Gautam Ghosh
Skills The Social Recruiter Needs to Build
One is typified by the Old Boys Club persona. These are typically the ones working on retained searches, placing CEOs, COOs and whatever are the other CXOs. I met one of them a couple of years ago and when he heard that I was working in the intersection of HR and Social raised a distasteful eyebrow and said “I don’t need social media. I am exclusive. Most of the leaders of India Inc. would give an arm to reach me.” They command usually high fees (to the tune of 33% of candidate’s salary – and take usually 11% before the search is commissioned, 11% when the shortlist is given and the remaining when the candidate is selected)
Then there are the third party recruiters working on contingent searches – trying to be the first one to push that CV that they have sourced, talked to the candidate (and sometimes not even that!) to the corporate recruiter before a rival does. Always yearning to reach the standard of the earlier described Recruiters on a retainer. They typically get lower commissions (8.33% in lean times to 12.5-20% in better times) and only when the search is complete.
The 7 trends to the Future of Talent Management
I was recently invited to be the guest editor of a HR magazine, People Matters, and worked on their cover story The Future of Talent Management.It was an interesting experience, and I discovered that magazine articles have their own needs and constraints compared to writing a blog post.
Here’s an excerpt. You can read the full article at the link below.
1. Predictive talent analytics
As more and more money is being spent in the areas of developing and acquiring talented people, organizations are no longer content with fuzzy ideas about their ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI). Forget return, some large organizations want to predict how people will behave before they spend their money on them. This is causing a few pioneering firms to look at data analytics and predictive analytics. Starbucks, Limited Brands, and Best Buy, can precisely identify the value of a 0.1 per cent increase in engagement among employees at a particular store. At Best Buy, for example, that value is more than $100,000 in the store’s annual operating income. In an HBR issue, Cognizant analyzed social media contributions on its internal social network, particularly internal blogs. It found that employees who contribute in the form of blogs were more engaged and satisfied than others, and performed about 10 per cent better, on an average.
An article in Businessweek magazine talked about an employee retention program developed by the software company SAS, which crunches data on employees who have quit in the past five years, detailing their skills, profiles, studies, and friendships. Then it uses this data to find current employees with similar patterns, and flagging them off as potential attrition risks. Another SAS program pinpoints the workers who are most likely to suffer accidents. The Wall Street Journal in May 2009 (iii) reported that Google was starting to analyze data from employee reviews, promotion, and pay histories in a mathematical formula to identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit. Google said that the algorithm had already identified employees who felt under-used, which is a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving the company.
This view is echoed by Sanjay Modi of Monster.com. “Technology will help organizations move from present analysis on what is happening, to futuristic analysis of what is going to happen. The more capable the organization is in predicting what is going to happen, the better are their chances to be competitive in the market”, he says.
Social Media at Work – A way to manage Talent?
Image via CrunchBaseThe folks at GD Goenka World Institute and the National HRD Network of India organized a Talent Acquisition, Engagement and Retention Conclave in Mumbai on 21st Jan 2011. The Corporate Resource Centre, GDGWI creating a resource handbook for the conclave participants and requested me to contribute a written interview for the same.
Here are the questions and my answers to them:
Q1. Like an email policy do you think it is important to formulate a social media
company policy as well?
Absolutely. Unlike email social communication on networks and communities are
transparent and open to all. People share their feelings, frustrations and joys with
their connections – and these can have implications for their employers. Progressive
organizations like Intel, IBM have put into place social media policies (see here for a
great list ) and Indian firms like Infosys are also starting to do the same
Q2.’ Facebook, twitter are a waste of time to Facebook, Twitter are critical to our
survival’, do you think there is a middle path?
Musings on the future of Work and Organizations
Debu Mishra has a great post on why Performance Management/ Appraisal doesn’t work. He raises some pertinent points, the critical one for me is how HR leaders keep changing and going by latest fads on performance management. Just because it worked in one organization doesn’t mean it’ll work in your organizations.
There are no best practices. They are contextual to the culture and climate of an organization.
However, the nature of work is itself changing. JP Rangaswami (one of the most incisive thinkers I have come across recently) blogged about how the “maker generation” will force organizations to think about work in new principles. Go read the full post, I can’t do justice to all the thoughts here.
