Talent Mgmt
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Top Chef on Management Styles
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I’ve been watching “Top Chef Masters” on Bravo TV. It takes some very well known chefs in the U.S. culinary scene and pits them against each other in a set of challenges. This week’s challenge (I am writing this on August 18) takes the last 4 chefs and pairs them with 3 souse chefs each. …
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Recruiting Dubious Talent
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Here is what the NY Times had to say about AIG executives and bonuses a few weeks ago: Now we can debate why A.I.G. felt it necessary to guarantee seven executives at least $3 million apiece when the economy was clearly on shaky ground. Perhaps we will find out these contracts were a bit of…
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Internal Succession Plans
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In the recent explosive growth of talent management, performance and recruiting always seemed to be the drivers, but compensation administration and succession planning always seemed close behind. I’ve always thought that recruiting and performance would level off as most organizations purchased and implemented modules and moved onto comp and succession. Unfortunately, it seems I’ve been…
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Innovating for Sales
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A while back I observed some talent software from a leading talent management vendor. They were excited to show me their innovations around presenting a “seating chart” that would allow the user to visually see where employees were located within the organization. Obviously, the software also allowed drill through on each employee to provide some…
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Talent 2.0
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What the heck is Talent 2.0? Well first of all, it’s not here yet. Second of all, it probably makes more sense to define Talent 1.0 before I can theorize on Talent 2.0. Talent Management 1.0 is simply what we have today. It’s the thought that old school performance management, compensation administration, and succession planning…
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Intellectual Property and Competencies
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I was chatting with a good friend of mine whose company does work with organizations to analyze the value of ongoing IP and R&D. Ardent Research looks at current R&D and patent activity, surveys progress along that research, competitiveness against similar projects at other companies, and unique thought leadership that might give Ardent’s clients and…
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Get Rid of the Performance Review
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The Wall Street Journal had a wonderful article a couple months ago arguing why the performance review is not advantageously contributing to overall productivity for a number of various reasons. I have argued on this blog many times before that performance is not useful and either needs to be completely overhauled and reimagined from the…
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SuccessFactors Results
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It will be interesting to see what the SuccessFactors executives say on their 4th quarter performance results, and even more so for their projections for 2009. Given that they just did an across the board layoff ((I don’t have direct knowledge, but the word on the street was that they did 20% across the board))…
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HR Metrics: Competency fill rates
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By now, many of our organizations have competency assignments for each candidate and employee within the organization. Along with those competency assignments you probably have skill levels for each competency. Assigning a numerical value to each competency level, we should be able to quantify the total aggregate level of any given competency within the organization. …
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HR Metrics: Quality of Hire
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All too often, we talk about the quality of hire measured by a new employee’s first performance review. We like to correlate this metric back to the source of hire, business units, recruiters, etc to identify who is doing the best job so we can replicate those results in other parts of the business. The…
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Recruiting CRM’s
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There seems to be a fairly significant movement from recruiting as an applicant tracking system to a relationship management system. At this point, I’m advocating recruiting CRM’s in some niche areas of talent acquisition. The idea behind the recruiting CRM is that in recruiting in general, you best candidates are the passive candidates – those…
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Changing Talent Strategies for HR Strategies
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So how many people do you have? What are their competencies? What is the total aggregated of any particular competency in your entire employee base? What is the engagement level for each of those employee populations for those competencies? Do those engagement levels change by generation, location, or line of business? Do you even care?…
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Integrating Talent Applications (Suites)
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As we seem to be moving past the initial enamoration of talent functionality, there seems to be more and more disillusionment with the lack of full integration that we are used to expecting with more mature applications like HRIS, payroll and benefits. (ok, that’s fully debatable, I know…) But the problem is that not only…
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Stages in Talent Management Maturity
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The taleo blog recently wrote a piece about the sages of maturity for talent management solutions. I actually like this 4 stage continuum, and think it applies to more than just talent management suites. STAGE 1: Companies use automated core HR systems with a group of manual and disparate human capital management (HCM) systems and…
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Engagement Over: Workstream-Empagio
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Why Workstream wanted to be tied to Empagio in the first place never quite made sense to me. When their merger was announced several months ago, everyone knew Workstream needed some cash to continue with their R&D and sales goals. But let’s get this straight once and for all. Empagio is just the rebranded name…
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US Businesses for Sale?
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Back in I guess what was the 80’s, there was all the rage over Japanese money buying US property and business. Well times have changed and there is an interesting dichotomy going on. Now, the U.S. economy is outsourcing to China and India (and others). Low skilled labor is going outside of the U.S. and…
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HR Budgets & the Economy
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The economy is in the tank, and while predictions are that things will get better in 2009, many HR leaders are doing budgets right now. The problem with recessions and HR is that HR budgets often take longer to come back than other budgets. Take 2001 as an example. The “bubble” burst with such ferocity…
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Your Best Employees
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So who are your best employees? Are they simply the top performance scores? Are they the ones who hold the most patents? Have the best win ratio when in court? I’m a firm believer that while there are some natural top performers, it is also a skill that can be learned. HBR outlines some key…
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Management Gurus: Peter Principle and HR
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While I’m sure everyone thinks I’m going to write about Tom Peters, instead, there is another, more famous Peter Principle out there: The Peter Principle is the principle that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” While formulated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in a humorous…
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Management Gurus: Drucker and HR
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Interestingly enough, Peter Drucker was writing about talent management as early as 1945. He was clearly decades ahead of his time, and his earliest writings still contain lessons for all of management including the HR function. Drucker was keen on decentralization because of its impact on what he called Human Effort, the motivation it provided…