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The 21st century has opened with a flurry of disasters, economic crises, acts of terrorism, and wars that underline the need to adapt quickly. The skills of planning, goal orientation, and consistency that we taught and practiced widely in the 20th century are no longer success factors. Workforce planning seems oxymoronic, and a three-year plan is looked at with both skepticism and humor. Trying to predict who we should hire in February or May is most often a futile act, yet we are still required to produce the right people — fast!

Whether we are talking about corporate strategy, HR strategy, or talent strategy, we are talking about probabilities. And the closer the desired outcomes are to today, the higher the probability that they will actually happen. But, rapid change makes planning less and less relevant, and recruiters, planners of all types, and organizations are trying to find ways to cope with the lower and lower probability of being able to predict anything.

Historically our plans have been based on an assumption that is increasingly in question: that most things are going to be the same or at least similar in the near future to what they are today. Planning has relied on consistency and stability and to some extent a simple world.

The Greek poet Archilochus wrote a poem about the fox that knows many things, and the hedgehog that knows one big thing. His point was that some of us — the hedgehogs — are inclined to hold one big idea or view of things and disregard all others. But some are more likes foxes that go from one thing to another easily and hold many divergent ideas at the same time. This seems to be the winning approach for this part of the 21st century.

The world is not consistent, stable, or simple. Three-year and five-year plans are at best general, low-probability indicators of goals deemed desirable at the moment of creation. Any event might change those goals. The recruiters you hired in last year’s frenzied market weren’t needed months ago and may never be needed again. No one wants those HTML programmers who were in high demand just months ago. The sudden failure of banks, the quick economic fallout of 2008, or the seemingly sudden surplus of workers has changed many organizations’ plans. Falling home prices have made unaffordable property affordable. Fat savings accounts have become slimmer, changing retirement plans. And something as simple as the CEO leaving or the arrival of a new VP of HR can change the best laid plans.

So how can we deal with constant change and the need for fast action?

The best approach may be twofold: (1) develop an accepting attitude about change and a belief that change will lead to winning, and (2) design systems and approaches to deal better with change. Building skills that improve your ability to adapt is important to both personal mental health and to organizational success.

The change competencies are agility and resilience. A book that I highly recommend is called The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo. This short video will give you a sense of his perspective. In it he outlines why Al-Qaida is successfully beating the U.S. in Afghanistan and how Hezbollah is winning over Israel. Both of these groups have learned that they cannot succeed head on against a powerful foe like the United States or Israeli military, but they can win by being able to move fast, adapt to changing situations, take advantage almost instantly of any advantage, and break all the rules.

So what does this mean to us in recruiting? keep reading…

Great people don’t make a job change for money. Great people have to be enticed to talk to a great organization. How I overcome this is by arguing that my “tribe” is a better fit for them than their current tribe. My tribe is cooler, funner, more interesting, faster, more successful, and contains less management-by-spreadsheet than their company. Come jump ship and work with us. This is the difference between “sourcing as selling” and resume mining.

I chose the word tribe because it is a good, short noun for the idea that “birds of a feather flock together.” And top managers can be a destination. They have their own posse and peeps who follow them wherever they work. I know: I work for one. But even the most incredible managers eventually run out of people to call when rounding up the usual suspects. This is where I come in. I sell the manager and the team. I look at the group that I am headhunting for and try to find some common denominators. keep reading…

Developing candidate pipelines (i.e. having a ready “pool” of candidates available when a position opens up) is a topic that has been talked about for years.

Of late, given the decrease in open positions, the candidate pipeline subject has resurfaced again as a hot topic among many recruitment leaders and hiring managers.

I’ve heard comments like:

“Now is the time to fill the pipeline for future hiring needs.”

“Since the recruiters have extra time, let’s have them build candidate pipelines.”

These comments are being made at companies throughout the country.

What I find most interesting is a growing frustration and disconnect between recruiters and hiring managers regarding this subject. keep reading…

Review your senior leadership positions. You might take the top 2% or 10%; whatever is a logical method to review your organization’s top tier talent. It might be that you review all director and above positions, or VP and above. You may wish to review only positions in a certain pay grade and above. (By the way, I’ve got a more in-depth article on executive pay coming up in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership.)

As you review these positions, find out if there is a person or persons in the organization who could take that individual’s position should it become vacant. Document who could fill the void, and/or make note if there is no one who could fill the position, should it become vacant. You might also make note of any imminent retirements in any key positions over the next few years as well. Once complete, you will have a clear understanding of which positions you need to plan recruiting for and when that recruiting might be coming online. Make this a subset of your strategic workforce plan.

