PLEASE VISIT OUR SPONSORS

Recruitment & Retention

Published April 2008

Would the Best Candidate Please Step Forward?

 

  Robert Gandossy and Tina Kao

Wrong. But this knowledge is critical to hire the best and brightest. Leading talent managers not only determine who is best for their organizations, they leverage the latest innovations and strategies to build tomorrow's talent.

Imagine a company that has a precise, real-time understanding of its workforce. With a laptop at hand, talent managers can sit anywhere in the world and point and click to test the pulse of the workforce and make critical recruiting decisions that can generate, or lose, millions of dollars.

At a macro level, decisions on whether to develop, buy or borrow talent are aligned with short- and long-term business needs. The history of an individual employee is carefully monitored to ensure business needs are met, skills are utilized and careers are managed. Even forecasts of external factors — the economy, interest rates, the political situation in China, South Korea, Chennai or Bratislava — are incorporated to deliver the best "right person, right time, right place" recruiting solutions.

Sound like a pipe dream? For most companies such capabilities are years away, but for a few it is becoming a reality. These trailblazers — including Capital One, The Home Depot and IBM — are forging ahead with innovative solutions and multimillion-dollar investments in the area of recruiting. This is no longer recruiting 101 but a snapshot of the future. There are five principles that help differentiate the best from the rest:

• Principle 1: Manage talent as a human capital supply chain.
• Principle 2: Invest in and build skills for tomorrow, not today.
• Principle 3: Build talent assessments to identify the best.
• Principle 4: Develop talent pools that transcend job requisitions and boundaries.
• Principle 5: Create a work environment not just to accommodate, but to inspire.

Faced with a smaller talent pool and a more competitive landscape — described by some as the perfect storm of labor markets — for most companies, the ability to attract and manage intellectual capital is a significant and necessary differentiator.

Further, a Hewitt Associates' studies shows one of every two workers is disengaged at work, with an astounding 40 percent expressing interest in being employed elsewhere.

Tougher circumstances demand smarter and bolder recruiting solutions. Part of the equation is getting the right talent in the door despite a smaller labor pool and a scarcity of critical skills. The other part involves maximizing the value of the incumbent workforce through smart recruiting and sourcing, and innovative development of people. Organizations that can manage the talent pipeline and inventory are clearly at an advantage.

Manage Talent as a Human Capital Supply Chain

When your largest and fastest-growing expense is talent and you employ more than 350,000 people, plus another 130,000 contractors like IBM does, it can be a daunting prospect for talent managers to get their arms around. Recently, IBM launched the Workforce Management Initiative (WMI) — "a series of strategies, processes, and tools that enable optimal labor deployment built on a foundation of learning" — which essentially is getting the right person, at the right cost, in the right job, at the right time.