Managing talent a strategic approach to your success

Managing talent a strategic approach to your success

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  Managing Talent: Thestrategic approach to your success A practical guide to finding the best people for your business
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  Contents Introduction 4 Your brand: would you work for your organisation? 5 Mobile technology: it’s where it’s at! 6 Data mining: how to unearth the gold 7 Be social and play games to find talent - case studies 8 Sourcing talent: if you use social media, you must mean business 9 The future role of recruiters 10 The interview process: Have you reviewed yours lately? 11 Future trends: where is it all going? 12 Conclusion 13 This article has been authored by Peter Cosgrove, Director at Cpl plc and current President of the National Recruitment Federation. Peter has 20 years business experience. He is regularly called up on by the media to comment on a number of topics, namely recruitment talent and careers. Email: [email protected] | Twitter@petercosgrove | Phone: +353 (0) 87 620 0836 3
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  Introduction What hasbeen the most under-managed corporate asset of the past two decades? According to McKinsey’s War for Talent survey, It has never been more challenging to identify the best talent. There’s an ever increasing need for technical skills, a move to non– permanent jobs and a desire among employees to work from home. So with all these changes, how are CEOs and recruiters managing future talent? Where do they find the best people, and how do they do it? This paper will help you understand what finding the best people is only going to get more difficult, how the jobs will eventually find the talent and not the other way. There are eight topics in all with three bullet points at the end of each topic for those who want to read an executive version of the article. 4
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  Your brand: Wouldyou work for your organisation? 20 years ago or so, it was relatively easy to manage a company’s brand. It was simply a case of what you told the marketplace. Even with the dawn of the Internet, there was a time when your website was your shop window; you could highlight positive messages such as “we’re socially responsible, carbon-neutral, great employers etc.” Those days are over. Many employers still don’t get this. In simple terms, you don’t want to be the guy who walks into a bar telling everyone you’re cool. You want to be the guy who walks into a bar having everyone saying that you’re cool.Your real employment brand is walking out your door every day and interacting with their friends more than ever before, posting messages on Facebook, tweeting and possibly using newer sites like glassdoor.com to complain about you.The difference now is that the conversation is happening whether you engage or not, so you need to know what is being said about you. All the challenges in finding and recruiting the best people are massively wrapped up in how people see you. It’s not much use if you can identify the top 100 best people for your company if 99 of them don’t want to join you. So what do potential recruits think of your brand? It’s often not what you think. Do you ask new employees why they joined? Do you carry out regular pulse surveys? Do you know how many referrals your employees are giving you? If employees like your brand, they will tell others. Referred candidates have one of the highest retention rates in organisations. That said; referral schemes tend not to work in most companies because they’re restricted to a period of time. Also, people may not want to have a friend working in their company, they may not know exactly what their friends do or if they’re any good at their job. One of the leaders in referrals is Arie Ball from Sodexho who has presented globally on this topic. She poses the following question: “Ask yourself why your people are not finding the best talent for you?” If you can answer that, you’re halfway there. How do you become a great company to work for? The answer is simple but not simplistic; be a great company. That means living and breathing the brand values and constantly monitoring and investing in your brand image. It starts with the CEO; if he or she does not impress on everyone the importance of the people they have and the type of talent they wish to hire, the rest of the organisation won’t either. Top tips/things to consider McDonald’s bites off more than it can chew The new online channels make it easy for people to comment publically on your brand, whether you like it or not. Some companies have tried to take the social initiative, with unhappy results. McDonald’s wanted people to tweet their favourite experiences about McDonald’s, using #McDStories, but the dear customers quickly hijacked the great marketing campaign with comments such as ‘Every time I enter a McDonald’s a little piece of me dies’. Ironically, there was so much commentary about this campaign (dubbed #McFail) that many say it actually succeeded, given that most people know what they’re getting when they go to McDonald’s. ›› Start with knowledge. Do you know what your brand says to potential recruits? ›› What proportion of your employees would be happy to walk around with the company logo on their belongings? ›› Remember that younger generations will be your future leaders.What are they saying and sharing about your brand? 5
