Given that moving diversity to the top of the succession planning agenda will require considerable investment, both financially and from a time point of view; companies will need to start thinking about how they can successfully and inclusively map talent both internally and with carefully selected external ‘target’ companies. Whilst some may feel that this particular activity is relatively low down on their list of priorities; particularly in a somewhat volatile market, it is bound to leap up the agenda when the attraction, development and retention of talent becomes a business critical imperative in the next 12-18 months.

At this point, it will be vital that companies take a holistic view of their strategy and consider a range of options including possibly implementing open/monthly/quarterly research fees to populate ‘benches’ with passive candidates who can be ‘kept warm’ on a regular basis and made ‘live’ as and when individual opportunities arise.

Want to know more about Succession Planning? Please join us for our webinar, ‘Planning for the future – linking succession planning with your external talent pool’.  To register please click here.

The logic of the market suggests that certain skills will always be scarce and the ‘war for talent’ is self perpetuating. So, rather than focus on the people and the market that may or may not supply those skills, why don’t we look at how efficient our internal processes really are rather than just add more resource. Continuous Improvement (CI)(lean, Six Sigma) has been embraced in manufacturing for some years, however, with a few notable examples such as GE, the service sector, seems reluctant or scared to employ these principles. Is this because somehow the service sector just needs more talented people to run broken processes? Is the service sector immune from improvement?

Six months ago I investigated how CI could help the recruitment process. I thought we understood time and cost per hire – quite an easy measurement to make in theory… I was comfortable to take the challenge. What a journey of discovery. Not only did I learn where some key challenges lay, I also realised that even a seemingly simple process such as recruitment can contain duplication, misunderstanding, and waste.  Why then do people wonder why it can take such a long time to achieve a result!

As a result many of our processes have been standardised, measured and this has led to a greater ability to challenge managers about what works – we know because we can measure it. So why shouldn’t we apply this to other disciplines, sales, marketing, and finance? Perhaps a CI approach might obviate the need to recruit?

The number one lesson learnt is that throwing more resource at bad processes only means the process gets worse. Just imagine more kids climbing on a broken tree branch – only one thing is likely to happen; there will be a broken tree, but more importantly some rather sad, possibly injured children. Does this happen in the working world…?

Was it the Head of Toyota who said, “ I employ average people running excellent processes”?

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.’ 

Gyan Nagpal, former head of talent in APAC for Deutsche Bank and now CEO of the consultancy, PeopleLENS, emphasised the fact that corporate boards are looking for greater involvement and depth of insight from HR, which means it is now more important than ever that the profession presents its business case in a more structured and robust manner.

Gyan cited some excellent examples of the need for HR strategies to be more flexible and responsive, the ‘market rush’ in the Asia Pacific region being just one. As many companies hastened to take advantage of the emerging opportunities in this area, they stumbled across a key flaw; few major businesses had a proactive strategy to develop their workforces in line with the necessary capital and technological investments.

In order to get the buy in and investment from the board in these instances, it is down to HR to communicate and plan talent investments in terms business-orientated minds will quickly and clearly understand. But how can they do this when there is a disconnect between the HR and corporate functions which has grown since the implementation of the Ulrich Model?

Nagpal used a medical metaphor to describe the solution; prescription without diagnosis could be as dangerous in HR as it is in medicine (also the subject of his book, ‘Talent Economics’, due to be published at the end of 2011). Put simply, this means that HR practitioners will need to analyse both the macro and micro factors that impact an organisation and its target markets in order to formulate tailored strategies in a more scientific way.

According to Nagpal, analysis must also forget the sceptical idea that there is a truly global solution. A ‘one size fits all’ approach is never likely to address the real issues when cultural and contextual influencers will constantly change. Instead what is needed is a flexible yet tailored approach which provides HR with a clear investment recipe for scarce corporate resources.

With this in place HR will be in a better place to achieve the long desired complete credibility with business leaders around the globe.

In one business I was once told that forecasting was impossible at a time of change – heads could be cut, stay the same or increase. A few basic questions later it was clear the decision points were around a specific time period and the scale of possible change easy to analyse – albeit there were three options. As a result the recruitment team was ready to scale up or down at that particular time.

Investing resource in intelligence gathering relationships seems a tough call. It’s usually expensive resource with apparently no juicy metrics like direct hiring. But in our experience it’s a sure fire thing – it inevitably means actual recruitment can be done with fewer people, with lower cost of acquisition, better candidate experience and more effective metrics.

Of course after linking recruitment and planning there’s the connection with internal talent… But’s that’s another story…

So how do organisations bring about alignment? Many try to achieve it during the P&L approval process when the senior leadership team reviews budgets and makes relevant amendments. Although this process can work, it can also leave line managers frustrated, as they do not understand the decisions being taken. So what’s the real solution?

Some companies have managed to build communication strategies to share their vision, ensuring employee engagement, driving the talent agenda and providing all employees with an understanding of their accountabilities. But these paragons of planning virtue are still the exception, rather than the rule. Perhaps the more realistic solution lies in building a bridge between finance and HR and convincing line management to make use of it. If they can be convinced of the need to treat headcount planning with the same degree of care and attention as financial planning a new degree of realism and robustness may be injected into the whole process to the benefit of all.

As Martin Johnson put it this week, winning the World Cup is not about possessing the most talent. And if you follow the thinking of Clive Woodward (England Manager when England won in 2003), it was less about talent and more about creating the working environment in which talent could be maximised, the pillars of which were shared vision, shared values, leadership, teamship and execution. And the success of that team was its ability to translate theory into practice, making the best of what was good talent but perhaps not the best talent.

