ERE.net

Does your organization have a succession program in place? Too many organizations and small businesses default to the practice of reactionary assignment of a successor amid a now-glaringly-vacant position, or embark on a rushed external hire that often ends up as a high cost disappointment from a ”hiring misfire.” The consequences are not only expensive but are also a missed opportunity due to lack of focus and the inability to support fast growth.

And this is the challenge for recruiters: urgent hires, and the inability to explain the succession process (i.e. growth potential) to candidates, as well as to current employees who are looking to build their career. Recruiters can have an important role in helping leadership address the issue of succession readiness.

A succession strategy is about having an identified plan to fill key positions within your organization. A succession program is the implemented process of identifying, developing, and transitioning potential successors for the company’s present and future key roles, aligned with the talent and ambition of its current employees and talent network.

A common error that we see in succession planning is to target only the key executive roles (CEO, COO, CFO). This is a significant risk unless you are a micro business. For example, if you are in the construction or transportation industry, a logistics manager may be critical for the success of your business. Having a vacancy in this position could quickly result in a decrease in service and an increase in customer complaints, and possibly a decrease in customer retention.

This is why critical positions across the business need to be identified and replacement processes planned.

In our work with companies we hear some common arguments and justifications. We repeatedly see that the president or key executive doesn’t believe there is an immediate need for a succession plan. Their stated arguments are, “we’re too small,” “we’re too new,” “we already have good people in place,” or “I’m not going anywhere soon!”

In an unlikely static environment where no one leaves, no one gets ill (including the owner, president, or senior managers), growth isn’t that important, and performance is exceptional — these arguments hold true. But, we don’t live in a static business environment. People do leave, they do get sick, the executives need to focus on growing the business verses operating it, the employees are not all good performers, and some roles are hard to fill!

There is also a tendency to hold on to marginal performers because there is no clear plan on how to replace them. The impact: the business suffers, the executives suffer, employee morale and productivity decreases, the customers become less than satisfied with their service, and new candidates are not attracted to your company.

When organizations do not have a succession program in place, consequences include: keep reading…

If you are among the many strategic leaders frustrated with your inability to anticipate and handle the volatility and the speed of change in the talent management environment, you should take a few minutes to understand VUCA. VUCA best describes the volatile and chaotic business, economic, and physical environment that we all now face. Unless you have had your head in the sand, you must have noticed the chaotic business and economic conditions under which we currently operate. In fact, the last decade was so chaotic that in its cover story, Time magazine labeled it “the decade from hell.”

Many in talent management have been hoping that this chaos is a short-term phenomenon, but it is a permanent condition that we must all learn how to manage under.

Because they were designed for more predictable times, almost all current HR, talent management, and workforce planning processes fail to perform in this chaotic environment. In a VUCA environment, there are more changes, a faster rate of change, and the size of the changes are so impactful that they must be labeled as “disruptive.” So the question for talent leadership becomes, “how do you effectively hire, develop, place, and retain individuals and leaders in the volatile environment where literally everything changes in months rather than years?” keep reading…

Of late I’ve been making the contention that the strategies and tactics used to recruit active candidates is fundamentally different than the ones used for passive candidates. Until this foundational difference is resolved, companies will never be able to hire enough top talent to meet their needs, unless they have a big employer brand to hide their process inefficiencies.

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

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

For years, being secretive has been the status quo in succession planning and leadership development, and few argued against the standard practice of keeping the names of high-performers secret. According to Towers Perrin, “72 % of companies do not tell employees they have been labeled as high potentials,” which means that only 28% do. While the number of organizations that do share is growing due in large part to demands from the workforce for greater transparency, internal debates on this issue continue to be extremely difficult and controversial.

