RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

In the last few months, Lord Davies’ report on businesses addressing gender issue bias in the boardroom has had a high media profile, in many different ways and with very many different commentaries! It has galvanised, quite rightly, a number of organisations into making a renewed commitment to aim for 20% – 25% female representation at board level by 2013.
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Einstein said ‘insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. This seems to ring true when we talk about the so called ‘war for talent’. This is an often quoted and misused expression describing the challenge for businesses to recruit, retain and develop the relevant talent to deliver sustainable growth.
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As most of you know Ochre House hosted its annual HR Leaders conference last month, with a focus on re-defining business value through a talent centric approach. And the speakers certainly got me thinking.

It appears that the West is slowly losing its economic power as potential moves to new powerhouses in the BRIC countries and Goldman Sachs’ ‘Next 11’ and one of the effects of this is increasing pressure on HR to deliver new, more effective talent strategies. But according to one of the speakers at the conference, the industry will only succeed if it can learn to master an organisations changing complexity and speak the ‘language of business.’ 

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Planning, forecasting, workforce analysis, headcount prediction, manpower planning and plenty more. Even the plethora of expressions illustrates the uncertainty around whether people needs can be forecast and how accurate this can be – never mind whether that can be used to make recruitment more effective.
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Quarter 4 tends to be the time of year when organisations begin their business review process, reflecting on the past year and brainstorming their strategies for the future. For those relatively rare players that have them in place, they’ll also be reviewing their 3-5 year plans and building the roadmap to achieve them. However far ahead a company is trying to reach they’ll need to be considering goals and objectives, and possibly more importantly, the talent that will be required to achieve them.
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When the Rugby World Cup kicks off this Friday, the All Blacks are once again odds-on favourites to win (by some margin). It is widely accepted that they possess the most talented individuals globally, and have done so for at least the past 25 years. They have the leading brand, the most attractive product and indeed the most passionate of followers. If you were to pick a world team at any time during the past quarter century, it is likely that they would provide 12 of the 15 players. So why have they not won the World Cup since the inaugural event in 1987?
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Many businesses make the mistake of recruiting too quickly. Of course nobody would deny that efficiency in hiring is often positive – but when organisations prioritise the speed and cost of hiring over quality, then problems can arise.
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You may remember in June 2007 Gordon Brown announced that his was to be a “government of all the talents”. A bold statement indeed, and one that left me feeling a little aggrieved that under Blair we must have only had “some of the talents” or even worse, perhaps “none of the talents”?! Brown was certainly excited to be in charge, and obviously felt that his team selection was superior to that of his successor – he had removed half of Blair’s team and moved most of the others to new roles, but critically, was still drawing on the same rather tired talent pool.
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Attending one of Ochre House’s HR Network workshops recently got me thinking anew about how we’re going to meet the challenge posed by the fact that talent is the number one goal on CEO agendas today. I hope that sharing my thoughts with you will stimulate your thinking too.
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On the back burner for the last few years whilst many organisations have undergone cost cutting exercises, the high potential (HiPo) programme is making a come back as business leaders have recognised that effective talent management and development is the key to business growth and sustainable competitive advantage.
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