After you complete this top talent succession planning exercise, compute the following ratio: keep reading…

Breaking the “War For Talent” / War On Talent Cycle

Most people in recruiting and talent management are just so busy that they don’t have time to step back and build programs or marshal line managers to participate in programs that successfully let them see the “big picture.”

As a result, many organizations are just starting to emerge from another painful cycle of rapid hiring followed by large-scale layoffs.

I call this phenomena the “war for talent” followed by the “war on talent.” Unfortunately, many organizations can look back at their history and see that for decades they have been repeating the same cycle over and over.

This “war for talent/war on talent” is unnecessary and expensive. In my view, it’s time to forever break that cycle through more effective workforce planning.

The topic of workforce planning is hot these days (it will be a major topic at the fall ERE Expo) because more and more executives have started openly discussing their desire not to repeat the painful “war for talent/war on talent” cycle. This binge and purge is extremely expensive, and it damages the firm’s employer brand image, stock performance, and innovation capability.

If you’re going to end this vicious cycle, focus both time and resources on workforce planning and in particular, upturn planning. While news reports may have left you thinking things are not getting much better, many organizations report that they are anticipating 200%-plus growth in requisition volume compared to last year by Q3 end.

If you work in talent management and you were surprised by the last economic downturn, don’t reaffirm your lack of competence by being surprised by the next upturn. Even the most pessimistic economists predict an upturn; the only question is when. Regardless of when it occurs, the upturn will provide talent management leaders an opportunity to make the talent management function look good.

By developing a turnaround plan and having your processes in order so that when the upturn does occur, your firm will be poised to act quickly and take advantage of the talent opportunities available.

keep reading…

Fast forward to January 15, 2010. What are some of the hiring challenges you’re now facing?

As you put the list together, consider these assumptions:

1. The trough of the economic downturn was reached in April 2009.
2. Job losses continued through October 2009, but at a declining rate, with job gains finally turning positive in November 2009, at around 20,000 or so.
3. The unemployment rate peaked at 9.7% in September 2009 and although still at 8.5% in January 2010, it is forecasted to drop to 7.0% by June 2010.
4. The number of searches on Google with the words “jobs” (e.g., “jobs nurses Seattle”) peaked at 7.3mm/day in April and has been declining by an average of 10%/month since then, but started inching up again in October 2009.
5. An article by Lou Adler on ERE in November 2009 suggested that this pickup was due to people who are fully employed but now getting itchy to leave. He contends that the pent-up demand for a new job is finally being seen and that this is a new group of people entering the job market. Note: this will be unexpected for unprepared companies.
6. Hiring for critical positions will begin in earnest three to four months before a general improvement in the jobless rate is seen. This will be exacerbated by an increase in voluntary turnover.

These assumptions are pretty realistic. The question is, are you ready for this scenario? If you are, here are some of the things you’ve probably been doing over the past six months:

keep reading…

While close to half of organizations consider workforce planning an integral part of their overall staffing and recruiting, only 27% of workforce planning processes are conducted by recruiting and staffing departments. See the chart, showing ownership of workforce planning.

That’s data from the Bersin & Associates’ Workforce Planning survey (which a lot of people from ERE took earlier this year). Sixty-seven organizations, mainly in the U.S. and Canada, responded. Bersin partnered with the Newman Group.

The majority of workforce planning processes are owned by individual business leaders, and thus disjointed from recruiting and even HR. At many organizations, such as T-Mobile, talent acquisition directors expressed a strong demand for workforce planning, but the responsibility to lead this program lay with the benefactors of the data, the business unit leaders.

Workforce planning needs to be an integral part of the overall staffing and recruiting organization. In this capacity, talent acquisition should not only create interest around the topic; it should help drive the process.

In order to gain a seat at the table, talent acquisition needs to share in the level of ownership and accountability for workforce planning.

In strategic workforce planning processes (something I’m writing about in the June Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership), 43% of workforce planning efforts are conducted by recruiting and staffing. As a result, 64% are able to better plan recruiting and staffing needs. Companies that implement consistent workforce planning processes throughout their entire organization rely heavily on their talent acquisition departments.

They take a different approach and involve recruiting: 53% of these organizations indicated that workforce planning is conducted by recruiting and staffing. One key driver for workforce planning is to link recruitment, development, and training decisions to organizational goals. Without involvement and support from talent acquisition departments, organizations will not achieve this goal.