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  Mobile technology: It’swhere it’s at! Sometime in 2014, mobile Internet traffic will overtake desktop Internet traffic. Quite simply, mobile is where it’s at. Of course, it’s important to understand what we mean by mobile. Some people still picture a guy sitting on a train with his mobile phone; this is only a part of it. Mobile also means people surfing the web at home on a tablet device. You need to bear this in mind when thinking about how people will search for jobs. The data on mobile usage is staggering: • 70% of Facebook updates • 80% of twitter updates • 30% of Google searches • 75% of emails opened are on mobiles The figures above speak for themselves, but businesses are still very slow to adapt to mobile. Why do so many companies not yet have a mobile website? If 50% of job viewing is carried out on a mobile device, you need to ensure that people can see what they need to see, without having to use their thumb and finger to enlarge the screen. If you want to hire the best people, you must make it easy for them to apply. Recruiters need to work closely with companies to ensure that the brand experience on mobile does not turn people off. They need to understand the analytics behind recruitment. Amazon.com is able to attribute drops in revenue to their website opening milliseconds slower, so expect the audience to leave your website if it doesn’t load quickly enough or isn’t user-friendly. Top tips/things to consider • Over 40% of people use their mobile phone on the toilet • More people in the world have a mobile phone than a toothbrush There is also a wow effect with mobile and the apps that come with it. For example, Layar is an augmented reality app. As you walk down a street, it identifies which companies have jobs along the way. Also, the likes of a QR (Quick Reader) code can help bring your marketing collateral to life. When someone reads your brochure, they can scan a QR code which brings them to a webpage about job opportunities, among other things. There are many other tools out there. For instance, there’s one that can project 3D images of you by taking your photo and that of a particular product, and putting them together. Think about the cool things you could do with potential candidates. Once again, this requires recruiting and marketing working together. If you take nothing else from this article, find out if your company has a mobile strategy, what it involves, and how it can benefit your recruitment brand. ›› What is your mobile strategy and has it been considered from the perspective of attracting talent? ›› How easy is it for people to apply for your jobs on a mobile device? Is your website optimised for mobile users? ›› What is your target audience browsing and watching on mobile and at what time? 6
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  Data mining: Howto unearth the gold Sorry, chaps, there’s no news today A British journalist tells of how, when he joined the BBC in 1930, there was no regular news bulletin. In his first week, he arrived at the studio to watch a scheduled bulletin being broadcast. The presenter sat at the microphone and, when the time signal had finished, announced with great solemnity: Information overload “ This is the BBC Home Service from London. It is one o’clock. There is no news. ” It’s a long time since the BBC had ‘no news’ to share with us. Nowadays, we are overloaded with information. With over 250 million profiles on LinkedIn alone, we probably have too much data, so the question becomes: how do we use it? All types of businesses are now using new sources of information to help make better decisions. Recruitment is no different. A word of caution though, computer analysis is subject to ‘GIGO’ (garbage in, garbage out), so you need to be careful where you source the data and how you process it. Predictive analysis As Danish physicist Niels Bohr noted, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Using predictive analytics however, we can monitor the behaviour of candidates and tell in advance when a candidate is ready to change job. There are many analytics tools that can now predict, with about 80% accuracy, when a candidate is ready to move, which can be very useful to know. Social footprint On top of this, there is now what is called ‘people aggregators’ who can gather together your entire online social footprint so as to get a more accurate view of you. They link your profiles on sites like LinkedIn, twitter and Facebook with your company bio, press releases, articles you may have written etc. to produce a ‘social CV’ of you as a candidate. Three of the main players to look out for are DICE, Talentbin and 3sourcing. Companies are investing heavily in the processing of such data, not only to source good talent, but to find out which candidate is the Top tips/things to consider best fit. Also, as face recognition and profiling software improves, it will eventually be possible to know all you need to know about a candidate without ever speaking to them. Taking it one step further, in the future, technology will be able to match candidates with your company before you even know you need them. So lots of data, yes, but we must be careful how we use it. That said, whatever data is produced will end up being processed by humans and humans are not very reliable. For instance, behavioural studies link the chance of a convict getting parole to the length of time since the judge has eaten. We are also 20% more likely to react positively to someone if we’re holding something warm like a cup of tea. No matter how advanced technology becomes, we need to use it intelligently and not rush to conclusions. A good online profile does not necessarily equate to a good offline employee. Some of the most highly sought after people in Silicon Valley at present are behavioural scientists, hired to interpret data. ›› Predictive analytics tools will be able to help identify future candidates for your organisation as well as identify employees in your own organisation who may be looking to move elsewhere. ›› Candidate data is everywhere. It needs however to be combined with humans at some stage. You will never hire someone you don’t like regardless of the data. ›› Understand the power of data algorithms to help you source candidates and identify star candidates. 7
