Top Consultant on Virtual Careers Fairs

Tony Restell at Top Consultant asked for a chance to respond to my slightly less than overwhelmed response to their recent virtual careers fair.

First, have a look at my post, then have a read through his in italics below, see what you think, and if you've got any relevant experiences of your own to share, please comment as well.

Cheers, Jon.

 

"Jon - thanks for the opportunity to post the other viewpoint, much appreciated.

Interestingly, the technology platform does provide the functionality for much more interaction between candidates at a fair like this, including the provision of a "Lounge" area where candidates can meet and network. The technology providers (iCongo) recommended that we deactivate this functionality, based on their experience at another careers fair they'd recently hosted. The feeling was that this would be a distraction from the main aim of the fair - namely putting candidates and potential employers in contact with one another and encouraging a dialogue between them.

I guess what the above indicates is that the technologies out there can enable a wide range of different events / experiences. So one key for companies such as ourselves is going to be experimenting and learning what format events should take to maximise the number of readers / candidates who leave thrilled with the experience and minimise the number who leave disappointed. Which is a similar conundrum to that faced in earlier rounds of internet technology of course. Lots of things are possible, but which are really going to bring value and be appreciated by readers and clients alike? We'll certainly be endeavouring to find that out as we run subsequent events!

Tony Restell (Top-Consultant.com) "

The Equalities Bill

It's now 12 months since vampire Gordon Brown stepped up as the UK's PM. He's had a difficult 12 months, one of the main criticisms being that he's not been able to explain his vision for the country, and even less to align the government's actions to this vision.

However, a key part of his strategy, as I commented last year has clearly been to increase social mobility: widening participation in the workforce.

And in this area at least, the vision is clearly being put in place - with the right to request flexible working, equal treatment for agency workers and the push for world class skills.

The latest initiative is the equalities bill.

The bill will try to tackle the ongoing gender pay gap by requiring public sector organisations (and any private firms doing public sector work) to publish details of their percentage difference in pay between men and women. I think this is sensible, and that it is also right to encourage rather than require private sector companies to provide similar reports. It's also been coming for a long time - with Denise Kingsmill's 2001 report and then her review into HCM reporting (Accounting for People).

Accompanying this is a move to stop companies from banning their employees to discuss what they're getting paid, which could involve some interesting cultural change.

More controversially, the bill suggests that firms should be allowed to apply a measure of positive discrimination / affirmative action to increase the proportion of women and people from ethnic minorities in their workforce, particularly at a senior level ("where candidates are 'equally qualified', it will allow employers to hire female or ethnic minority candidates" - I'm sure Hilary Clinton would have liked to have used this one!).

This idea is going to get quite a lot of flack. The actual legal change may be quite minor, but it involves a big psychological shift (which is of course the point).

But I would argue again that it is a sensible, and indeed overdue (being 30 years since the equal pay act), change. I was listening to a INSEAD leadercast (podcast) on the way home tonight and heard Sandy Ogg, Unilever's group HRD talking about their strategy to get more women onto their executive teams that they call "One More" - one more women on the board. It sounds a hugely sensible approach and one designed to "move the needle" much more than even the best development, coaching, networking etc.

And I think this is all that the government is trying to achieve.

In overview, the bill would almost seem designed to raise heckles from the UK's mainly right wing press. I think it's a courageous step that clearly links to Brown's vision and could signal that the government is finally getting back on track.

McKinsey: Multinational talent

First, the findings:

There is a surprisingly tight relationship between financial performance, as measured by profit per employee and ten dimensions of global talent management (see graph).

Companies scoring in the top third of the survey (when all ten dimensions were combined) had a 39% higher profit per employee than those in the bottom third.

The correlations were particularly striking in three areas:

• The creation of globally consistent talent evaluation processes
• The management of cultural diversity
• The mobility of global leaders.

