Some Sobering Facts

• Research done by Nobel Laureate Michael Spence for the Council on Foreign Relations found that over the last 30 years, companies of all types have increased the profitability of their operations, but companies that trade goods and services have created almost no “net new” jobs in the US between 1990 and 2008.  Spence further notes that absent high growth in the non-tradable sector, notably healthcare and government jobs, the US “would have already faced a major employment challenge [prior to 2008].”  In other words, the concept of a “jobless” recovery is not only real, it’s directly tied to offshoring.
• The above trend is more troubling still when you factor in technology advances that make more and more work “tradable.”  Thirty years ago, “reading an x-ray” wasn’t a tradable service.  Today, due to advances in telecommunications technology and digital compression, it is.  Automation advances, whether through robotics or software, also impact the challenge of “net new” jobs by reducing the number of workers required to produce an end product or by reducing the skillset to complete a given job.
• Given the above, a huge area of growth is knowledge work.  In fact, a report by Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce shows that by 2018, we will need 22 million new college degrees—but will fall short of that number by at least 3 million post­secondary degrees, Associate’s or better. In addition, we will need at least 4.7 million new workers with postsecondary certificates.
• Despite the clear needs above, the percent of US workers with a college degree isn’t growing all that fast.  In February of this year, the press widely celebrated a new milestone in educational attainment in the US: more than 30% of the adult population now have at least a bachelor’s degree.  While this is a significant milestone, it’s also significant for what it is not: a big positive movement; 30.4 percent is only four percent growth over the 26.2 percent attainment level of 1990 (US Census Bureau).
• While college attainment is its own index of workforce readiness, another is the prevalence of untapped talent pools.  And here again, we have some work to do.  Forty percent of all minority students fail to finish high school (American Promise).  How many of these students have the raw intellectual capability to go on to college?  Another untapped pool?   Those who start college but fail to finish – 17% of the working age population in the US (Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Corporate Workforce Connections

While global companies can take advantage of the growth in tradable jobs and tradable services, they also need to proactively develop talent.  Thus far, global companies have largely capitalized on the emergence of a global talent market by poaching talent and shifting work to emerging markets.  This strategy has largely worked to date, but it’s already bumping up against two inevitable realities: boomer retirement and the maturation of emerging economies.  On the former front, the worldwide challenge of boomer retirement in nearly every mature economy and even some emerging ones like China is going to make it very difficult to staff senior roles on a global basis.  On the latter front, the strong growth in BRIC countries means that global firms are not only facing talent shortages “in country” but also stronger competition for talent in their home countries as competition from emerging markets begins to expand globally.

In fact, research by IBM shows that “34 percent of CHROs in growth markets say they anticipate increasing headcount in North America over the next three years, while 37 percent plan additional investment in Western Europe. This includes companies from India, where 45 percent of respondents indicated they plan to increase headcount in North America and 44 percent in Western Europe.” (“Working Beyond Borders,” Jan 2011)

While the preceding data largely addressed the challenges facing the US economy, a recent report by Accenture highlights nearly identical challenges in Europe – lack of strong corporate development practices, growing disconnects between the workforce and the work, and an inability for government or business to address the gaps by themselves.  In other words, the challenges of work / workforce disconnects are systemic, resulting from the rapid the shift from industrial to knowledge based economies and the unrelenting technological advances that enabled such a shift in the first place.  Global companies therefore can’t simply ignore these challenges by relocating workforces and work outside the US.

In other words, the War for Talent has started again, even absent full economic recoveries in the mature economies of West Europe and the US.  If these markets start to really turn the corner, the lack of global talent is going to be a limiting factor in the growth strategies of global companies.

Suggested Strategies

• Take an inventory of the capabilities you have today and the capabilities you need over the next five years.
• Think through the right mix of hiring for the missing capabilities vs. developing the capabilities internally.
• Invest in the long-term hiring / employer of choice strategies to attract the right kind of candidates, including learning and development incentives to attract quality candidates.
• Invest in the development and training capabilities you need to grow your people in support of your strategies.
• Invest in talent mobility strategies that enable you to move talent across geographies and divisions, not just vertically through promotion.
• Invest in deep succession planning and critical skills development.  Map out the career paths, capabilities, and experiences for critical roles and senior leadership positions so that you can cast a wide net for high potentials and possible successors.
• Develop a strong culture of learning and development and reward those managers who are your best talent incubators.
• If you are a big enough player in your industry, consider partnering directly with policy makers in various countries to support education reforms and talent-friendly policies regarding talent mobility and employee development.