In the June Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, I’ve got an article about strategic workforce planning — a multi-functional discipline encompassing several human resources functions spanning a long-term planning period.

You’ll get much more detail there, but I wanted to whet your tastebuds with this sample paradigm for a workforce plan. keep reading…

Everyone knows that recruiting is currently in a down cycle, but there is no doubt firms will again need to recruit significantly to fuel growth and replace aging workers.

But do you have a plan that will enable you to explode out of box immediately as the downturn ends?

If you don’t have a feasible recruiting turnaround plan, you may be hurting your organization.

Research shows that the majority of recruiting organizations don’t have a documented recruiting strategy, let alone one specifically developed to deal with a recovery of the macro-economy. While one could argue that it’s difficult to plan when you don’t know exactly when things will improve, such an excuse is just that, an excuse.

Scenario planning, or a what-if analysis, prepares you to handle the turnaround no matter when it occurs.

As a recruiting manager, ask yourself — before one of your senior executives asks you first: keep reading…

Past talent initiatives have generally not aimed at people, but at improving efficiency, managing work flows, and ensuring quality. Now, service, innovation, and relationships are seen as the enablers of increased profit as the spotlight moves away from manufacturing and production.

HR has the opportunity to shine or be replaced by some other function as it is asked to ensure the availability of and quality of talent. Recruiters are central to that effort and many changes are underfoot.

keep reading…

by Dr. John Sullivan & Master Burnett

For many in corporate staffing, contingent labor management is an unpleasant activity often relegated to the lowest-cost outsourced service provider the organization could find, mainly because no one internally wanted to deal with it.

The work is largely considered mundane, process-oriented, and as a necessary overhead cost that provides little or no value.

If you work now or have worked in an organization that views contingent labor management this way, you work or have worked in an organization that has no clue about the future of strategic talent management!

Contingent Labor Taking Over?

keep reading…

Let me apologize upfront for this “rant” on HR’s failure regarding workforce planning, but I can’t think of another time where human resources as a profession appeared to be floundering to the point where it’s embarrassing itself.

All you have to do is read the paper on a regular basis to see that many firms and their respective HR departments are struggling to find ways to reduce labor costs. Rather than implementing sound and well-established workforce-reduction plans, HR and talent managers appear to be making it up as they go, all in an attempt to avoid layoffs.

More often than not, they are utilizing ineffective and often damaging approaches like furloughs, pay cuts, and voluntary buyouts. After years of clamoring to get a seat at the table, many HR departments are demonstrating why they shouldn’t have a seat; they struggle to deal with a predictable and reoccurring problem, economic downturns, and the related need to dramatically cut labor costs.

At least to me, the lack of a long-established plan of action at most firms is an unnecessary embarrassment when it should be a significant opportunity to stand and deliver.

Déjà vu All Over Again

The lame reaction by HR departments around the world wouldn’t be nearly as embarrassing if it weren’t for the cyclical nature of the economy and the fact that organizations have faced downturns every few years since the emergence of civilization, most recently in 2001 and 1994.

keep reading…

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.

keep reading…

“Talent Pools.”

“Talent Pipelines.”

“Talent Networks.”

All of these buzzwords describe the same thing — the idea of building a community of individuals whose skills you will need before there is an immediate opening for them. The idea is to strengthen the bonds between these people and the organization so that when the need arises, it’s a simple matter of picking up the phone.

In theory, of course.

In practice, I’ve seen too many software solutions aimed at creating these “communities” turn out to be little more than databases with candidate names and contact information. I’ve seen too many companies fall in love with the idea (which is a really good one), but not put in them time necessary to implement them in a way that realized the concept’s potential.

This Tuesday, I attended a NY Recruiting & HR Network Meetup and had the pleasure of hearing Linda Paul, the Director of Team Development at Meetup talk about her work. keep reading…

In today’s tumultuous economy, companies have been forced to make some devastating workforce decisions. In an effort to prepare for the future, best-practice companies are taking a long-term strategic approach to attracting and retaining their employees. Makes sense, doesn’t it? Given the number of massive layoffs, companies are looking to restructure their organization, streamline business operations, forecast staffing needs, and above all else, reduce costs. As a result, workforce planning is no longer a fad; it is a necessity. (Bersin & Associates is conducting a survey on this topic and we would love your participation. In return, we will provide you with an executive summary of the findings.)