"Companies achieving scores in the top third in any of these three areas had a 70 percent chance of achieving top-third financial performance (see graph). Companies scoring in the bottom third of the survey in these three areas had a significantly lower probability of being top performers, particularly if the company had inconsistent global talent processes."

Those are pretty remarkable findings. But there are some problems, and McKinsey themselves point out that:

"Although providing no evidence of true causality and lacking a longitudinal perspective, the strong associations between company financial performance and these global-talent-management practices strengthen our belief that these are important areas on which businesses and HR leaders should focus their attention."

But my main reservation focuses on their choice of profit per employee as a measure of the impact of talent management. This is clearly going to be much higher in knowledge based sectors where the 3 or 10 practices identified by McKinsey are going to be more common.

So the research basically says that companies which invest more in talent are often knowledge based (as talent is where their knowledge comes from). Knowledge based companies have higher profits per employee (as knowledge based work has higher margins than production based work). So, companies that invest more in multinational talent management will have often have higher profits per employee.

It's as good as saying this is research. Research is supposed to show you something. This is supposed to show you something.

Unfortunately, it doesn't.

Carnival #36

The carnival is out again, back with its originator, Evil HR Lady.

My favourite post: Amit Avasthi's Talent Glocalisation on HR Bytes. Not as fun as some posts, but then you don't come to my blog for entertainment, do you? And it includes some great information / insight.

In fact, I'd meant to post on the McKinsey article ('Why multinationals struggle to manage talent') that informs Amit's post myself when it was published last month - following on from my earlier post on their war for talent update. Unfortunately, this was one of those that got away.

The other reason for not posting on it, given that it includes some fairly (if superficially) striking findings, is that I think it's a surprisingly duff piece of research.

But Amit's inspired me to post, so my own reflections will follow.

Nick Jefferson guest post

Thanks to Nick Jefferson from Couraud for his guest post.

Couraud is a no-nonsense developer of HR architectures and provider of tools and training, and employs some particularly bright and sparky consultants. It is also one of very few UK based HR consultancies with its own blog.

Nick and I both think quite similarly about the world of work, and this was shown recently by us both commenting within the space of 5 minutes on the same Management Today post.

Do take a look to find out more.

What's the Point of HR?

Written by Nick Jefferson, Director, Couraud.

I laughed when Jon told me he was the other blogger who had almost instantly responded to Matthew Gwyther's piece in Management Today, 'What's the Point of HR?'.

I could equally have cried.

What is it with those of us in this world? Why are we making such a poor case of our chosen area of work, that we regularly get it in the neck like this? Luke Johnson wrote a not dissimilar piece in the FT not so long ago also.

We all know that there are lots of frankly low grade HR people kicking around, who couldn't articulate how HR adds value if their lives depended on it.

But we're not all that bad. I've met some truly fantastic, quality practitioners in my time.

Why aren't we standing up and being counted? It reminds me of the moderate muslims who for whatever reason don't get up and stay - 'STOP!, enough is enough'. We have a duty to fight for what we believe in - that if people matter, HR must matter.

It is time to take the fight to the cynics, and not simply react to next, inevitable 'why do these guys exist?' piece.

And let us begin today.

Productivity Guy guest post

Thanks to Erik Samdahl and Jay Jamrog at i4cp (the Institute for Corporate Productivity) for their guest post outlining 5 challenges for HR.

It's great to have them contribute to this blog, partly I think the social nature of web 2.0 means that this sort of collaboration and knowledge sharing that blogging should be about. And also because I think they're a great source of intelligence research and commentary on the world of work.

I've tracked i4cp's outputs since they emerged from the Human Resource Institute, and their relatively new Productivity Blog provides a great resource for their members (corporate executives and human resource professionals from many of the world's top companies) and non-members alike.

I'm sure I'll be commenting on their research again soon.

Five Challenges for the HR Profession

Written by Jay Jamrog, Senior VP of Research, i4cp

Jon has asked i4cp to give our perspective on HCM. Since I’m a researcher, trend watcher and futurist, I thought I would write about some of the challenges the HR professions faces today and in the years to come. Many of these challenges have been around for awhile but the failure to address them will only increase the pain in organizations in the future.

