First thing first, we shall know what we want. It's not just a position title, or job description at best. What kind of specific qualities we are looking for to go into our workforce to translate into a business success. It is a highly skilled techies ready for a single contribution type of job ? or a generalist with consulting background at ease to speak with the language of business ? This is on top of specific disciplines being on hire - be it IT, Finance, Facility Engineer,..etc. Interesting enough, a famous study by McKinsey for The War for Talent, highlighted that most companies don't really know what they want. They must find out, and quickly, or their recruiting programs will be flawed before they even begin.
War for Talent
Talent management , emerged in 1990s and continues to be adopted, refers to the process of developing and integrating new workers, developing and keeping current workers and attracting highly skilled workers to work for your company. The War for Talent, based on a research study in 1998 about 77 companies from a variety of industries, remains relevance until today and is a good base reference. Even for companies where the dominant strategy is to spot talent early and train it within, the study suggests considering regularly hiring senior executives from outside. Is it a failure of internal development pipeline ? No, it suggests to view it as a way to accommodate rapid growth, refresh the gene pool, and calibrate the internal talent standard.
Better talent is worth fighting for. On recruitment process, most big companies still are in passive mode: run thru vacancy ads in newspapers, confidently expect that best talent outside would be attracted to appy to the big names. I doubt it work quite well. At the interview moments of having candidates of this type, I was always wondering if there were still many better talented people outside that would not give a damn to apply to a newspaper ads. I believe so and we are adressing it with our HR to reach beyond. Some companies are spotting great talent by constanttly looking around - competitiors, suppliers, customers.. and even the military!.
Rewarded Accountability
While HR is tasked to oversee broad spectrum of workforce and talent managment, the accountability shall be extended to line managers to develop, develop, and develop their people. Recruitment is the start of the talent management pipeline. We offten do it occassionally. It is very rare to see that bonus is tied in with managers' skill on managing people. Even ability to recruit talented new people goes unrewarded. Probably, we shall take lessons learned from the member-get-member marketing scheme. Some headhunters, to some extent, put it into practice to get people for their clients.
A book by William Poundstone, How Would You Move Mount Fuji ? , provides some insights on Microsoft's role in changing interview practice. The hiring focuses on the future tense, accepting rather than resisting the "job candidate as blank slate". Hire for what people can do rather than what they've done.
Future Investment, Worth Some Disruptions
So we ought to get well prepared for the prime time - dedicated time for recruitment interview. Moving along, building organization capability with structured people development. Putting good talent beyond his/her current domain and reach, as part of managed job assignments, could certainly be a very effective development. There is nothing worse than assuming a job that is in degradation of our experience and abilities.
On our sphere of influence, we tried to put job rotation, people movement into performance metrics. The implementtaion is still posing challenges to some leaders. Managers are most of the time still worried that moving people around is not worth the disruption. Well, we got to have a little pain to breed overall benefit for the whole organization success.
A little disruption that oscillate the organization to a new height of performance level into the future is worth investing.
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