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  Be social andplay games to find talent Hard Rock Café Firenze fills all positions using Facebook alone The Hard Rock Café in Florence needed to hire 120 staff for its new store opening. They recognised that their consumers and candidates were often the same person, so they launched a Facebook campaign that allowed candidates to submit applications via Facebook. They also ran Facebook ads targeting people around Florence who showed an interest (liked) rock and roll bands. The page grew to over 6,000 in 4 days (bearing in mind that some companies take years to reach 5,000). The Hard Rock team also responded to applicant questions within Facebook. The campaign led to 4,000 applicants and all 120 were hired through the app. It was not just incredibly quick, it was very cost effective. Also, because they targeted candidates who were passionate about the Hard Rock brand, they had a 95% offer success rate. RMS engages in smart thinking RMS, an insurance company, bought into a game called The Plague (a game about infecting the world) as it recognised that many of the decisions that had to be made in this game were similar to calculations a risk analyst might make. So, rather than go to a university campus with a corporate stand, they set up the game and a leader board, and checked which graduates scored highest. It proved a highly engaging way of identifying suitable candidates. UPS did the same with a road-trip challenge They set up a community where people could win $2,000 in a game; then, when it came to their busy recruitment season, they posted job messages to this community and filled 900 jobs through this method alone. The total advertising spend was only $2,000. Find talent in the book section! One recruiter who was hunting for actuaries was finding it very difficult to source any available candidates so he thought about where an actuary might be found. He logged onto amazon.com to find the most popular book on actuarial matters. He then targeted those people who had rated or commented on the book in the comments section below – clearly they were all going to be actuaries – certainly a left field approach. 8
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  Sourcing talent: Ifyou use social media, you must mean business Many argue that sourcing talent will never be easy again. Birth rates in the developed world are falling, candidate mobility is rising, technology is evolving at a rapid rate and fewer jobseekers see themselves in a career for life. So how have the traditional channels responded and what new ones are emerging? Job boards - useful, but not when you’re looking for scarce talent The biggest challenge with job boards or your own career site is that you’re confined to applicants who are actively looking. Also, your job has to stand out among thousands of others. Most line managers when asked to review their own jobs online are horrified with the content and would not apply themselves! As companies are swamped with more data than ever, responding to every applicant can be very time consuming and many don’t see how not responding to applications can impact negatively on their brand. Job boards can be useful when the skillset is plentiful but not when you’re looking for scarce talent. LinkedIn - transforming the way candidates are found All the talk now is about social media and a sourcing strategy that targets the best talent. The basic premise is that only 20% of talented people are actively looking at any time. That said, the other 80%, although passive, will engage with an opportunity if it is presented and packaged in the right way. There are now over 250 million profiles on LinkedIn and that number keeps growing The basic premise is that everyone is a candidate; it just depends on the opportunity. It enables recruiters to search for hard-to-find skillsets and target potential recruits in specific companies more easily than before. Jobseekers are spending more time adorning their profiles, adding recommendations and linking to their blog or any recent presentations they may have given. Of course, you need to be careful; many candidates are passive for a reason; they are not looking for a job so you could spend a lot of time talking to candidates who are not interested. Facebook - if the candidates you want are on it, then that’s where you need to be Every company is trying to get followers on Facebook, but many still do not understand how to make the most of them. Maersk, an oil company that specialises in drilling, has one of the best Facebook pages with over 30,000 ‘likes’ which proves you don’t need to be a ‘cool’ brand; you just need to know how to engage with your