With the impending retirement of boomers, the growing disconnect between the work and the workforce, and the fast growth in emerging economies, many companies are going to be surprised by the intensity of the talent wars in the coming years.  Now is the time to think through your strategies and your approach so that you can lay the foundation for success.  Smart companies will find ways to tap into global talent and leverage underutilized talent pools.  Those that fail to plan will end up paying more for the right talent, either in opportunity costs and direct costs, assuming they can successfully compete at all.

At Taleo, we recently conducted some research into critical talent pipelines, which I presented at the event. The results were upbeat, with more businesses expecting their workforces to increase than decrease this year, and most reporting that voluntary turnover was stable. However, while 94% of HR directors surveyed said that they identify with the notion of critical roles, only 60% were confident that they had the right people in these positions. This suggests that better ways of managing critical talent pipelines are needed.

So how do you know which are the critical roles for your organisation? Generally, it appears that they are either the roles without which the business could not operationally function, or those that can have a significant impact on the bottom line. These roles are the ones most likely to restrain growth if you don’t have a sharp focus on how to fill them with the best people.  During the discussion, audience members also highlighted other criteria, e.g., roles of high strategic importance, and roles necessary for compliance.

Dr Ray Glennon, Senior Talent Management Consultant at SHL, explained how companies need to go about getting it right, by first identifying their critical roles, and then asking: How do I know if the critical roles are being done well? He said that businesses should compare the skills of their critical talent with industry averages to identify where they should be looking to develop internal talent or recruit externally. Using 80 million (yes, 80 million!) different data points, SHL’s analytics help businesses to understand how critical data is used during the recruitment process – for example, measuring the quality of direct applicants compared to agency sourced candidates, so that any threats or opportunities can be identified and rectified.

However, getting better at external recruitment is only half the picture. It’s often more important to focus on developing and upskilling internal talent. The key is to have some sense of what the balance should be between internal talent supply and external recruitment. To measure this, you need access to robust data.
On that theme, Claire Guberg, Global Talent Systems Manager at IHG, talked us through her company’s massive drive to know more about their internal talent. IHG is the largest hotel operator in the world by number of rooms, and employs 345,000 people in 4,480 hotels across 100 countries. Furthermore, they are planning to make around 256,000 direct hires over the next three years, and hope to source many of these people internally. So as part of their ongoing talent management plans, IHG holds bi-annual Global Careers Weeks, during which they encourage all their staff to create and manage talent profiles which tell the business about their skills and ambitions. In the last two years, they have seen awareness of internal mobility and opportunities increase amongst their staff by a significant 8%, bringing it up to 85%.

An interesting theme to come out of the event was that your critical talent may not always be who you think they are. For example, IHG pointed out that to open a new hotel, it’s essential that they have a general manager in place, and staff to handle the day-to-day running, such as receptionists and cleaners. However, candidates for these day-to-day roles can be sourced relatively easily, and so are not considered critical. General managers on the other hand can take up to six months to source, meaning that these individuals prove much more critical when a new hotel is opening. To learn more, read the IHG case study.

To further illustrate this point, Dr Glennon mentioned a very interesting example involving Disney World. The theme park found that one of the major influences on visitor enjoyment was how well staff were able to answer questions around the location of rides or amenities… and the staff member visitors were most likely to ask was the road sweeper. Because of this, Disney road sweepers become the critical talent in the park and have an unexpectedly high influence on the business’ bottom line.

If you are interested in finding out more about critical talent pipelines, I am giving a webinar on Critical Talent Pipelines tomorrow, May 3, at 2:00 pm UK / 3:00 pm CET (9:00 am EST). You can also see the Taleo Research paper “UK Critical Talent Pipelines in 2012″ or contact the Taleo UK team on 0208 987 1210.

