Generator Group - Talent Management and Recruiting

Performance Prediction: The future of search and selection

By Jeremy Barnaby

As the sun begins to set on the first decade of the new millennium I have been reflecting on how third party staffing vendors need to change to be more relevant in a world where everybody is connected. This year I organized and hosted a fire side chat with the Software Association of Oregon (SAO) Human Capital special interest group on how social and professional networking will evolve the search world yet again, perhaps as much as the internet did in the 90’s. Is the search business going to vanish with the advent of web 4.0 (whatever that will be) technologies? I don’t think so, they will be tools that may have significant impact on the efficiency in which we find people but the discipline it takes to solicit interest from someone to consider a position we are representing is not in jeopardy. In fact if all the concerns about the pending labor shortage come true then we will need even more tools to help us meet the demand. So, if the demand for services is high in the foreseeable future why change at all?

I think this question is the crux of why external search vendors are stagnant and generally continue to flounder in raising the bar with the profession. The future will demand that workforce leaders and HR professionals need to be far better predictors of successful hires. If a great challenge of your business is getting enough people then certainly an ability to better predict before the hire that an employee has a significant potential of being a top performer amongst his/her peers becomes even more paramount. Does the organization we support actually conduct a predictive selection process? If so how predictive? Do your interviews have ranked answers to your questions, and are they truly structured? If not, then your predictability could have just dropped from 55% to 25%. Does your search and selection vendor partner even know what “multi-hurdle” selection is? Is it hard to imagine a time when you can call your external search and selection vendor and ask them how predictable there selection process is? At Generator we don’t think it should be. Would it help to know what percentage of the candidates a search and selection company helped place were top performers? Having been in that seat and had the responsibility to select vendors I would have loved to get that #, let alone talk to a vendor who even had the topic on their radar. Our goal in 2008 will be to implement and have that number readily available as well as reference able clients to back it up.

Managing Your Talent Ecosystem

By Roy Notowitz

A company’s “talent ecosystem” is not unlike an ecosystem in nature. A healthy ecosystem can maintain the right balance and sustain itself, but the cumulative effects of poor management can lead to cataclysmic events that are hard to reverse.  Creating an environment where industry superstars want to work and preventing the loss of top performing employees are important to the sustainability and growth of your business.  Here are some of the ways that you can tune into your talent ecosystem:

Sustainable Recruiting: How efficient and repeatable is your recruiting process?  Are you able to consistently fill positions with strong talent in a timely manner?  How would you rate the quality and volume of candidates generated for each of the key positions in your company? What are the typical recruiting challenges that your organization faces and what strategies is your company implementing to ensure long-term success?

Workforce Stability: Companies that have a healthy ecosystem look for ways to maintain business continuity by reducing turnover, avoiding team burnout, and maintaining positive morale can protecting organizational knowledge and generate greater return on their investment in employees.

Return on Recruiting Investment:  Calculating return on recruiting investment incorporates costs associated with recruiting, selection, on boarding, training, and assimilation of new talent. Analysis of the expenses as compared with recruiting output metrics such as: time to hire, quality of hire, cost per hire, longevity of hire, source effectiveness, and time to productivity can be helpful to see how well your recruiting function is performing.  Talent management professionals now have standard formulas for measuring Human Capital Return on Investment, Human Capital Value Added, and Quality of Hire. These metrics can provide your organization with real data to evaluate the true health of your talent ecosystem.

Workforce Optimization: After the hire is made, performance management, succession planning, learning, and knowledge management is a primary indicator on how well your company is leveraging existing talent.

Employment Experience:  The perception of your employment brand in the market plays a key you’re your ability to land industry superstars. However, attracting top hires means that the recruiting does not stop once the hire is made. The employment experience has to be true to the employment brand image.  Employees appreciate professional development, pay for performance, advancement opportunities, and flexibility.

As you can see, sustainable recruiting is only a portion of the equation. Attending to your holistic talent ecosystem can prevent your organization from experiencing the costly effects of significant brain drain while setting yourself up to take market share from your competition.

Competing for Talent Globally

By Roy Notowitz

I recently stumbled across a Chinese job board and it struck me that although 90% of the content was written in Chinese, there was enough English to figure out which jobs were applicable and potentially interesting to me. It got me thinking about the changing landscape of recruiting and how the web has really created an optimal platform for communicating to potential job candidates all over the globe. It is easy to imagine that applying for a job in Beijing could be as easy as applying for a job in San Francisco. It is also becoming more evident that as the global economy heats up, the perception of America’s employment brand will directly affect our ability to attract and retain top scientific and engineering talent. A recent survey conducted by the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC) found that 50% of US executives polled would consider relocating to China for the right opportunity and 35% would relocate to India and Russia. America as a nation of immigrants could become a nation of emigrants if countries like China, India, and Russia provide comparable educational opportunities and if they start recruiting their own citizens back. The good news is that America still invests the most in research and development which is a key ingredient in attracting innovative minds. If you are interested in checking out the job board that I found go to: http://www.meijob.com/.

Excutive Recruiting Search and Selection: Promoting Conveniently Located Mediocrity

By Jeff Johnson, PhD

Wikipedia aptly describes the Peter Principle concept as:  “a hierarchy [where] every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”.  Most would agree that the Peter Principle is still pervasive in today’s modern organizations. A good example of this is when the “high performing” individual contributor is promoted to management based primarily on their performance as an employee – rather than their leadership potential or management competence. This arguably comes from a persistent tendency for organizations to select managers based largely on convenience. It is often just more convenient to fill a management position with the good sales representative, the good technologist, or simply the long-time employee. What’s wrong with promoting that conveniently located person? There may be nothing wrong with that at all, as long as convenience is not the primary reason.

Let’s think how we make decisions in our personal lives. Do we go and buy a car from the nearest car lot because it’s convenient? If I did, I would be driving a mint 1990 Yugo. If we really want convenience, we might just invest in lottery tickets instead of the stock market since it is more convenient to buy them while getting groceries.

Sometimes doing what’s best for ourselves (and our organization), requires doing what’s not most convenient, or maybe even downright inconvenient. What is convenient in the short run may lead to much greater “inconveniences” over time. For example, promoting the less-than-competent manager may seem quick and easy, but the havoc and inconveniences resulting from that type of decision are usually more painful than the initial hassle of searching for the optimal (or at least better) candidate.

So, what does one do? Determine what a manager must be to succeed, and then look for what you want and need in that person, not just who is readily at hand. If you want a great manager, look for someone with management competencies rather than settle for the readily available technician who may possess great technical competencies. If you want a manager who is also a great leader, then assess leadership capabilities along with management competencies. In the end, you will get what you’re looking for – conveniently located mediocrity, or sought after greatness. Wikipedia leaves us with a warning for following the Peter Principle: “The end result for an organization as a whole is that the organization is prone to collapse when the number of incompetents among its ranks reaches a critical number, resulting in the inability of the organization to perform its functions.”

The extra effort is worth it, even if you ultimately determine that the person down the hall is the best person for the job after all.

About the author: Jeff Johnson has 11 years of experience in leadership and organizational development, including building leadership teams, creating performance management systems, facilitating group/team development, and leading talent management projects. As the principal partner and founder of LeadSmart, a leadership development consulting group Jeff has been instrumental in helping Generator Group to develop a talent management leadership competency model that will help our clients put more science behind hiring decisions. If you are interested in connecting with Jeff you can reach him at: jeffjohnsonphd@gmail.com