Measuring quality of hire is a perennially important—and somewhat problematic—issue. We covered it in our Quality of Hire: The Next Edge in Corporate Performance paper and HCI webcast Measuring Quality of Hire: You Can't Improve What You Can't Measure.

Now, there’s some buzz about a BusinessWeek podcast and column by Jack Welch: The Hiring Batting Average: Improving your chances of hiring right. Read, for example, The HR Capitalist blog posting, Do You Measure Your Manager's Effectiveness at Hiring? and Dr. John Sullivan’s article What Is Your Hiring Batting Average?.

The Hiring Batting Average (HBA) concept extends a quality of hire measurement out to more stakeholders—especially to the actions and recommendations of hiring managers. Of course it’s hard to hit a home run if your hiring manager behaviors are turning off your top candidates.

Two-thirds of jobseekers reported that the interviewer influences their decision to accept a position, according to DDI/Monster’s Selection Forecast 2006-2007: Slugging Through the War for Talent.

The most annoying interviewer behaviors?

Learning to hit hiring home runs requires a process that is optimized — from spring training conditioning all the way through consistent contact at the point of impact.

We were happy to get a note from Josh Bersin, CEO at Bersin & Associates, who wanted to highlight some of his firm's recent research on talent management: High Impact Talent Management®. The focus of the research was to identify:

• Business drivers and specific industry solutions that organizations are implementing.
• Level of maturity and adoption of different processes and systems.
• The highest impact talent management solutions.

Bersin analyzed more than 1 million data elements from 750+ corporations to develop these findings. Here are some of Josh’s comments about that report:

The best way to develop a focused strategy is to consider talent management a business strategy not an HR strategy. For example, many retail organizations need to develop talent acquisition, management, training, and succession programs. If they focus in a critical job area, their entire talent management strategy can be easy to define and actionable.

1. The biggest impact area is performance management.
2. The second highest process area was competency management.
3. The third major area which is becoming urgently critical is sourcing and recruiting.
4. The whole area of workforce planning needs tremendous focus.

We’ve always agreed that HR can add more value by better aligning talent with business objectives using the right solutions. And the best place to start is by developing talent management strategies that provide focused and immediate impact to the business. That’s how talent turns business goals into business performance.

The challenge of aligning the workforce with the organization’s goals is clearly not confined to large, complex, global businesses. In fact, it’s the focus of a study aptly titled, 2007 SMB Owner Trends: Aligning People with Business Goals.

What’s not surprising is that the Achilles Group study found that Finding and retaining talent is by far the biggest SMB challenge. We know eRecruiting is no longer limited to large organizations.

Recruiting talent was identified as the biggest HR challenge–although HR respondents didn’t equally emphasize the challenges of talent management initiatives such as performance management or retaining talent.

Although this is a study specific to small and medium businesses, remarks in the study’s introduction easily apply to businesses of all sizes:

People matter — success is linked to people, because labor costs represent the largest ongoing cash disbursement and because financial performance is typically tied to the people capacity of an organization.

In contrast to the hiring processes implied in the survey results we covered in Insights Into Making Hiring Decisions, Dana Green, talent acquisition and relocation manager for Taleo customer Toyota Motor Sales USA, Inc., provides a great description of Toyota’s approach and process for talent acquisition and talent management.

The Kaizen of Toyota Recruiting describes the effects of Toyota’s place on Fortune's most admired companies list, explains recruiting at Toyota, and outlines the practices they use to make Toyota an employer of choice for jobseekers.

Notably, the recruiting process at Toyota is not a silo. It extends into the organization’s work around the employee value proposition. The article is worth a read to learn about good talent practices in action.

For all the effort and resources being used to evolve the hiring process from art to science, here are some disappointing results from two studies:

Hiring managers often know whether they might hire someone soon after the opening handshake and small talk, a new survey suggests. Executives polled said it takes them just 10 minutes to form an opinion of job seekers, despite meeting with staff-level applicants for 55 minutes and management-level candidates for 86 minutes, on average.

That’s what Robert Half Finance & Accounting says.

Eighty-eight percent of executives said they consider a post-interview thank-you note influential when evaluating candidates, a slight increase from when executives were asked this same question five years ago (86 percent in 2002).