Some key findings:

• 20% of employees are actively looking for new jobs
• 50% of employees are open to new opportunities but not actively looking
• LinkedIn and Facebook have roughly the same levels of “professional” usage
• 45% of employees use social networks for professional purposes (and the use of social networks for professional purposes increases as age decreases)
• Only 1 in 4 employees feel that their employer is leveraging their social networks
• Employees overwhelmingly feel that their colleagues know more about their skills, experience, and career aspirations than their managers

What does this mean for recruitment?

The fact that up to 70%(!) of employees are either actively or passively open to changing jobs is both an opportunity and a threat. If the average UK office worker is a “job flirt” then employers needs to start flirting too.

From an employer’s perspective, the “flirting,” should be driven by a social media/networking strategy to target both internal and external networks.  And just like in real dating, companies should use their friends and connections to help potential relationships.  Companies can do this in two main ways:

• Tapping into employee social networks for referrals
• Leveraging peer expertise to identify possible internal candidates

Another interesting finding was the mix of LinkedIn and Facebook usage.  For office workers I had always assumed that the use of LinkedIn for job related networking would far exceed the use of Facebook, but the research suggests otherwise. I don’t think I’m alone in making this false assumption. Many of the large enterprise companies that I meet with to discuss Talent Management strategies focus their social sourcing budgets on LinkedIn while often having little or no presence on Facebook. There are of course exceptions, for instance Dell’s presence on Facebook, but I would contend that that is the exception rather than the rule at the moment. So, if your organisation doesn’t have a Facebook presence, it might be time to start thinking about how best to change that (regardless of your industry).

Engaged employees, according to the research, are keen to leverage their networks for the benefit of their employer. This can have a huge impact on both external recruitment and internal mobility. As we all tend to network with people in similar roles, industries, companies and so on, companies should encourage employees to post relevant vacancies as status updates on LinkedIn or to their wall on Facebook. On LinkedIn, shared jobs tend to be shared again on average 15 times. Imagine the job distribution that can be achieved to relevant audiences at no cost to your business – it will transform the way you source talent.

Moving the focus internally, the research discovered that employees feel that members of their internal networks understand their capabilities and experience far more than their managers.  And who typically recommends employees for new opportunities and succession plans?  In most companies, it’s the manager.  Yet we know from recent research from Blessing White that the number one reason for dysfunctional turnover is a lack of career development and related opportunities. Given this body of research, it clearly makes sense to start leveraging employees’ internal networks for internal referrals and peer nominations. Referral programmes tend to focus on bringing in external talent, but given the results of our research, not encouraging internal referrals would appear to be a missed opportunity. I’d even suggest that companies go to the next step and allow employees nominate each other for open roles and for succession plans.

What does this mean for Talent Management?

Quite simply this could mean a revolution in Talent Management.

Talent Management tends to be quite hierarchical. For instance a manager manages the performance of an employee. The manager may request feedback from 3rd parties on the employee or more often than not they won’t, due to a lack of time or myriad of other reasons. Some employees may be subject to a 360 degree review process, but due to the high administrative burden associated with 360 degree reviews the majority of employees will have the standard manager review. As organisations have become increasingly virtual with more project based work, the hierarchical model is starting to break down.

Leveraging internal social networks and collaboration provides the potential solution. Employees are telling us that their internal networks know more about their experience and abilities, so we should look to embed these networks and social collaboration into Talent Management processes. By doing so, the perceived value of the processes will increase in the eyes of the stakeholders (the employees and managers), increasing engagement and driving user adoption of supporting technology. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

Social goal and performance management

The focal review process is broken in many ways. Goals are often set once a year and not updated to reflect changing business strategy. Everything – the goal setting, the performance review, career discussion, etc. – is squeezed into this once a year meeting with little preparation on either side. Many managers will only remember what has happened in the last couple of months with regard to the employee, so if you’ve had a good couple of months you’ll get a good review. Time, the associated administration, company culture, and limiting technology are often the root cause of such a broken process.

Transformational Talent Management solutions don’t simply “lift and shift” the review form, but leverage social networks and social collaboration to transform these processes and drive value. Goals shouldn’t be hidden away in a performance review form but should live and breathe throughout the year. Employees should be able to collaborate on their goals with internal networks to drive achievement through knowledge sharing and support networks. As an employee I can choose to share my goals with people in my network who have perhaps had or have similar goals, sharing best practice and working together to achieve excellence. Social technology makes it easier to move away from this focus on the focal review, encouraging (and easing) on going feedback on goal progress, general performance, and competence.  In this new model, the focal review will be transformed into a rubber stamping exercise rather than a potentially confrontational activity where each party has differing expectations entering the meeting.