So the future of work in the future knowledge-based organizations is all fuzzy. As I noted in my comment to JP’s post:
if these principles are really embraced and integrated – maybe there will not be any “corporation/ enterprise” at all.. just a “brand” and free agents willingly aligning with that brand – to services customers, suppliers (and other stakeholders)
Making Work Meaningful
Image by Larry Tomlinson via FlickrLots of people think that unless you are pursuing your passions you are wasting your life. However they never stop to explain that pursuing your passions is not enough to be successful. Pursuing your passions needs a lot of skills that being an entrepreneur calls for – like reframing skills, discovering or creating a market, and marketing and sales skills.
No wonder many of us don’t choose the freelance or entrepreneurial route. And in cases like mine, choose it, explore it, and head back to the corporate world, which for all its imperfections enables you to do one thing and do that well.
If that is the case, why are so many of us unhappy at work?
Well the reasons are as varied as there are employees, and depends on what we expect from our jobs. Is it the need for achievement or affiliation or power as McClelland postulated?
Personally I think every human being wants to be part of something larger than himself or herself. An organization should look at goals that excite even the most world weary cynic and say “I am part of something meaningful. Something larger. Something beautiful”
I think it was Umair Haque who wrote that things that excite human beings like meaning, sense, love, beauty and passion are deliberately stripped and removed from the modern corporate in the single minded pursuit of profit without “purpose and passion”
Innovation Lessons from Steve Jobs
However, when I came across this Forbes.com – Magazine Article on what makes Steve Jobs such an innovator – it reinforced my belied that that basic skill of an innovator is to see the same things as we see – but with new eyes.
Here’s an excerpt from the article.
Psychologists have worked tirelessly trying to figure out what makes innovators different. In one of the most thorough examinations of the subject, Harvard researchers interviewed 3,000 executives over six years, and they found that the No. 1 skill that separated innovators from noncreative professionals was “associating”–having an ability to successfully connect seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas from different fields. The three-year Harvard research project confirmed what Jobs had told a reporter 15 years earlier: “Creativity is just connecting things.”
CEOs in Asia and Succession Planning
A senior from XLRI, Indranil Roy gets quoted in this Economic Times article Why do corporates have a natural resistance to succession planning?
Meanwhile, as they expand their operations in Asia, MNCs are looking for a different kind of CEO. Indranil Roy, Korn/Ferry’s managing director, Asia-Pacific, leadership and talent consulting, calls then the ’2.0 CEOs’ as opposed to the ’1.0 CEOs’ that went before. “MNCs say they want CEOs who are very different from the ones they have. That’s because their businesses in Asia have moved from the outsourcing and cost arbitrage model to a talent and innovation model. The likelihood of finding such leaders is highest in India. But still, we estimate it’s only 8% of the basic qualified talent.”
While the Asia 1.0 CEO was required to replicate or customise existing strategy, the Asia 2.0 CEO will have to generate new growth in an unserved market. The old CEO worked with a culturally homogenous team, but the new CEO will have to build a diverse, international pool of talent with creative skills. “An Indian passport is no longer necessary to be a CEO in India. That was unthinkable when I was growing up,” says Roy.
What does Evidence Based HR mean
This is spelt out in the blog post Up a creek without a paddle?
They then inevitably want to question, and eventually dismantle, the crumbling edifice that is the typical HR framework of: -
Job evaluation and grading – plenty of evidence to show it is often a rigid and expensive way of managing rewards that does not produce the highest performance levels possible
Engagement surveys – they realise the theory behind the employee-customer profit chain is suspect and the links between engagement and performance are never as simple as it suggests
Competence frameworks – because, apart from the specious theory that produced this industry – in practice, quite frankly, anyone with any common sense always knew they were going to become a bureaucratic nightmare without any evidence of added value
HR and Business Strategy
Here’s the excerpt from the blog post:
One particular question asked “What do you consider to be the three biggest HR challenges being faced by your organization today?” At the top of that list was ensuring that employees remain engaged and productive, followed by retaining key talent, and developing leaders.
In my mind, the first “business of HR” response came in fourth: aligning people strategies to business objectives.
