If you missed the last post, be sure to look at BusinessWeek’s The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies and how these organizations drive success. Their formula:

“They nurture cultures that value creative people in good times and bad.”

IBM used to have a cultural mantra posted in their offices: THINK. Apple used the tagline: THINK DIFFERENT. How about: THINK CREATIVE…because creativity drives success.

Ready to Innovate: Are Educators and Executives Aligned on the Creative Readiness of the U.S. Workforce? from The Conference Board offers some artful insights on the disconnect in business between creativity and innovation.

99% of educators and 97% of employers believe that arts are crucial for teaching creative thinking. But they don’t necessarily back beliefs with action. Says Jonathan Spector, Chief Executive Officer of The Conference Board:

"In particular, we believe it is time for employers to evaluate how well their corporate support of education and the arts, as well as their own employee-training programs, stack up against the strategic value they themselves place on innovation and its creative underpinning.”

If arts are primarily elective, then is innovation mostly optional? We don’t think so. Neither should business, however:

“…among those employers who cite creativity as a primary hiring criterion…80% provide the three activities/training options that they say best develop creativity — working in departments other than their own, managerial coaching, and mentoring — only on an ‘as needed’ basis.”

The summary statement says it all:

“...this new research shows that both businesses and schools recognize the critical role of creativity as a workforce skill, and both groups accept the role they have in fostering it. Both also recognize that arts-training is a key way to foster creativity. Yet despite this recognition, most schools do not include arts training as a mandatory part of the curriculum, and most businesses provide creativity-fostering training only to very few employees. With this growing recognition of the role a creative workforce has on the global competitiveness of American business, both business and education leaders need to examine what changes can be made to more widely foster these skills in our current — and especially our future — workers.”

How many times have you seen business executives wave their hand and call for increased innovation? Usually it’s when business results are not up to par. Innovation does not just happen. It’s driven by a number of factors and we believe talent is #1.

In tough economic times when it’s much easier to think of cost-cutting and pulling back on R & D, the innovative keep on going. They focus on business advantages and talent opportunities regardless of the economic season.

BusinessWeek's article and recent ranking of The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies in association with the Boston Consulting Group summarizes how these organizations drive success:

“They nurture cultures that value creative people in good times and bad.”

There is no innovation setting on the business control panel. You can’t just switch it on. But you can formalize processes to help jumpstart your culture. Talent management is the strategy that sets the table for innovation.

More and more executives are seeing the results and making talent a top priority. In fact, on the Scoreboard of Innovative Companies, we noticed that 11 of the top 15 and nearly 45% of the top 50 are using talent strategies and advanced online tools to source and hire top talent.

How do we know? They are Taleo customers. We look forward to seeing them at Taleo WORLD 2008 later this year to discuss new ideas and outline their winning talent strategies.

Google asked the question What will you do for Earth Day '08? There you can see a map of the globe or the continental US with suggestions ranging from using biodegradable golf tees to walking to work instead of driving. You can also submit your own message and scroll down to view suggested actions.

We’d like to reiterate our green suggestion to move from paper resumes and manual forms of recruiting to career sites and eRecruiting. Because when the solution is a service, everybody wins. In addition to the obvious paper savings, here’s how Planet Earth wins:

SaaS is green and eRecruiting delivered on demand is much greener than traditional paper processes or on-premise solutions that create redundant computing environments:
“Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications running in a multi-tenant environment…tend to be greener than on-premise software and servers. Multi-tenancy delivers more efficient power utilization per customer resulting in a smaller carbon footprint…helping reduce carbon emissions instead of powering more servers.”

Green is the color of successful recruiting. People are investigating employer brands to see what companies are doing to help the environment. Differentiate your brand and get green with eRecruiting.

A new global study, Creating People Advantage: How to Address HR Challenges Worldwide Through 2015, conducted by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA), and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) surveyed 4,741 executives in 83 countries and markets.

Here is their major finding:

Managing talent is the most critical human resources (HR) challenge worldwide.

The report also ranks the global priorities:

Globally, Eight Topics Demand The Most Immediate Action and The Greatest Attention

Business managers and executives also voted with their reading choices. The McKinsey Quarterly Top Ten Newsletter reported that Making talent a strategic priority ranked #2 last quarter in popularity among McKinsey readers.

More and more board members, business executives, and line managers are embracing the concepts of talent management as a core business strategy for success. They realize that the war for talent is real and talent management is a concept that drives results up and down the organization.

A new unified approach to talent management takes advantage of the natural synergies between recruiting and performance management on a single platform.

This creates an opportunity for HR to get the top down support it needs to make the investment and realize the returns. Along those lines, Knowledge Infusion explains How to Buy a Talent Management Suite. And Bersin & Associates makes The Business Case for Performance Management Systems.

Survey shows nearly half of UK job seekers use the Internet to apply for jobs:

• 43% of workers applied online or sent a CV by email.
• 53% preferred online methods due to the fast response time.
• 24% found online job searching to be less time consuming
• 13% appreciated the ability to apply for many jobs at once.
• 27% still use word of mouth as the traditional way to get employment.

On the employer side, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says that using the Internet:

• 71% reduce recruitment costs.
• 41% increase speed of hiring.