Many are cynical about transparency in people-planning processes because there are numerous real and imagined consequences associated with revealing the names of the chosen few. Regardless of where you sit personally on this subject, realize that the impact of both positive and negative consequences can often be negated with poor/great approaches to the practice. Doing anything exceptionally well requires foresight and planning, something I hope this list helps you accomplish. keep reading…

Bersin & Associates’ Senior Analyst Barb Arth presents findings of 2011 research on high-impact leadership development. The research shows that organizations with high-impact Leadership Development strategies are developing a different breed of leaders, and that they generate 7X greater business impact (business + talent results).

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

The financial markets are abuzz today over a Wall Street Journal survey that says economists now give the U.S. economy a 1-in-3 chance of falling into recession in the next 12 months.

According to the Journal, the odds are the highest since the start of the recovery and rose 4 percentage points since the August survey. In addition, the economists in the survey doubt that anything the Federal Reserve will do during its meeting next week will make a difference.

The Journal‘s survey follows a similar Reuters poll earlier this week in which a consensus of economists put the likelihood of recession at 31 percent. A similar survey in August put the chance at 25 percent. keep reading…

There is overwhelming agreement among executives that succession planning is critical for business continuity. But only one-third of companies have a plan in place – and that’s for the CEO level. The numbers are worse for upper and middle management and almost non-existent for other positions. An even more compelling story is that for those companies with plans more than four in ten employees rate their companies’ talent efforts as “fair” or “poor.”

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

Paul Basile, CEO of Matchpoint Careers, Inc and a veteran business leader and H.R. specialist, will share insights, examples and the validated science that offers practical solutions to today’s recruitment dilemmas.

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

Following the release of the June unemployment figures, House Speaker John Boehner released a statement that began with: “The American people are still asking the question: where are the jobs?”

Boehner is not alone. A lot of people of all political, economic, and social persuasions seem to be asking the same question. But because many of us have been exhorting for years that such a scenario was inevitable, the current job crisis should be no surprise. More importantly, it should be more than obvious that strategies that worked in the past would not work in the future. As Peter Drucker once said, “the greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

A new report released by McKinsey Global Institute seems to confirm that political rhetoric and populist driven strategies won’t be enough to see the United States return to full employment before 2020.

The report includes quite a few compelling statistics that I hadn’t seen before, at least not in these terms: keep reading…

On this week’s webinar we discussed the increasing trend of fake work and how it is costing organizations time and money. We were joined by Dr. Brent D. Peterson and Gaylan W. Nielson and took a look at what constitutes fake work, how to avoid it, and how to make sure all of your efforts are aligned with your company’s overall goals.

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

In the November Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, in an article titled “Talent Acquisition as a Tool of Succession Management,” I discuss talent acquisition in the context of succession management programs. I propose that our recruiting leaders are not involved enough in succession planning and the execution of those plans. You’ll get more detail in the Journal, but to summarize: Talent managers and the executive echelon can make much more use of their internal recruiting capability than they currently do. Of course, it wouldn’t be a replacement strategy but simply a way to enhance and augment corporate succession management.

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

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

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

Define “Best of Breed.” That’s rhetorical, but think about it because it illustrates a point about the direction of HR software that was part of the “Great Technology Debate” at HR Tech this morning.

It wasn’t among the questions posed to debaters Jason Averbrook, CEO at Knowledge Infusion, and Gartner’s Managing VP Jim Holincheck, though it lurked behind their generally affable agreement on most of the talent management issues that arose during their time on stage.

For instance, when show co-chair and debate moderator Bill Kutik asked about the meaning of strategic human capital management, and, later, about just what workforce planning is, there wasn’t much debate.

The former is the linkage of employees, their skills, training, performance, management, compensation, and deployment directly to the business goals and needs of the enterprise. As Holincheck said, it is “more than talent management,” and as both agreed, it is well more than the mere automation of HR functions.

Workforce planning was a little more complicated. keep reading…

This week we were joined by Goerge Bradt of PrimeGenesis to discuss long term succession planning initiatives. Learn how to create a strategy that will prepare your employees to smoothly transition from role to role, from the onboarding process all the way to leadership positions.