Companies such as T-Mobile and McKesson are stepping up to the plate by establishing a formal workforce planning process with a designated leader in order to achieve results. So, what exactly is workforce planning? How can it help organizations achieve these goals? And why should you care?

keep reading…

Hiring will start to recover in Q2, 2009, and now is the time to rebuild your recruiting team and massively upgrade your sourcing and hiring processes.

If you’re still considering cutbacks in your recruiting staff, think again. Recruiting top people is a repeatable sales process that’s fundamentally different than hiring average people. Instead of cutting back, replace the underperformers with people who can sell complex intangibles and services, those who can learn solution selling, and those who have demonstrated they can follow a realistic sales process including meeting quotas and being managed by the numbers.

Forget the Lone Rangers and those experienced recruiters who have not gotten significantly better over the past two years. Hiring top people is a business process, equivalent to selling your firm’s products and services. Now is the time to start implementing new training programs and changing your outdated pre-recession recruiting processes.

The amount of stimulus Obama, Bernanke, and Paulson/Geitner have already induced and are planning to induce into our economy system will jumpstart the recovery faster than can be imagined. So get ready to rumble. The best people are now sitting on the sidelines waiting for some reason to think about the future, rather than holding onto the past. (Take our annual recruiting challenges survey if you want some instant insight on what’s happening.)

Instead of minor changes and improvements, I’m going to suggest a wholesale rebuilding of your recruiting department is in order. This will give you a chance to hire the best people as soon as there is evidence the economy is changing direction. So starting with a fresh clean slate, here are three things you should be doing right now to get ready for the upcoming hiring recovery.

keep reading…

Part one of this series talked about the increasing importance of succession planning and development of talent during tough economic times.

It defined succession planning and why recruiters can and should play a role in a modern, world-class succession planning program. Part one also concluded by listing a series of metrics to evaluate existing programs based on their usage and design.

In part two, the focus will shift away from discussing what makes a great program to covering metrics that demonstrate what a great program accomplishes.

Part B: Plan Output or Success Measures

Group 3 – Output measures of plan success

The best plans have goals (and measures) that cover each of these areas:

1. Percentage of all management positions filled by internal candidates (this is the broadest measure of development success because it covers all management and leadership positions). A high rate of internal placement (vs. external hires) can be considered as an indication that development efforts have been successful.
2. The success rate of external hires over internal moves for plan jobs. Good development should result in a higher success rate (performance and retention) for internal moves.
3. Percentage of interviewees for plan positions whose positions are designated as ideal jobs for stretch assignments. Ideally, 100% of the interviewees for open plan positions will be “on” the succession plan.
4. Percentage of actual movers on the plan, where “movers” are the individuals who were actually transferred to or promoted into any designated plan position. Ideally, 100% of those actually selected from the interviews will come from the plan.
5. Percentage of movers without the most tenure in the job. Natural movement generally means the candidate with the most tenure will receive the nod. Effective succession planning periodically selects a “not so obvious” candidate from those being interviewed.
6. Percentage of movers from another department/business unit (again, “natural” movement generally means most positions are filled from within a department).
7. Percentage of movers who jumped a level (natural movement generally means promoting individuals “up” one level). Successful succession planning occasionally promotes individuals more than one level up.
8. Percentage of “on plan” movers who get promoted again (if a promoted individual is promoted again within three years, that can be considered as an indication that the first promotion was successful).
9. Percentage of movers placed in their targeted business cycle. Innovators are placed in departments or business units that require innovation (i.e., start up business units). On the other end of a business cycle, efficiency experts are placed in cost-cutting or commodity business units, where their skills are a better fit to the business cycle that the unit is in.
10. Percentage of job openings predicted accurately (successful plans prepare the individuals for movement at a designated time. Plans that successfully forecast openings within six months of their “projected time” are more effective than those that prepare individuals well before or way after they are needed).
11. Percentage of jobs with a defined back-fill person for sudden openings. In some plans, having “backfill” replacements are considered to be a separate plan element. Effective plans have pre-identified qualified and tested individuals that can immediately fill a sudden “unplanned” opening, without a loss in productivity.

keep reading…

When it comes to adding capability or additional capacity to a team, department, or organization, managers have also had to make a rather basic choice…either build the talent internally through training or buy it via recruiting.

Most firms strike a balance between buying and growing, although little if any strategic planning guides their decision. However, during tight economic times when recruiting budgets are severely restricted or even frozen, the emphasis almost always shifts dramatically toward “growing talent.”

If you are a recruiter or recruiting manager and you want to increase your impact on the business, a downturn is a signal that you should begin to focus on succession planning.

