Here’s a no-brainer:
• The population of the UK is ageing.
• Simultaneously there is a shortage of talent in many sectors.
• New anti-discriminatory UK Age Regulations were introduced in October 2006.

As the baby boomer generation moves towards retirement there are insufficient younger workers to take their place, let alone satisfy the requirements of a growing economy for more labour and different skills. Couple that with the regulatory imperative for UK Age Regulations compliance and it seems pretty obvious that tapping into—rather than shying away from—the older worker talent pool is the smarter strategy.

We’ve partnered with The Age and Employment Network (TAEN) on a paper that digs deeper into these issues and provides practical strategies for organisations to recruit older talent into their workforce.

Download Tapping into the Older Worker Talent Pool.

With the wave of broader demographic changes, the strategy of hiring older workers is valuable for many developed nations besides the UK.

Lou Adler’s “ground rules in the new playbook” resonate well with Taleo solutions and research. Check out his full article, Are You Playing the Hiring Game to Win?

We can’t help but highlight his rule #5:

“Every person in the recruiting department must be a technology fanatic. People who work in a corporate recruiting environment must thrive on using technology.”

Our version of the article would put that at rule #1. A robust technology platform is either at the core or the support platform for executing on all the rest of the rules:

• Reduce the number of sourcing channels used, but be great at each one.
• Implement consumer marketing "best practices" to rewrite, position, and push your advertising.
• Use advanced CRM marketing techniques to extract maximum value from your resume database.
• Create a sourcing function that allows for deep networking.
• Implement workforce planning.
• Establish process-control metrics.
• Hiring managers must take on a much bigger role in hiring.
• Create an internal executive search team for critical positions.
• Treat your third-party recruiters as partners, not vendors.

Computerworld online recently published Mary Brandel’s article called Fishing in the Global Talent Pool about global hiring strategies for IT. We were happy to see Kent Kirch, Global Director of Recruitment from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, quoted in the article:

“We’re hard-pressed to find talent quickly enough to meet our business needs,” he says. “Our approach for recruitment, even for our local companies, is global.”

Kent is one of the talent leaders guiding Deloitte to global success, powered by Taleo. He shares additional insights on our archived webcast, Will Talent Management Drive the Future of HR? Hear even more from Frank Wittenauer of Deloitte and other experts on the online replay of the Recruiting in Emerging Markets webcast.

Case studies outline the global strategies used by Dow, Roche, and DSM. Or you can dig a little deeper and read our paper, Managing Global Deployments.

For your dive into the global pool, make sure you get ahead of the learning curve and know all you can about global talent solutions.

Take a look at how this nice simple chart compares the perspectives of the old Personnel Department to the modern HR managers of People and Talent. McKinsey—coiners of the popular “War for Talent” phrase—offers The New Way to articulate the thinking behind talent management:

The next step is turning the thoughts of The New Way into strategic actions.

• Build your Talent Mindset on the framework of on demand talent management solutions which become your tools for cultural transformation.

• Express the Employee Value Proposition and power Recruiting strategies through tailored careers sites.

• Grow your leaders and differentiate your organization by using best practices for talent acquisition and retention strategies that drive successful employer of choice initiatives.

That’s how you execute on these ideas.

In lockstep with the burgeoning number of websites and Internet users is the ever increasing number of job boards. Some are broad and well established: Monster, Careerbuilder. Others are new, niche boards such as WorkforceHRjobs.com and 37 Signals Gig Board for project work. There are also job listing rollups. One to check out: DirectEmployers Association has developed the JobCentral National Labor Exchange to replace America’s Job Bank.

As the author of one of the very first publications cataloguing job boards, The Jobseekers Guide to Online Resources in 1994—a very slim book at that—I was fascinated to see this latest offering: the AIRS 2007 Job Board & Recruiting Technology Directory. It’s 106 pages, organized by industry and specialty, full of ads, and available as a free pdf download.

I’m sure there are now even more job boards than made this listing. It’s a low barrier-to-entry, highly fluid market. That’s why I stopped publishing job board directories in 1995! But don’t get confused by the quantity. Use the directory as one of your reference sources. Focus on executing a results-driven sourcing strategy linked directly to your talent management system and its source reporting and analytics.

More and more organizations are establishing or extending their Internet presence. Here’s a major milestone: there are now more than 100 million websites on the Internet with web pages easily numbering in the billions.

More and more people are using the Internet. Earlier this year, the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported that 73% of US adults use the Internet.

Globally, you can see the growth in the Pew Global Attitudes poll.

Given that information, it is more important than ever to make sure that your corporate site – particularly the careers section – is fresh, appealing, and uses the best technology as you wage the war for eyeballs…as well as for talent.

We came across a great book that supports the importance of having a talent management system in place: It’s Not What You Say... It’s What You Do – How Following Through at Every Level Can Make or Break Your Company.

“You can have the best product or service, a great bottom line, but without the right people from top to bottom it is impossible to follow through.”

Bestselling business author Laurence Haughton identifies the flawed processes that cause great ideas and breakthrough strategies to slip through the cracks, based on studies with more than 150 companies. To make sure that things actually get done a manager must:

1. Communicate what’s expected in terms everyone can understand.
2. Match the right people to every strategy.
3. Get their teams off to a great start.
4. Maintain momentum long after the mood has passed.