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

Most organizations do a weak job at succession planning, but as recent events highlight, Hewlett-Packard deserves some sort of award for completely blowing it! While the “entire story” behind the departure of CEO Mark Hurd has yet to be uncovered, it is clear the issues leading up to it were a complete surprise to the board and that no succession plan is in place. Within five days of Hurd’s separation, HP had lost nearly $11 billion in market value and become the corporate punching bag for reacting stupidly.

Lots of factors can take down a CEO unexpectedly, and major corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to have a plan in place. While BP won’t be on anyone’s list for excellence in corporate management, even it had a well-groomed and prepared successor in place for Tony Hayward. Based on my experience and observations over the years, I’ve fashioned the following checklist to assess the success/failure of changes in senior leadership and the subsequent checklist to assess the design of succession planning.

Assessing a CEO’s Release and Replacement

1. Was a succession plan followed? Organizations may need to replace a CEO suddenly for a variety of reasons including illness (Apple), lack of confidence (GM), arrest (Stanford Financial) and accidents (Chevron); it is simply reckless not to have a succession plan in place. HP has a well-documented recent history of failing to prepare for succession, most notably the painful and public departure of CEO Carly Fiorina. keep reading…

They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. --Andy Warhol

It is time to change the recruiting game. Someone has to reinvent a process that is aged, inefficient, and marginally successful in procuring high-performing employees.

Over the past 20 years recruiters have been given magical tools starting with applicant tracking systems, then the Internet, job boards, recruiting websites, and now an array of social media tools. Yet, it is a sad fact that a single recruiter can deal with no more open positions than he could two decades ago, still feels overworked, and is deluged with unqualified candidates.

It is time to challenge our assumptions and reinvent the entire recruiting process. Let’s start by asking dumb questions: why does recruiting exist as a function? Is it to hire people? Surely given our technology, hiring managers could be trained to screen and select the people they need. Is it to screen candidates, schedule interviews? All can be automated. Is it to sell the organization to the candidate? That often happens prior to any recruiter contact through the products and services you offer, through fellow employees, through brand and reputation, and through your location. What the recruiter adds to this is useful, but probably minimal.

So, then, how can recruiters add value? keep reading…

Strategic workforce planning is a relatively new concept and practice for most organizations. Many firms have a simplified form of workforce planning in place which is focused on replacement of people in current positions and functions. It is a rare experience to find an organization that has thought through its future needs and balanced those needs with a mix of both hiring — internal and external — along with development.

Why the Need

Growth and recession are hard to predict. Neither are typically gradual or linear. There may be a sudden need to add dozens or hundreds of employees in new business areas or in different parts of the world. Or, there may be a sudden shift in products that makes many employees redundant. Economies can suddenly slow and business can evaporate quickly. Replacement planning does not deal well with any of these scenarios. And this is why typical workforce planning is looked on with scorn by many human resource professionals as well as business managers. keep reading…

There are three reasons to do a succession plan, and identifying a replacement for the CEO and select top executives is only part of one of these reasons. The three reasons are:

• Replacement for key employees
• To support anticipated growth
• To address and deal with talent shortages

Unfortunately, however, succession planning is too often considered an exercise, a means to an end, a human resources task to be checked off and moved into the done pile. This is absolutely the wrong way to think about succession planning. keep reading…

Earlier this month The Conference Board released the results of one of its periodic surveys saying less than half of American workers are happy at their job.

Out of 2,900 respondents to the survey, only 45 percent reported being satisfied with their job. In 1987, when the question was first asked, 61 percent reported being satisfied.

By now, the numbers may have changed. The survey was conducted last summer when huge monthly job losses were being reported and the unemployment rate was climbing. I should also point out that the survey is not without its challengers and that the results are at odds with other polls, notably the Gallup and University of Chicago, which found workers much more satisfied with their work.

Still, The Conference Board survey shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Its other surveys, including the much-watched Consumer Confidence Index, supports the suspicion that many of you have of a general worker malaise. A Salary.com survey released a year ago reported similar, though somewhat less dramatic, results. 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…