Social succession planning

I’ve always advocated that talent can be found anywhere within an organisation and that talent management programmes that focus on a limited employee population, often at the highest levels, are delivering limited value. Talent Management technology solutions have gone some way in enabling organisations to extend their talent management programmes to much larger employee populations. Social networks and social collaboration will take talent management to the next level and social succession planning is a great example of this.

Social succession planning looks to exploit internal networks and the “wisdom of crowds” to allow talent to “bubble up” through the organisation. Traditional succession plans are populated with candidates sourced by HR and business leaders. This approach limits the potential pool of successors. Social succession plans reach out to internal employee networks, giving employees the opportunity to nominate potential successors for key positions. This social approach extends the potential succession pool to include all possible talent in the organization and can help identify hidden talent. If a particular employee receives a large number of nominations for a key position, it may well be worthwhile investigating further.  And if that same employee was not recommended by the manager, that may well be worth investigating further as well.

Social talent management is going to provide us all with many opportunities to drive value and although still in its infancy, I believe a lot of people reading this blog are already experimenting in this area. We’d love to hear your stories of what’s working well, and what lessons you have learned, so please add your comments below.

The latest example that is generating a lot of links and buzz is the story of “Caine’s Arcade.” Rarely do I share a video more than once with Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but I made an exception in this case. And as proof of the power of social media, and that you never know where such wonderful, insightful stories will enter into your life, I’ll note that I first learned of this one from a link shared on Twitter by none other than Las Vegas magician Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller fame).

The Story of Caine’s Arcade

I won’t belabor in words the full story of Caine’s Arcade. You are far better off taking eleven minutes and watching the entire video embedded below to learn for yourself.

Pretty wonderful, right? Nine-year-old Caine Monroy’s entrepreneurial spirit, creativity, determination, perseverance, and pure joy at what he was doing – even when he had virtually no customers – goes well beyond the typical cute innocence that most children display. But then when Nirvan Mullick gets involved, orchestrates the flash mob, and we see the great results – it doesn’t get much better than that. Except it does, as at the very end of the video (you did watch all the way through, including all of the credits, didn’t you?) when we hear in Caine’s own words how he feels about what he had accomplished: “… and I was proud.”

Lessons for HR, Talent, and Business Leaders

This story is one that, upon reflection, is pregnant with lessons that HR, talent, and business leaders more broadly should consider. Here are just a few that come to mind, that I think this story can help to both illuminate and cement in your consciousness as you forge ahead in making your organization a more productive and successful enterprise.

Get out of the way and let them shine

Caine’s father George was a critical part of this story. He let Caine pursue his entrepreneurial interests. While he encouraged him – both with material and psychological support – a key to his approach was giving Caine a fair amount of autonomy. Unlike some parents who provide too much structure in their children’s activities, or step in and try to help them “do it the right way,” clearly George let Caine do things the way he wanted to – making mistakes, learning from them, and so on.

In the workplace, there is plenty of room for this kind of autonomy, and it can bring about equally impressive results. Beyond an everyday preference for light-handed management styles, recall some of the oft-discussed specific examples from the past few years. These are examples of organizations that truly respect and value autonomy, knowing that it can be the fountainhead of some truly great innovations. One such example is Google’s “20 Percent Time” program, in which employees are encouraged to take 20 percent of their time to work on something company-related that they are passionate about and that interests them personally. Google engineers have used this time to work on projects that eventually became real products and services, reportedly including Google Earth, Google AdSense for Content, Google News, Google Talk, Orkut, and Gmail.

While Google’s program might be the most famous of its kind, it is far from the only one: 3M did something similar well before Google, and more recently software maker Atlassian launched their “FedEx Day” program which affords developers time to work on an idea that they can deliver within 24 hours (hence the name).

Another approach taken by many organizations (Taleo included) is to hold focused innovation programs that run for several weeks or months, offering employees time and prizes to think up new products, features, or services that could improve the organization’s offerings. Even with some structure involved, the key results come from giving your employees some time, getting out of the way, and letting them shine.