audience. Many people see Facebook as a fun site and not about jobs and careers. It’s only a matter of time however before it becomes a key way of finding people, simply because there are so many people on it. The reality is, if the candidates you want are on Facebook, then that’s where you need to be. Precise targeting – how to find that needle in the haystack The changes in how we target candidates have led to a more scientific approach to sourcing. Because people have a growing digital footprint, it’s getting easier to learn more about them. Complicated search strings (called ‘Boolean’) can be used in Google to unearth candidates. Companies such as Social Talent and trainers like Craig Fisher and Stacy Zapar share their tips online for free to help find that needle in the haystack; recruiters are part recruiter, part data scientist. In the case of hard-to-fill vacancies, it’s usually because the required skillset is in high demand. In many cases, suitable candidates do not need to visit job boards; they get approached (headhunted) instead. As a recruiter therefore, you need to be fishing where the candidates are swimming. Talent communities – how to convert followers into employees While it’s great to generate followers and advocates online, the challenge is how to take this audience offline and engage with them one to one. Companies are investing heavily in twitter followers and Facebook likes, but the reality is you need to translate this online community into offline employees and/or customers. Clear objectives – measure what you manage Social media is just another channel for communication, albeit a very useful one. You need a clear goal however; there are millions of inactive pages and blogs that sit like abandoned ships in the middle of the ocean. Those who set them up did not really know why they were doing it. As with anything in your business, you need to measure what you manage; social media and social sourcing are no different. Are your recruiters finding and hiring more candidates using social tools? Is it a good use of their time? If you can answer these questions, then you are doing better than most companies. If you need more support on this, Bill Boorman and Andy Headworth are both experts in the area. Top tips/things to consider ›› Ensure the ownership of the job specification lies ultimately with the line manager, not HR, as they are closest to it. ›› Don’t delay in establishing a social media recruitment strategy. Don’t do it just because everyone else is doing it. Do it because it’s where so many people can be found and you need to communicate with them. ›› What games could you create that would engage and build a community to help you recruit in the future? 9
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  The future roleof recruiters Companies need their recruiters to be salespeople as the war for talent increases. They also need to ensure that recruiters understand the business so they will be more passionate about the company. Key things that a corporate recruiter needs to consider: • Sell the opportunity: How exciting are the jobs you advertise? Do you highlight the fact that new jobs have arisen due to growth? Do you use more than just a job specification? Do you commission a short film or corporate video? Do you track which jobs on your careers webpage get the most hits? • Measure the right thing: What is your most important metric? If it’s time to hire, consider why. If you want to target people for hiring quickly, you may be promoting the wrong behaviour. • Stay in touch with former staff: Do you track star candidates who have left? Many great employees return to a company when they find that the grass is not greener elsewhere. It is up to you however to stay in touch and make this happen. • Track the data: Do you keep track of the information on your career site (what’s popular, what’s not) and then adapt it accordingly? Are your recruiters savvy enough about Google Analytics and page rankings? • Facilitate internal mobility: How often have you seen an employee shine when they switch roles? It’s considered a hot potato in many organisations because no manager wants to lose his best people, but it may be the right thing for the company overall. • Tap into talent communities: Are you identifying future hires and building talent pipelines and skill networks? Top tips/things to consider Recruitment Agencies Job boards, LinkedIn and corporate recruiters have all been highlighted as reasons for the death of the recruitment agent. But, to adapt Mark Twain’s remark, rumours of the recruitment agency’s death have been greatly exaggerated. The industry is alive and well, thriving in fact and there are very good reasons for this: • Talent is not a commodity: Unlike other things you can procure, talent has a voice and an influence and it is complex, like any human individual. The services of recruitment agencies involve much more than providing CVs. If that’s all an agency does, it will struggle to survive. • Social media is not a replacement: Tools such as LinkedIn and job boards, while very useful, will never completely replace recruitment agencies; they only give you a list of candidates; you cannot identify the right candidate by this means alone. • Good business sense: Commercially, it will always make sense for companies to use recruitment agencies. Their service is generally free until you hire (no hourly charges like many professional services). If you can find the talent quicker and better yourself, fine, but is it really