First challenge: Figure out what talent management means. Today, too much is being written about integrated talent management – breaking down the silos in HR and developing a holistic strategy for HR – and not enough about how HR identifies the talent gaps that the organizations will face over the next 3 to 5 years. The objective of TM is not only to fix HR but also, and probably more important, to insure that the right people with the right skills are in the right place at the right time so that the business can execute the strategy. Integration is only a possible means to an end. The true goal is execution.

Second Challenge: Get beyond the multi-generational hurdle. Trying to develop procedures and practices to accommodate four or five different generations will drive HR crazy. People don’t fit neatly into a stereotypical generational cohort group. The key to retaining and engaging the best and the brightest today is to treat each individual as an individual and build trusting relationships between supervisors and employees.

Third Challenge: Get to the next level of HR metrics. If HR is going to move the profession forward, it needs to get beyond measuring the efficiency of HR programs – time to fill, headcount, turnover rates, training competed, etc. - and start measuring the effectiveness of those HR programs. For example, time to fill (efficiency) numbers has no meaning unless you can report that the quality of hire (effectiveness); turnover (efficiency) numbers have to be combined with the quality of separation (effectiveness). Even more important for HR is solving the great debate on measuring the “impact” that all of the HR programs has on the organization and its ability to execute the business strategy.

Fourth Challenge: Understand the impact that technology will have and not have. Most of the HR profession has yet to reap the long-promised rewards that vendors are claiming for technology solutions. This is not because the HCM technology is flawed; it is because, in most cases, HR fails to have a comprehensive strategy for technology. Technology will make HR more efficient in the future but the question is how will HR become more effective. It has been said before that the more high-tech we become, the more people in organizations will need “high-touch.” HR needs a strategy for making their organizations more high-touch.

Fifth Challenge: Keep up to speed on the latest trends and issues. The rapid pace of change - coupled with information overload - makes thinking about the future a daunting task. How does the average HR professional get information on the forces of change (demographic, social, political, legal, economic, technological trends) and then find the time to analyze the possible impacts that they will have on the organization? HR needs solid solutions in this area.

Overall, I think that HR is at a tipping point and the biggest challenge will be to get beyond “fixing” HR (faster, better, cheaper) and to stop worrying about being a business partner and getting a seat at the table. The conversation needs to get to a level where the HR professional addresses the issues related to the impact that they are having on the organization and how they tell that story. Addressing that challenge and the five challenges listed above will take a combination of intelligence, accountability and curiosity, allowing HR to move from “How good do I have to be?” to “How good can I be?”

Vampire Brown Sucking the Working Classes' Blood

Well, I thought The Power of Mojo was a good blog heading, until I came across this one from my namesake's blog at the UK's Daily Express.

Now we know where Gordon Brown's rather strange facial contortions come from!

The power of Mojo

A little while ago, I posted on the the need for organisations to have an internal purpose: a clear big idea about the organisation that increasingly needs to be internally rather than externally generated (ie about how the organisation's going to be rather than what it's going to do).

I linked this need to growing interest in self-actualisation and increasing cynicism over corporate messages within employees.

I want to use this post to extend on the idea, and will then further develop it over the next few days.

So firstly, why mojo? The word apparently traces its origins back to Congo, Africa from the word moyo, meaning 'soul' or 'life force'. More recently, it is often applied to that often elusive quality (magic, personal charisma, energy) that sets a person apart from everyone else.

This is what I'm talking about on an organisational level too - the organisation's real central essence that gives it its life and character and distinguishes it from elsewhere.

And I think there are two types of organisational mojo - the first of which is something absolutely central to organisational strategy and which is going to make this strategy real and achievable. The second is a complementary focus to the main business strategy - something that will fit beside and support (if not drive) the strategy, but which will be more motivating for employees.

More shortly...