RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

Last month Taleo published an interesting paper on talent intelligence. The paper uncovered valuable insights on the age old challenge for HR; providing meaningful intelligence and business insight. Below is a snapshot of the key findings (courtesy of onrec )

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What does Global really mean and can this really be achieved through RPO? I asked myself this whilst on a 747 between San Francisco and London – having travelled via Hong Kong, India and South Korea during the seven days prior to this. Two days ago I was with the EVP HR for one of our Global customers who said that their transformation objective for doing a Global RPO with Ochre House was to truly Globalise his HR function. This got me thinking… is Global RPO there to support the hires for Companies in many countries across Americas, EMEA & APAC or could it be utilised to create real transformational change within businesses. 

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Since Q4 2009 we have seen a huge surge in activity around Resourcing functions.  The two key challenges that kept coming up are: A need to increase capability and globalisation.  

The first is not hard to figure out why as many business needed to increase capability where perhaps divestment had been the order of the previous 2 years.  There has certainly been much greater interest in “Outsourcing” resourcing but perhaps not for the obvious reason of increased flexibility (of cost base) and reduced overall costs.  The key driver we are seeing is that businesses are seriously concerned about being able to compete for, win and retain the best talent in the market place.  They realise that resourcing is becoming more and more complex with a need for good, flexible resource planning to try to deliver against often ever-changing needs of the businesses, coupled with high levels of engagement and innovation in the attraction and selection processes in order to bring the best talent in.   If they can’t deliver these then they may well be left constantly on the back foot and with little chance of delivering what the business demands.

The other key driver has been globalisation with larger businesses wanting to increase economies of scale whilst maximising cross-border mobility for internal talent.  The big challenge in Europe has been how to create efficiencies in such a diverse region, whilst delivering leading-edge service locally to candidate community, hiring managers and HR alike.  Europe really is the antithesis of the homogenised market place and therefore requires wide spread local knowledge and engagement, which often creates cost challenges.  There is no one way that works best as each company culture is unique, and we are fortunate to have spoken to many organisations who do things quite differently,  which makes for very rich debate!

At Ochre House we are running 2 workshops in the next 2 months to address these topics http://www.ochrehouse.com/HR-Network-Knowledge-Centre/Event-Schedule-81.  Please let us know if these are challenges you are facing, and if you would like to add to the debate.

I came across a blog post on Harvard Business Review the other day which spurred me into writing a piece on leadership succession.

An “identified patient“ is a psychological term referring to a family member — often a child or a teenager — who gets scapegoated for behaviour that is actually just a predictable response to dealing with an unhealthy family. In this sense, Tony Hayward is BP’s identified patient.

BP is a great example of an organisation in the grips of a leadership crisis because it has suddenly found itself with an “Identified patient”. Whether this is because of leadership failure or because the US administration “wants some blood” is a point for debate. However, it is clear that few organisations are immune from this potential risk. This therefore poses some interesting questions for those in charge of planning succession.

Typically, leadership succession processes are designed to fulfil three objectives:

Build a “talent pipeline” that is full of the capabilities required in the future organisation
       – Plan for future leaders in specific roles
       – Be ready for a sudden change in plan

It’s this final objective that organisations are frequently poorly prepared for. Whilst BP is one example, the Saga at ITV  last year just underlines the point.

My observation is that whilst strategic leadership planning seems to happen relatively smoothly, scenario planning for shorter term changes tends to be overlooked. So a question for you all? If you had an unidentified patient in your organisation, would you have an answer?

Gender diversity, especially in the Financial Services sector, has rapidly emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing British business today. If the current rate of women entering the board room was maintained it wouldn’t be for another 65 years that there was even parity in numbers. Simply put by McKinsey recently in published research: Organisations with women in top management outperform those without. There are a plethora of other reasons too, why a lack of women is bad for business and in turn for the British economy, not least of which are competitive advantage and sustainability. Britain is, after all, completely reliant on our financial services sector in the global economy, and that is unlikely to change much to a meaningful degree, despite the backlash over the credit crunch and perhaps imminent legislation regarding banks.
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Why are some recruitment agencies still picking fights with clients and RPO providers and bemoaning their shrinking “slice of the pie”, when the whole resourcing world is changing around them and they risk missing out completely?  There is of course a very valuable role for the best recruitment agencies to play and as an attraction channel for external talent, it will remain key.  Those agencies that focus on their candidates and clients’ needs and provide great service, will of course continue to thrive. Read full post

Talent Management has now become a trigger for getting HR taken seriously in the business and for making leaders sit up and pay attention. When we say it we feel a bit more strategic and everyone nods sagely.
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Our Annual Symposium took place at Wentworth last week to explore more deeply the subject “A Talent Centric Organisation”. We were delighted to have secured our strongest speaker line-up to date, with Ian Ruddy (O2), Prof Chris Roebuck (Cass Business School), Kate Rider and Michael Maynard (Maynard Lee), Stella Estevez (National Grid) and with Terry Lockhart (Consultant) returning after such positive feedback on his talk at last year’s event.
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Talent has traditionally been viewed as the few at the top of the organisation, but increasingly organisations are taking a more holistic view. In this article I discussed how organisations are investing in the ‘vital many’ rather than the ‘chosen few’. Why?
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In an in-depth report published last week by Deloitte we can see a stark presentation of some of the very real challenges that face businesses globally with regard to their talent.  At this particular stage of the economic cycle organisations are more vulnerable than ever and the level of competition for talent and future talent means businesses cannot afford not to act.    
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