the best use of your time? • Candidate’s perspective: From a candidate’s point of view, they may not want to apply directly to the competition; they may prefer a third party to contact them on your behalf. Recruitment agencies will need to specialise to a greater degree, if they’re to continue adding value. They will need to demonstrate their expertise and promote themselves to clients and candidates as the place to go. As Greg Savage, a prominent industry expert, often says “whoever owns the talent, will own the market”. ›› Do your recruiters understand the business and can they sell opportunities with enthusiasm and passion? ›› Build the relationship with recruitment agencies. The best companies work very effectively with them, they partner with them. ›› How much time do you spend identifying talent internally and asking staff for ideas as opposed to looking at the external market? 10
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  The interview process:Have you re-viewed yours lately? Before you try anything new, get the interview process right. People don’t always act as you expect them to act, so recruiting and selecting people is never easy. The show ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ follows the same format in Russia; you can ask the audience if you’re stuck. But the Russian audience is more likely to give you the wrong answer. So not only are people irrational, they are irrational in different ways, depending on culture and a variety of other factors. Although we know this, we still base most of our decisions on an interview, often by an untrained interviewer. The head of HR for Google, Laszlo Bock, recently conceded that all their brainteaser interview questions had been a waste of time and had not improved their interview results one iota. Before you try anything new, get the interview process right. One old-school technique which has fallen away is the reference. It’s not because companies don’t give references, they do, but anyone doing a proper check would never rely solely on a formal reference. Think of how much more relevant information you could get from a 30 minute reference than a 30 minute interview The challenge lies in the psychology of hiring. When you’ve gone through the entire process, the last thing you generally do is look for a reference. If a bad reference is given at this stage, you have to start the whole process all over again, so most references, if average to poor, are ignored, as the pressure of making the hire is too great. Top tips/things to consider One fact that will not change is if the hiring manager does not like the person you put in front of them, they won’t hire them. No one hires someone they have to work with if they don’t like them. How many processes have gone through two or three rounds of interviewing before the line manager even gets to see the person? The growth in video interviewing and shorter interviews will help get this likability factor out of the way and speed up interview rejection and acceptance. A lot of work has also been done into initial CV discrimination. Bias enters at every stage of the process. Think how we are often unimpressed with a CV, only to change our mind when we meet the person, or vice versa! Look at how many organisations still recruit by ensuring all hires have a college degree despite the fact that often times senior executives in the firm do not have a degree. Seeing things in black and white Two leading economists, Bertrand and Mullainathan, ran an experiment with 5,000 CVs to measure racial discrimination in the labour market, entitled ‘Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal?’ They responded with fictitious resumés to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. Each resumé was assigned either a very African- American or very White-sounding name, but nothing else was different. White names received 50% more callbacks for interviews. ›› How many of your hires are still based purely on interview and how many people do you reject at the reference stage? ›› How much time is spent before the ultimate hiring manager gets to meet the shortlisted candidates? ›› What do you screen out at the CV stage? For example, is a college degree still critical for every role? 11
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  Future trends: Whereis it all going? We are seeing an irreversible trend from permanent workforces to more temporary and contracted positions. It has been forecast that up to 40% of the global workforce could be freelancers by 2020. Much of the outsourcing taking place is around flexible or contingent talent, a fact which companies will need to bear in mind, as more of their workforce moves to non-permanent roles. This trend could lead to the outsourcing of recruitment functions which can help drive down recruitment costs. A word of warning though; while it’s good to get value for money, do you really want cost to be the most important factor in the acquisition and negotiation of your number one asset? Companies are hiring talent from a global network on the understanding that they may never meet their employees face to face. Many of these trends are coming about because of advances in Top tips/things to consider technology. Sites such as Elance and oDesk enable freelancers to make money from their talents, by connecting them online with companies. In this way, technology is making it simpler to link employers with ‘employees’. This will fundamentally shift the way we do work. Bring the work to the worker