Why?

Tight economic times do not change the management demands for most organizations; in fact, decisions made during such periods will have a dramatic effect on how organizations can recover when the economy turns. So ensuring that the organization doesn’t have any critical holes in their bench for both leadership and mission-critical roles is a vital concern.

It is not uncommon for every employee to be asked to “do a little more” during hard times, which makes this a great time to develop talent using on-the-job projects. By speeding up “internal movement” and leveraging stretch assignments, managers can ensure that the right leadership and mission-critical talent is developed and ready to assume key roles that either open up as a result of turnover, retirement, or business growth.

If you see a slowdown coming in hiring volume, now’s the time to shift your focus toward succession planning.

What is Succession Planning?

Organizations use succession planning to help mitigate the risk of a vacancy occurring in key management and leadership roles that could impact the organization’s ability to perform.

In more strategic organizations, the scope of succession planning is expanded to include high-impact and mission-critical roles throughout the organization.

The activity looks at talent within (and in a few rare cases outside the organization) that can be developed to step into key roles on a timeline consistent with an anticipated vacancy. In essence, it looks to develop key players who can sit on the bench until needed. Positions with two or more possible replacements in development are considered to have a strong “bench strength,” while those with only one or none have little or no bench strength.

Why Tap Recruiters for Succession Planning?

While development for roles covered by the succession plan can include traditional training, more and more organizations are adopting a development approach that relies heavily on coordinating the acquisition of new skills or capabilities via rotations through roles that enable on-the-job learning and mastery of those key skills.

As product lifecycles have gotten shorter, so too has the timeframe with which organizations can develop talent. A few years ago, a manager in development may have had to sit in a role for 48 months in order to experience a full product cycle, but today that experience may only require a 10-14 month stint.

Given the changes in workforce demographics, global competition, mergers and acquisition volume, and technology, the act of developing through rapid redeployment has become a profoundly popular topic among senior leaders.

keep reading…

Imagine a manufacturing plant for a moment. While it produces thousands of widgets every week, no one knows what the various machines actually do, nor does anyone know where the raw materials are located, how much of them there is, or of what quality they are. Yes, it would be unimaginable, and a scenario that would lead to almost certain bankruptcy.

Yet, if you are like most of us, you probably have a sketchy picture of your employee population. I would bet that no one could tell me the exact headcount, nor could they tell me much about the skills and competencies of your workers except in general terms.

I believe that because of this inaccurate and vague picture of the workforce, American firms are caught in a vicious cycle that seems almost impossible to break. We hire like madmen when times are good, and dump thousands into the labor market when times are bad. This is an unsustainable cycle that leads to disgruntled workers, lower profits, and cynical candidates.

If we can plan and fine-tune our factory production cycles with precision, we should be able to do this with people — at least better than we do now.

An answer, however, may be forming.

keep reading…

When the economic markets look grim, hiring is at a standstill, and budgets are frozen, perspective is what is important. As some have said, “When things are good, they are never as good as they seem. And when things are bad, they are never as bad as they seem.”

We should all use the pause in the hectic pace of the past few years to begin and frame the future we want when we emerge. And we will emerge. I am not sure when, of course, but within a few years we will be back at the global hiring process with renewed vigor and increased challenges.

The cry we all heard over the past five years has been that there was no time to plan, think, experiment, or implement new methods. Most of us used the methods we were comfortable with but just worked harder, longer, and faster than before. This is the opportunity to figure out how to do things differently.

Be Strategically Bold; Tactically Careful

The first step in dealing with the current situation is to sit down and plan out a 3-5 year strategic plan for the future of your recruiting function. Envision a new tomorrow where you can use the technology, processes, and learnings that have emerged over the past decade. Some of the technologies and tools include such things as social networks, blogs, wikis, and candidate relationship management tools.

The processes that have shown promise include less-restrictive internal mobility practices, real time candidate assessment, virtual job fairs and other virtual recruiting techniques, as well as more authentic candidate engagement using online communication tools.

This strategic planning process should be formal, should involve your team and other employees as well as outside people, if that is acceptable in your organization, and should be designed to force yourself and others to think outside the usual assumptions about talent and recruiting. If you have any budget, it would be wise to engage a facilitator who is experienced in this kind of activity. They can make the process robust and much more valuable.

By formulating strategies that use these tools and practices, you can emerge from our current morass with a roadmap for quickly trumping your competition.

At the same time, you need to act right now with fiscal caution and show your management that you are a responsible manager.

keep reading…