.

I thought that was nice information to have, but no special feat since any CFO can do revenue averages per year-end headcount. But as every CFO and line manager knows, being down one position doesn’t translate into a direct or immediate loss of revenue. Depending on the size of the unit, other workers will pick up the load. keep reading…

SHRM had employees use a 4-point scale to indicate what’s “very unimportant” (that’s a 1) or “very important” (that’s a 4).

The percentages below indicate how many people gave the item a 4, meaning “very important.”

The 601 full- or part-time employees were randomly selected from the U.S. telephone population. keep reading…

Imagine being able to unleash the hidden talents and untapped skills of every single one of your employees?

Imagine if every single one of your employees, from front-line staff to senior management, was 100% engaged, doing the work they were cut out for, contributing to the success of your organization by focusing on their core competencies.

Can you envision the collective power you would unleash? No laggards … just a company filled with rising stars. Absenteeism would drop instantly, worker defections to your competitors would cease entirely. Entire departments would start exceeding quotas.

You would become a preferred employer, and employee recruitment would be an exercise in picking the talent you wanted. Better yet, what if I told you this can be achieved and without the tremendous cost and resource drain of investing in hard-to-measure training programs? That long-sought-after seat at the management table would suddenly materialize for you.

Does this sound too good to be true? Well, it’s not. There is a beautifully simple tool called a “human capital development audit” that you can implement immediately to achieve these results.

Here’s how it works: keep reading…

(Editor’s note: This is the sixth installment in Dr. Sullivan’s series. Here are Part 1, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.)

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. keep reading…

There is little argument that job rotations, stretch assignments, and other forms of internal movement are some of the most effective development and retention tools available. While world-class organizations aggressively manage deployment for development purposes regardless of the economic state, such programs become universally popular when economies turn sour.

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.

keep reading…