Executives also were asked, “How do you prefer to receive thank-you messages from candidates following interviews?”
Their responses:
Handwritten note: 52%
E-mail: 44%
Prefer to receive both: 3%
Don't know: 1%

Those findings come from an Accountemps survey.

10 minute decisions by one-minute managers? Handwritten notes? Relying on your gut? Beware. You can make either a good or bad decision in the blink of an eye. First impressions, a cordial attitude, and thank-you notes have a ceremonial place in determining cultural fit during the interview process. But they surely shouldn’t replace or override scientific hiring decisions made on the basis of validated pre-assessments, candidate skills, experience, and interests.

Turnover for financial officers—CFOs, controllers, treasurers—is decreasing (albeit still high in the range of 13%), according to Russell Reynold’s Financial Officers’ Turnover, 2007 Study. But, as outlined in the article, CFOs need to rise above the financials, they are struggling to assert their influence in business decisions.

Chief financial officers (CFOs) and finance executives need to improve the quality of their organisations’ management information if they are to fulfil their ambition of updating their role and influencing senior decision-makers, according to a survey by CFO Europe Research Services for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Substitute Human Resource executives for CFOs in that finding and it sure sounds familiar!

Here are four different takes on the ongoing debate about baby boomer retirement, potential for turnover, and the associated perceptions and actions.

Preparing for an Aging Workforce: A Focus on New York Businesses from AARP found:

• 62 percent believe their business is likely to face a shortage of qualified workers within the next five years, but only 23 percent say they have taken steps to prepare for potential worker shortages due to baby boomer retirements.

Steps taken?

Buck Consulting’s report, The Real Talent Debate: Will Aging Boomers Deplete the Workforce?, found:

Only 42 percent of employers believe that the aging workforce issue is significant, while 29 percent believe the issue has little or no significance. Differences in opinion vary by industry and seem to be related to perceptions regarding the relative age of employees in each industry group. For example, respondents from high technology companies, with a younger workforce, generally assign less significance to the issue than do representatives of health care organizations, which typically employ a more mature workforce. This is reinforced when learning that the primary reason (53 percent) respondents indicated that this is not an issue is that their workforces will not be eligible for retirement within the next five to ten years.

Meanwhile, employees who were asked “How long do you plan to stay with your current employer?” in a What Workers Want survey, said:

And another contrary view is presented in The Talent-Shortage Myth, by Workforce Management editor John Hollon…

Does your organization have—or need—a baby boomer exit strategy?

UK companies that employ successful talent management practices have an immediate opportunity to gain the talent advantage over their competitors. Here’s why:

A study by KPMG and the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) showed that “Recruitment is now the top problem for more than half of all UK companies ahead of business strategy or management.”

Onrec.com reports in War for Talent worsens with further tightening of Labour Market that more than 80% percent of UK companies see hiring problems ahead, according to the Recruitment Confidence Index (RCI).

A study of more than 42,000 managers by the Chartered Management Institute and Remuneration Economics has found that eight out of 10 British firms are facing chronic problems when it comes to attracting managers, and are being forced to offer an ever greater range of incentives to lure them in. A third are now offering “golden hellos”, compared with just 16 per cent in 2006.

The UK Talent Report from Capital Consulting and Cranfield School of Management reveals that while 60% think talent management is important, only about 40% are doing something about it. About half cite financial investment as an obstacle.

Their findings are consistent with the Taleo Research report, Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies: A Missed Opportunity, that describes how only half (51%) of all FTSE 100 companies allow candidates to apply online through a structured application form to support an automated process.

In addition to confirming that the business environment has changed, the UK Talent Report states these reasons for focusing on talent:

• mounting global competition for increasingly itinerant talent;
• a shrinking pipeline of new talent due to an ageing workforce; and
• a burgeoning knowledge economy requiring highly skilled managers and technicians.

The challenge—and opportunity—is there now for UK companies.

The recent All-Around HR Players: Knowing It All article discusses a trend towards filling HR executive positions with professionals experienced in other disciplines and departments. This could go a long way towards promoting more of an HR business-based view because these executives bring their broad corporate knowledge to developing HR strategies.

And it may be a good personal move for the executives as well. An ExecuNet survey found HR execs have the highest job satisfaction levels across professions.

Increased internal corporate mobility, a sophisticated business approach, high job satisfaction…maybe this way more VPs of HR will go on to become CEOs!