instead of the worker to the work. Currently, many workers cannot enter the workforce because they have to stay at home due to childcare commitments, a long term disability, or because they’ve been out of work for a long time and are perceived as unsuitable. In circumstances however where the only requirement is the completion of a particular task within a given timeframe, many people who are currently not working could find a regular earnings stream. Such new ways of working will make more talent available to companies; they just need to be open to it. Also, for the first time, we are seeing firms ‘acqui-hiring’, i.e. acquiring other firms for the talent. This was something companies regularly did to buy intellectual property, contracts, etc. but now, with the challenge of finding the best people so difficult, it has become increasingly prevalent and will only increase in the future. The power of the idea has not died. Companies like Attlassian in Australia understand the benefit of encouraging their employees to be creative. Every quarter, they give employees the chance to work on anything that relates to the company’s products. The likes of Google and Facebook hold regular ‘hackathons’. But it’s not just IT firms that understand the importance of creativity. Volkswagen in Germany sought to turn off senior executives’ smartphones (for email) before 7am and after 7pm because they were paid to be creative and come up with solutions but had no time or space to think because they were constantly busy and distracted by the torrent of emails. ›› The shift to non-permanent workers is happening at a rapid pace; how are you adapting? ›› Understand that your talent no longer needs to work in an office or even be in the same country, so look at how you can access global talent, not just local talent. ›› If people are your most important asset, expect others to know this and more aggressively target them. 12
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  Here is asummary of the top ten things you should consider if you are serious about finding the best people: 1. Understand what your brand says. There’s little point identifying the top 100 people for your company if 99 of them don’t want to join you. What matters is not what you say, but what others say about you. Ask yourself if you would be inspired to join your own company or if you would refer others to work there. 2. Appreciate the importance of social media in attracting future talent. Be clear on what you want to achieve and dedicate resources to it, only then will it become more powerful. 3. Ensure your recruiters are part data scientists and part sales people; they need to understand how to find candidates amid the vast amount of data, but they also need to be able to sell them the opportunity. 4. Make sure you have a mobile optimised website that makes it easy for candidates to apply – one in two applicants will be looking for your jobs on a mobile device within 12 months. 5. If your people are your most important asset, ask yourself how many people are financially rewarded to manage it? 6. Partner with a recruitment agency. Many firms do not have problems finding the best people because they have excellent relationships with agencies who know the best talent out there, including yours! 7. Look at changing your assessment process to rely less on interview and take the reference check much more into account. Also ensure that the line managers see candidates at the start of the process, as this will save a lot of time. 8. Understand the importance of creativity and new ideas. These will differentiate your company from the competition. Are you clear on how you are getting the best out of your current staff? 9. If your talent is the number one reason you will succeed, re-think the role of procurement that says you must get the lowest possible price from all recruitment partners. Talent is a commodity and there is a right price. 10. Look at the future of work; your employees are less likely to be permanent, less likely to be in the office and even less likely to be in the same country. Are you ready to adapt to such changes? Conclusion The most complex thing in the universe is the human brain. Hiring people will always be difficult, but they will ultimately make or break your company. The world of recruitment has changed and will continue to change. We all need to keep pace with the latest developments, in order to recruit the best people for the job. 13
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  Cpl Resources plc.is a leading provider of recruitment, staffing and outsourcing services. We provide these services to local customers and multinationals through a network of 32 offices in Canada, Czech Republic, England, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and Tunisia. Our business is based on matching the capabilities of our candidates and employees with the needs of our clients to get work done. We achieve this by: • Placing people in permanent jobs with our clients • Staffing client projects with our temporary employees and contractors • Employing staff in our service centres to support our international client base. In addition to providing these services to customers in Ireland, we serve the European needs of global corporations in Technology, Finance & Accounting, Science & Engineering, Sales & Marketing, International Customer Service and Healthcare. Our Business 14 Peter Cosgrove, Director Cpl, 01 614 6000
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  www.cpl.ie