Concurrently, there is a surge of momentum towards online recruitment advertising in the UK. In The Success of Online Recruitment Advertising, Onrec.com reports rapid growth due to enhanced audience engagement, measurability, and targeting with the online process. Their numbers demonstrate how success breeds success:

• 72% of online job seekers applied for jobs.
• 65% of online seekers gained interviews.
• 56% of interviewees got the jobs.

Additional benefits are expected when companies extend their recruitment strategies to employment branding. This is where Web 2.0 technologies come into play to make recruiting more personal and intuitive.

Enhance Media saw this trend and projected that The internet will be the UK’s largest recruitment medium by 2008!

UK Online Ad Revenues Predicted to Overtake TV in 2009 according to the World Advertising Research Center – with recruitment at the forefront.

Classified web advertising saw a 54% year-on-year leap to £585.3m in 2007, recruitment firms leading the pack with 25.7% market share.

Yet, in our study Careers Site Recruiting in the FTSE 100 Companies: A Missed Opportunity last year, 49% of companies were still relying on email or physical CVs to drive their process. UK companies can seize this opportunity and create competitive advantage with eRecruiting. The data on jobseeker and recruiter use of the Internet and the benefits proves the tipping point is here.

DiversityInc.com has published The 2008 Top 50 Companies for Diversity List. More than 350 companies that have more than 1,000 employees participated. We’re pleased to note that nearly half of the top 20 for the past two years are companies that use Taleo.

Congratulations also to Taleo customer JPMorgan Chase who was ranked #1 of the Top 10 Companies for Recruitment & Retention, is considered “a longtime human-capital diversity leader”, and also made the Top Ten Companies for Executive Women.

Not focusing on diversity is simply bad business. The impact of workplace unfairness on retention is costing the US economy an estimated $64 billion per year in turnover of managers and professionals according to The Corporate Leavers Survey published by the Level Playing Field Institute.

A commitment to the power of diversity goes beyond simply employing compliance in the hiring process. It’s an organizational culture initiative. However, having systems in place that measure and monitor diversity certainly help a company know where it stands.

Making the board more strategic: A McKinsey Global Survey outlines responses from nearly 600 corporate directors. What are they thinking? They are concerned about developing more forward-thinking strategies for value creation and shareholder return. What’s at the bottom in terms of time spent yet primarily top of mind? Talent management.

Boards and Time

Leading the pack of issues, 53% of respondents would like to see more time devoted to this initiative. Add this insight to the epiphany at Davos and current CIO thinking, the “war for talent” coined by McKinsey a decade ago is on everyone’s minds from the top down.

Executive minds are rethinking priorities when it comes to talent management. They want more strategic thinking around talent. The exciting news for HR is that board level leaders know what value talent brings to business and what kinds of results can be achieved by the organization.

Of course succession planning is there. But note the emphasis on Defining optimum organizational structure and core skills, capabilities needed below the top team. That lines up with the value of unified performance and recruiting and a talent master system of record.

Now that talent management is top of mind from the board room to HR, now is the time to plant the seeds of opportunity, regardless of the economic season.

BusinessWeek’s Debate Room recently featured Employers, Get Outta My Facebook on the issue of employers using profiles on social networking sites to evaluate job applicants. Check out the pro/con arguments and have a look at the comments.

Making legitimate social network job connections is powerful for recruiting, especially if you want to net the net generation. Structured data is replacing the traditional resume. Mapping migratory career paths between companies is becoming more transparent. And blogs are changing the recruiting landscape in terms of finding talent.

The proliferation of online personas created by people is now widespread. Just make sure you know where to draw the line if you Google your candidates. Because a majority of people feel that’s taking recruiting a step too far, as expressed in this comment:

…What would you think of a potential employer that drove to your house to gauge your “status” and neighborhood and how meticulously you kept up your house?

ExecutNet’s report Dealing With Your Digital Dirt reveals that executive recruiters are supplementing candidate research with online searches that they admit has serious ramifications:

Our bottom line is that online sources such as blogs and social networking can be a prime source of passive candidates for many recruiters. However, we’ll leave the background checking and ongoing screening to the professionals.

The National Law Journal’s story Employment tests may fail legal exam and recent settlements regarding testing procedures in the hiring process have raised a few eyebrows. Since many more companies are using some form of aptitude testing, the number of discrimination complaints regarding job screening tests has also risen.

"This is an enforcement priority for the EEOC right now," said Michael Rosen, a management-side attorney at Boston’s Foley Hoag. "That in and of itself is something that employers should be paying attention to."

Organizations can take certain steps to maximize the level of defensibility of the selection tests they deploy. Trouble begins when you use tests that are not properly developed for your company and/or your positions.

According to Nathan Mondragon Ph.D., a Senior Industrial Psychologist at Taleo, following these five steps could help maximize the legal defensibility of your selection tests:

1. Conduct an analysis of the jobs for which tests will be deployed.
2. Select tests that will best predict competency or develop custom versions.
3. Statistically validate the test with job outcome criteria.
4. Establish selection cut-offs to differentiate between poor, good, and excellent scores.
5. Continually check and revalidate tests over regular periods of time.