McKinsey has published another stylish chart. The data points echo the oft-cited disparate (and dismal) view of HR performance – which of course depends on your point of view (POV). Take a look at the perception gap.

Aligning talent strategies with business objectives along with accountability and responsibility perceptions are clear disconnects.

So, HR needs to:

Demonstrate the connection between HR and business performance.

Implement talent metrics and communicate business value.

Analyze and evolve the status of talent management capabilities.

Now let’s focus on areas of near agreement. Most HR professionals and Line managers regard HR as administrative not strategic. Many from both sides think HR lacks authority and respect.

Yet the oddest common perception in the findings is that only about one-third of HR pros and Line managers agree that HR relies too much on best practices when designing systems. Although convoluted, the learning from the study findings seem to indicate more reliance on best practices would be welcome, regardless of your POV!

“Show me the money.” Although sports agent Jerry Maguire provided a different style of human capital management, the words ring true. When it comes to HR contributing to the bottom line, we’ve seen the business value of talent management as have a number of independent analysts and studies. Now there are more proof points that deliver evidence of the growing impact.

The Conference Board’s Evidence-Based HR in Action describes how Taleo customer Hewlett-Packard and others are using a methodology called Evidence Based Human Resources (EBHR) to demonstrate the connection between HR and business performance.

EBHR begins with the notion that talent drives performance. Starting with the financial and organizational performance measures, HR professionals then identify human capital strategies that empirically drive the desired outcomes.

That sounds familiar…in fact, talent drives performance is Taleo’s tagline.

Supporting this connection between HR and business performance in the Age of Talent, two Harvard MBAs explain why HR is the place to be in Why Did We Ever Go Into HR?

HR today sits smack-dab in the middle of the most compelling competitive battleground in business, where companies deploy and fight over that most valuable of resources—workforce talent.

The New HR they describe has evolved to the unified talent management platform and executes with a keen understanding of how talent aligns to the business. They describe a transformed function that creates value, nurtures intellectual capital, connects people, engages employees, and channels people’s strengths.

The arrival of the Millennials of Generation Y taking the seats of retiring Baby Boomers signals it’s time to upgrade career site employment brands with Web 2.0 technology and fire up online social network recruiting connections.

Why? Because connection & collaboration drive career choices for Gen Y. Social utilities are beneficial for the enterprise in both recruiting and daily work. However, this issue carries controversy as social network profiles spark debate about appropriate use of the tools to make social networking job connections.

But there’s no debate when it comes to attracting candidates with technology. Innovative career sites can enhance your employment brand. Register for the webcast: Career Site 2.0: 11 Essential Elements on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 at 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT to learn more.

There’s no doubt the competition level is high in China with the Summer Olympics. And it may be the same on the business front. It seems that hiring and retaining world-class talent is just as competitive.

The McKinsey article, How to address China's growing talent shortage, opens by highlighting the trials:

“The growing need for talented managers in China represents by far the biggest management challenge facing multinationals and locally owned businesses alike…44 percent of the executives at Chinese companies surveyed by The McKinsey Quarterly reported that insufficient talent was the biggest barrier to their global ambitions…”

The article, Chinese ‘Pay Now, Worry Later’ Mentality May Be Retention Killer, describes the hurdles associated with the sport of job-hopping and notes:

“Organizations can mitigate some of their recruiting and retention woes without throwing money at talent. Implementing some basic building blocks of effective reward-program management into compensation considerations might be a good place to start.”

So the judges would say that unified recruiting and performance management practices and a strong employee value proposition are compulsories for the competition in China as they are worldwide.

The Beijing Olympics surely contributed to other business talent shortages by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs to work on the event. Estimates for the 2012 London Olympics peg this number at 100,000 with 27,000 in service industries.

Predicting the future is more art than science, but it can be instructive to speculate on scenarios and extrapolate on trends. In the PricewaterhouseCoopers study Managing tomorrow’s people*: The future of work to 2020 three key themes emerged:

1. Business models will change dramatically.
2. People management will present one of the greatest business challenges.
3. The role of HR will undergo fundamental change.

The report paints HR in the corporate landscape as passively standing at a crossroads with its service baggage where it will choose to become the heart of the organization, drive social responsibility, or get outsourced for acting too transactional while retaining the people sourcing function.

In line with these themes, unified talent management offers HR a combined process, strategic, and bottom line approach to become the heart of business performance. It’s part of our vision of The Future of Talent Management: The Four Stages of Evolution.

Rich man, poor man,
Beggar man, thief.
Doctor, lawyer,
Indian chief!

That’s the traditional counting rhyme. Depending on which positions you are trying to fill, here’s some interesting rankings of job types: wanted or not, easy and hard to fill, and those in demand:

The 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill Worldwide, as reported by employers for 2008:
1. Skilled Manual Trades
2. Sales Representatives
3. Technicians
4. Engineers
5. Management/Executives
6. Laborers
7. Secretaries/Administrative Assistants
8. Drivers
9. Accounting & Finance Staff
10. IT Staff

The top 5 of the Top 20 Most Recession-Proof Professions:
1. Sales Representative/Business Development
2. Software Design/Development
3. Nursing
4. Accounting & Finance Executive
5. Accounting Staff

The occupations at the top of the Most Prestigious Occupations list:
• Firefighter (57% say "very great prestige");
• Scientist (56%);
• Doctor (53%);
• Nurse (52%);
• Teacher (52%)
When the numbers for "very great" and "considerable prestige" are added, all of these occupations are very favorably regarded by 74 percent or more of all adults.

The Least Prestigious Occupations:
Only 15 percent or fewer adults regard the following occupations as having very great prestige:
• Real estate agent/broker (6%);
• Stock broker (10%);
• Banker (15%);
• Accountant (15%);
• Entertainer (15%)
Substantial majorities of adults (from 61% to 83%) believe that these occupations have "hardly any" or only "some" prestige.

But there are also trends that bear watching. It’s a good time to be an IT worker. Green industries offer job growth opportunity. And the Federal commission calls for two million poll workers. Let’s hope they do a better job hiring for those positions than when the Justice Department hired lawyers!