The Economist Intelligence Unit’s CEO Briefing: Corporate priorities for 2007 and beyond sends a clear global talent message. More than 1,000 executives (half of them at C-level) responded to The Economist’s online survey. Note this finding:

“The dynamism of emerging markets largely explains the spring in the executive step. For the second year running, rising demand in the developing world is seen as the most critical force at play in the global marketplace. A clear majority of respondents intends to invest more time and money in emerging markets over the next three years than in developed markets.”

According to 50% of executives, the most significant factor to growth in emerging markets is the talent gap:

“One of the biggest problems that businesses will contend with in 2007 is a shortage of talent. This is especially true in emerging markets, where one in two respondents identify a lack of available talent as the primary barrier to growth.”

Also, 22% of executives expect to invest heavily in recruitment/talent—even more than in IT infrastructure and operations & production. For HR, the message is to revisit your talent strategies for emerging markets. At Taleo, we’ve anticipated this need. Here are some resources:

Listen to our archived webcast: Recruiting in Emerging Markets
Hear Judy Panagakos of JPMorgan Chase, Frank Wittenauer of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Pete Engardio of BusinessWeek, and Don Chun of Taleo offer expert advice on developing recruiting strategies to succeed in China and India.

See how the Taleo Global Foundation can help you succeed. Read the Talent Management International overview article. Then download the free Managing Global Deployments white paper.

Quantifying the impact of high quality talent to an organization is an interesting challenge. In the tradition of McKinsey’s seminal War for Talent study, and Watson Wyatt’s ongoing Human Capital Index work, Hewitt Associates has released its version.

The Talent Quotient is a human capital metric that quantifies the financial impact of pivotal employees on an organization’s business results.

Hewitt analyzed the HR data of more than 1,000 large companies and 20 million employees to determine the financial impact of human capital programs. Results showed that the flow of pivotal employees—defined as employees in the top quartile of their peers in pay progression—into and out of an organization is a strong predictor of changes in Cash Flow Return on Investment (CFROI) and shareholder value.

According to Hewitt’s research, for the average Fortune 500 company with about $10 billion in sales, a 10-point improvement in TQ Retain could improve a company's CFROI by 0.7 to 1.6 percentage points on average over three years, or approximately $70 million to $160 million in cash flow.

The Talent Quotient presents another validated reason to emphasize the processes and technology to acquire and retain valued employees.

The New York Times recently reported on Google using automation to accelerate their hiring process in a time of rapid growth: Google Answer to Filling Jobs Is an Algorithm.
With 100,000 applications flowing into Google each month, we’re not surprised.

We commend Google for their use of testing to help select their workforce. Google is surely innovative in many ways, but on this one they've turned to a method many organizations have already been using to achieve volume hiring success.

As they have found through experience, relying solely on interviews and school GPAs is problematical. However, this type of testing is not new to the assessment industry. Combining biodata with personality testing and statistically linking the test to on the job performance measures is not new and essentially required by the professional standards for employee selection.

This process is called criterion validation. In fact, Taleo deploys a very similar methodology and design in our assessment content for campus and hourly selection. We combine biodata, personality, situational judgment, and cognitive ability questions into a single assessment. We also ensure the questions are statistically and practically related to the success criteria for the specific job group. With tailored assessments, each client can predict success criteria that are highly relevant to each job group, such as turnover reduction, sales performance, or dependability.

We believe that well designed assessments can deliver a more useful score than a simple GPA in terms of who makes the grade in an organization’s hiring process.

“Fear of the unknown…” That is the reason cited by a DiversityInc. article to explain why many organizations struggle to recruit and retain qualified people with disabilities. How can business do a better job? Let’s look at some examples of success.