Aligning people to business strategies is what talent management does best. As Haughton points out, “…the research out of Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business is conclusive—managers who make sure they have the right fit between their people and goals before they take action double the likelihood of successful follow-through. That’s more than a 100 percent increase in successful follow-through for simply fitting the right people to your goals.”

With that kind of potential business performance improvement in your hand, how could you not make the investment in talent management?

Computerworld online published an interesting article titled: Helping small businesses choose between On-demand and On-premise software. Though the focus is general, it reiterates the main advantages of on demand talent management and eRecruiting for small to medium businesses:

Lower cost of entry: “avoid the large upfront investment required for software licenses and hardware… reducing the hassles of ongoing IT maintenance.”

No readiness issues: “on-demand … dramatically reduces the technical burden … enabling businesses to devote more of their time to higher-value activities.”

Shorter time to productivity: “…because on-demand deployments are typically preconfigured … they are relatively speedy.”

Support for mobile users: “Whether employees are in the office, at home or in a hotel room in another time zone, access to an on-demand application is identical.”

We heartily agree with these main points: Lower costs. Less burden. Faster. Anywhere, anytime. No surprise, since we offer Taleo Business Edition.

But regardless of our agenda, the article’s argument for on-premise software just doesn’t hold up:

Data accessibility and ownership? Domiciling your data is nice. But it also means responsibility. For smaller businesses, on demand can provide a higher level of state-of-the-art hosting, security, and backup than their IT departments are able to provide.

Transactional volumes? Internet bandwidth and shared processing resources are legitimate variables, but truly scalable multi-tenant on demand architectures are designed to support a higher level of usage than small business networks. At Taleo, we processed more than a billion transactions for 750,000 users in Q2 2006 alone.

Less downtime? Although on-premise removes some remote-connectivity issues, Taleo has achieved 99.9% on demand uptime. How many hiccups has your on-premise email server had this month? How many steps does it take to access your servers on the road?

More seamless hardware/software integration? Complete control over your hardware and software environment might feel nice, but with Web Services APIs and hardwired integrations, it’s a legacy illusion.

Lower ongoing costs? On demand requires subscription fees, but are clearly an advantage over on-premise license, implementation, and ongoing maintenance fees for a greater return on investment. Want to switch on demand providers? Go ahead. It’s much less costly than changing ERP applications.

Many of the largest and most complex global companies with their sophisticated IT environments have chosen Taleo for on demand talent management. The choice for a small business without those kinds of IT resources is even simpler. Explore Taleo Business Edition to learn more.

Many top employers are taking a try before you buy approach to hiring the hundreds or thousands of new entry level workers they need every year. Internships provide a valuable way to get to know the person before committing to a permanent hire. Employers and interns both get a low risk opportunity to find a perfect fit.

The 2006 Experiential Education Survey done by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) reports that employers offer jobs to more than 70% of interns. 75% of offers are accepted with a 53% full-time hire conversion rate. That’s a great success story for campus recruiting.

The success rate of these real world auditions are also a welcome counterpoint to the dismal findings of the recent report, Are They Really Ready to Work?, lamenting student skill levels. Maybe there is no lack of skills and abilities in the upcoming generation of workers, after all?

The Offshoring Research Network (ORN) is a joint effort of the Center for International Business Education Research (CIBER) at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and global consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. They have been conducting a multi-year survey and panel study, collecting firm level data on the offshoring experiences of companies across many industries for the last three years.

The newly released report, Next Generation Offshoring, The Globalization of White Collar Work, takes a comprehensive look at drivers, employment impact, location choices, and risks of offshoring analyzed by industry, region, and company size.

Survey says:
1. Labor arbitrage is giving way to accessing talent as the primary driver of next-generation offshoring.
2. Offshoring high-skilled functions does not replace jobs onshore.
3. Companies look elsewhere, because they can’t get it at home.
4. Where you offshore depends on what you offshore.
5. The obstacles to successful offshoring are increasingly internal and organizational.

Implications:
1. Businesses must develop a global workforce sourcing strategy now.
2. Organizational transformation is essential for success in the new business world.
3. Promote policies that cultivate innovation.

Although Information Technology (IT) is still the most popular offshoring function and the prognostication for the future is that IT offshoring will continue to grow at double digit rates, the survey results place HR at the top of the growth in offshoring by business function.

Then again, for a much more whimsical look at those HR jobs described by workers of the future, check out the charming video at www.hr.com/grow.

Here’s a glass half full or half empty item. Readiness for sudden succession by HR professionals is either laudable with 59% prepared or dismal with 41% unprepared, according to SHRM’s 2006 Succession Planning Report.

Succession planning is one spoke in the talent management wheel and can be a driver of business performance when executed well. Find out more about successful talent management in our upcoming webcast: “Will Talent Management Drive the Future of HR?” on November 8, 2006. Joining me will be Kent Kirch, Global Director of Recruitment, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. You’ll hear about real-world examples of value generation through talent management practices and technology.

And the answer to how full is the glass? It all depends on whether you’re filling it or drinking from it…