And as an Englishman with South African parentage, I sincerely hope the All Blacks get that bit wrong again!

The answer for a number of in-house teams has been to introduce a values-based hiring model. This is built around the premise that employers need to establish what a good hire looks like and apply structured criteria in order to reveal those traits.

For example, this hiring model might assess an interviewee’s values and behavioural patterns. By measuring candidates against these factors, a company is more likely to find a good cultural fit.

However, ensuring quality of hire does not end at the recruitment stage. Careful talent management can also go a long way to preventing an unsuitable cultural fit. We consulted with Cranfield University and built our quality of hire research around the Kirkpatrick model.

The Kirkpatrick model evaluates employees through the following:  how the trainee felt about the training, the subsequent increase in knowledge or capability, behavioural improvement and the overall effect on the business or environment.

Our adapted model looks at the employee’s capability to integrate, adapt, contribute and perform. Each organisation may have different aspects they want to measure under each of these headings but as a framework we have found it a good template to start the process. Tailoring the criteria by which staff are measured to your organisation will greatly increase the likelihood of a successful hire.

Well we all know well that talent is not everything and that talent is most definitely not everything if it is not fresh, motivated and in the right role. Effectively planning and mapping internal and external talent and directing this talent to the right role at the right time, has become THE key factor in a business maximising its value and on September 14^th at Wentworth Club in Surrey we will be hearing from industry leaders who have done just this.

It’s not ok just to employ the best talent (as if that wasn’t a big enough challenge in itself!). Change is so frantic and ever present in the post-crunch era that it is what you do with it that matters. And if talent isn’t core in your business strategy, you could retain 15 Alistair Darlings but still end up playing opposition to George Osborne!

2) Recruitment versus resourcing – Are we seen as a function that provides recruitment, a transactional process or are we seen as an integrated talent management model that covers everything from strategic workforce planning to onboarding the employees? And how do we really measure the quality of talent which in turn, delivers ROI to our stakeholders? In too many instances we’re still seen as mainly in the first category. However, one company that seems to have tackled this well is Arcelor Mittal (the number 1 in steel industry). Mittal’s resourcing function is more of an integrated talent management model that is really valued in the business.

3) The difference between strategic workforce planning and resource planning – If we get this right, then everything else falls into place. Mittal explains that there is a clear difference between resource planning and strategic WFP. They tackle this in the following way – their resource planning is 0-24 months, but their strategic workforce planning is at the 3-5 year stage and they therefore use the strategic workforce planning to feed into the resource planning. They then ask the following questions. What is the availability of the workforce that is needed to meet the business long term plan? Segmentation of the workforce and its skillsets? They then think through the strategic planning of what they need to resource and use dedicated segmentation techniques to achieve it. They define what are the key critical roles (roles that would stop the business from functioning) and they therefore plan their workforce based on this approach.

4) How does the resourcing function brand itself? – We should be the organisation’s ‘eyes and ears’ in the market and be able to provide our expertise on the roles that Hiring Managers want to hire –e.g. if this role doesn’t exist, or our Hiring Managers expectations on what they are seeking are too high, we should be able to recommend what would be more realistic rather than struggling to fill the job. We should be Advisors rather than Suppliers. We should be measured on ‘time to productivity’, which is related to quality of hire, rather than cost, cycle times etc.

5) Recruiters need to come out of silo’s and understand the skillsets required to make a candidate a top hire – For example, a recruiter searching for engineers in oil and gas should also be able to recognise a strong energy engineer – therefore recognising how talent can be shared across markets, across different businesses etc. We should be hiring future talent who we know fit the organisational culture and we should assess them against growth values or competencies rather than just technical skills.

We would like to thank Shilpa Unalkat, Talent Acquisition Leader, GE Europe and member of the Ochre House HR Network for this great guest blog.

Many organisations fall at the first hurdle; making the distinction between high performance and high potential.

High performance can be measured against clearly defined goals and objectives that exist today. High performers deliver tangible results, are star performers in role, have expertise in a technical or functional discipline and see their careers thrive in a meritocratic organisation. So how is this different from high potential?

HiPos usually sit within the top 5% of talent in an organisation and can be clearly recognised as those who deliver game changing performance time and time again in a wide variety of circumstances, display broad acumen of the company business and contribute to the organisational strategy whilst living out their company’s values. They are characterised through more rapid career growth than their peers, spurred on by their drive, entrepreneurial thinking and mastery of emotional intelligence.

So are the high performers of today the high potentials of tomorrow?

Not necessarily.

An emotive debate and one that the most forward thinking talent centric organisations are set to tackle with not only the current but the long term future goals of the organisation at forefront of mind.

As organisations set out to increase the number of HiPos in their business against an uncertain backdrop where required “skills for the future” are still unknown but the challenges ahead couldn’t be more clear, we are seeing a shift away from technical skills and past performance as key hiring criteria and a renewed focus on the behaviours, traits, mental agility, emotional intelligence and embodiment of company values as selection criteria to meet the business challenges of tomorrow. Investments are being made not only in internal HiPo programmes (coaching, rotational placements and simulated situations) likely to leverage and convert the potential of current high performers but also in external programmes specifically targeting the HiPo talent of direct and indirect competitor organisations with particular focus on top MBA schools as a key source.

How organisations will measure the return on what they invest in these programmes remains to be seen but for now all they know is they can’t afford not to.