The Best 4 Ways to Recruit Employees With Disabilities offers these recruitment methods taken from interviews with top ten companies listed in The 2006 DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity:

1. Partnerships
2. Human-Resources Training
3. Use Employee-Resource Groups
4. Use Government Organizations/Job Boards

Read the article. Then formalize your strategy around a consistent process that supports your diversity and disability hiring goals. Improve your quality of hire through support of diversity programs that foster innovation with Taleo Compliance. It’s more than just a regulatory imperative; it’s a smart way to tap great talent.

Here at Taleo Research, we’ve followed retail hiring trends for many years. Hourly workers are the largest and one of the fastest growing labor segments. With high average turnover, the sheer volume is staggering. Plus a poor hourly hiring process can impact revenue, customer satisfaction, and brand perception.

We conducted a study on the Top 100 US retailers in 2004. Now we’ve published the 2006 results: Trends in Hourly Job Application Methods at Top 100 Retailers.

Here are some of the key findings:

• 70% accept hourly applications on their corporate website. Of those, 16% accept only online applications - a significant increase from 41% in 2004.

• In-store automated hourly applications have become more prevalent with 37% providing a kiosk or computer station versus 22% in 2004.

• Surprisingly, 44% accept in-store paper applications. But 22 retailers still accept only paper applications!

Retailers are using technology to help with hiring and recruiting, yet they still have a long way to go. Nearly half could lose the paper process and optimize hourly volume hiring to streamline communications, provide more reliable reporting, and reduce recruitment costs.

Automation also improves speed of hiring and enhances your ability to recruit and retain top performers. The message is clear. Get automated before your competitors hire all the best talent.

Recruiters are spending more on online media ($5.9 billion) than they are on print ($5.4 billion). These figures were reported in the 2007 Outlook: Online Recruitment Advertising report published by Borrell Associates last month.

Here are some quotes from the executive summary:

“When the history of Internet advertising is written, recruitment sites will undoubtedly dominate the first chapter.”

“With so much activity, we expect recruitment advertising online to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 10.3 percent over the next five years, approaching $10 billion by 2011.”

These statements are consistent with what The Conference Board has reported about the dramatic 17% rise during 2006 in online advertised job vacancies.

In just a few short years, the power of Internet technology combined with on demand best practices has made it possible for organizations of all sizes to achieve success by cutting advertising costs while improving business performance.

According to the eWeek article, Survey: Talent Management a Top Concern, nearly 62% of respondents to an HR executive survey by ORC Worldwide cite talent management as a key strategic issue. And 33% predict talent management will take up most of their time during the coming year.

The results of this study don't come as a surprise to us. But they do demonstrate once again how important talent management has become when HR executives look to develop strategies for improving business performance.

While playing the report title The Great Divide off the Australian Great Dividing Range, a study of Australian work attitudes reveals a serious disconnect:

• Almost 90% of employers believe that up to 80% of their workforce will be stable for two years.
• Yet, 74% of employees say that they will move either as soon as possible or when the right opportunity comes along.
• Furthermore, 62% of employees believed that their career path requires that they leave their current employer.

The issues of perception based on viewpoint are not confined to Australia, but are repeatedly revealed in studies in many locations. Can the needed actions be more clear?

Don’t take your employees for granted. They will only stay in a win-win situation. Stress career development and internal mobility opportunities to increase retention. Successful retention strategies require bridging that great divide.

Two retirement studies conclude that many retirement age Canadians won’t be retiring so fast. Depending on the source, half to three quarters of them plan to continue working in their golden years.

A retirement survey from Fidelity Investments has found that, while almost half of baby boomers are planning to retire early, an almost equal amount plan on continuing to work in their retirement.

According to a BMO Financial Group study conducted by Ipsos Reid, three in four pre-retirees in Ontario (73 per cent) expect to work in retirement. In addition, 91 per cent of Ontario boomers stated that they are willing to continue to work if they're not able to save enough to fund their retirement.

Although the baby boomer brain drain may not be as dire as some predictions, this still challenges organizations to engage and retain this valuable talent through attractive work arrangements and favorable benefits.