It reminded me of a conversation I had when running a marketing function. My manager would (rhetorically) ask me, “What should be marketing’s #1 metric?” The answer: revenue. Every other marketing metric and activity, from building brand awareness to identifying leads, is a contributor to the function’s overall goal: to generate revenue for the business.
In much the same way, HR’s biggest challenge should be helping the business design, deliver, and execute on its strategy, in order to achieve its goals. Every other challenge (hiring, retaining, engaging employees, etc) should flow from that.
Develop Corporate Storytellers
This is not a tactical decision – it is a fundamental shift in the way organizations see themselves and will impact both internal and external systems and process. HR needs to also transform then from a “policing” and “compliance monitoring” function to developing the new competencies required.
Here’s the excerpt from Steve’s article
The new law of digital relativity (e.g. the relationship between time and space) means the end of scarcity. This was the currency that, for years, powered marketing budgets, filled media coffers and drove the information economy. Now that scarcity is gone, however, we will need to adopt a new set of skills.
Enter the Transmedia Storyteller.
Employee Advocates for Employee Communications
One of the oft-ignored aspect of employee engagement is employee communication. Organizations just don’t treat it as priority. I asked this question on my facebook page – and three people have answered yes to the question I posed so far.
So why is that the case?
Primarily it is because employee communication is not thought of as a discipline by HR professionals as external communications is thought of by the Marketing professionals. Most HR communications are restricted to garishly colored emails with 20 size font letters. Or managers are expected to do the bulk of the communications to their supervisors – and we know how that goes.
The question needs to be rethought – and organizations need to look at their employees as an internal community they need to “converse with” and not to “talk/sell to”.
So here’s my free advice to organizations on how to better “communicate with employees”
- Listen. Give tools to your employees to make them heard. Use ideation platforms, question and answers, wikis, internal blogs for employees to connect with each other. Figure out what has their attention and time.
How Companies are using Talent Analytics
Interesting article in the HBR on how organizations are using analytics to use employee data to better performance. Here are some examples:
What’s driving this shift to analytics? Certainly, companies today want more from their talent. That’s why some are reinventing a whole range of people practices: Netflix has tossed aside traditional HR absence policies, and Best Buy’s corporate office eschews standard work schedules. Analytics takes the guesswork out of fresh management approaches. At the same time, voluminous “digital trails” of data from knowledge management systems and social networks are now available for analysis. Read the rest of this entry »
Thoughts on the future of Human Resources
Some years ago I was talking to a HR regional manager who works in the non-alcoholic beverage industry. He was bemoaning the fact that finding great sales people was becoming more and more difficult at the fronline level. It was tough to imagine that, as most sales organizations had been on an expansion spree. It seemed like he would have more of a talent pool to hire people from. He disagreed, saying “Sales folks who have worked in the consumer facing industry which is cyclical, is what I am looking for. These kinds of people are tough to find!”. Talk about specialization.
As the HR and Recruiting function evolves and complexity creeps in, HR professionals struggle to make sense of this new age, and though they welcome it , find themselves awfully short. The old assumptions hold true and yet, the contexts seem to have changed. The skills that they have built up over the last few decades as Personnel became HR , seem to have lost their potency.
HR will need to open up its silos and soak in skills from other functions, specially those skills of Sales and Marketing functions. This will be a natural corollary of viewing employees and senior management. This will also mean that to succeed Recruiters and other HR people will need to change their mindset.
Corporate Social Networking in India
- It’s not just a generational thing – sure the young have more comfort with such technologies – but it’s wrong to say that such tools are focused only for them
- The benefits of social networking is not just higher engagement – collaboration leads to business benefits – like reducing time to market and impacting productivity if used in a strategic way – and not just left to be “emergent”
An excerpt from the article:
Top tech firms are realising that keeping the new generation glued, they need changes beyond pure salaries, which is already considered hygiene by new recruits. Launched around two years ago by Cognizant, the C2 already has around 60,000 active users and the site records over six million page views every month.
Social Media Competencies Grid
My ex-colleague Gaurav Mishra has come up with a framework which he calls the social media competencies grid using which B Schools (and training groups within social media firms) can train people in social media skills.
You can see it here