People with passion outperform great assets

Consider Caine’s desire to add a claw machine to his arcade. His father encouraged him to make one himself, and provided him only with an S-hook and some string. Caine then used those simple inputs to MacGyver a solution. His pure passion for what he was doing allowed him to not get frustrated, but rather use his meager assets to produce something that worked.

We can all think of many situations in the workplace where additional budget, equipment, people power, etc. would naturally make overcoming a challenge easier. But to paraphrase a classic line: you won’t always get what you want; often you’ll get only what you need. People with enough passion and enough talent (not just knowledge and skills, but ingenuity, creativity, imagination, etc.) can more often than not “make it work.”

Fostering these kinds of results on a large scale requires two key things. First you need to hire the right people – passionate employees who will put in the effort, even in the face of significant obstacles, to achieve the goals of the organization. Dale Carnegie said it well when he noted that “Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.” You can’t train for passion – but you can easily kill it. In the face of micro-management or too frequent shifts in objectives, employees will eventually leave for people and projects that will once again ignite their passion.

The second key is to hire – or better, internally develop – the talents of your people. When you couple passion with talent, you are likely to achieve the best results – even when the material assets involved are less than optimal.

Where to start? A key for you, as an HR, talent, or business leader, is to first know your people’s passions and talents. Both of these are what Taleo considers part of talent intelligence – data provided by robust talent profiles, that enable key insights and drive better business decisions. Only by first knowing your people’s varied passions and talents will you be able to hire where appropriate to fill gaps and develop talents further as your goals require.

Focus on aligning passion and talent with opportunities

Caine’s passion and talents would never have blossomed without the opportunity he was given. His father again deserves a lot of credit for giving Caine the opportunity to pursue his interests (a win-win, since it kept the young boy out of his way while he was running his auto parts business.)

Thinking again of the workplace, once you have a good understanding of your people’s passions and talents, the next critical step is to consider their alignment with the needs and opportunities in the organization. This is often referred to as “talent mobility” – matching the skills and aspirations of each individual with the open opportunities in the organization. The most obvious form is vertical mobility, i.e., promotions. Many organizations focus on and are pretty good in this area, but are weaker at the two other main forms of mobility: horizontal (lateral org moves) and geographic (e.g., shifting personnel to support global expansion). In fact, data from Taleo Research studies in 2011 in the UK and Australia showed just how weak many organizations are in these latter two kinds of mobility (see chart.)

Crowdsourcing and social media are powerful enablers

So far the lessons from this story have all been derived from Caine’s and his father’s virtues. But here we can also see the power of two modern phenomena: crowdsourcing and social media. After all, without the idea to form a flashmob-like gathering of people to play Caine’s arcade games, this story would have been far less interesting and powerful. The tools used included Facebook, Reddit, and other social media to crowdsource the creation of signs, the gathering of players, and more. During the credits at the end we hear Caine wondering who are all these people: were they Nirvan’s friends? Not exactly, unless you go by the Facebook definition of “friend.”

Think now about how social concepts like crowdsourcing and technologies like social media can be leveraged for powerful results. Just a few examples include:

• Innovation competitions. These could be focused on internal employees as mentioned earlier, or be open to the public, perhaps to solicit help in solving particularly thorny challenges (see examples of this in Don Tapscott’s book Wikinomics).
• Social recruiting. In most organizations, the highest quality source of new hires is from employee referrals. How are you leveraging your employees’ social networks to increase your referrals, especially for critical skill positions that have the greatest impact?
• Social learning. This is nothing new – learning from and with others – but what is new in just the past few years are the many social media tools that enable this to occur at a distance and asynchronously. Is the L&D function in your organization leading the way in deploying internal (or external) social media tools to enable greater social learning?
• Social performance management. Relying on only the perspective of an employee’s manager to rate performance, and worse to do so only once a year in a backwards-looking review process, is not a recipe for success. Encouraging feedback year round, and from a much wider array of colleagues, is a way to “crowdsource” the performance appraisal process. Such an approach also provides agility to match what the organization’s increasingly changing goals demand.

Do yourself a favor: reward your talent

Focusing again on Nirvan’s role in bringing all of us this great story, I think it is a great example of the “win-win” scenario that arises from enlightened self-interest, good will, and trading value for value. He clearly had fun trying Caine’s arcade games initially, and it was a kind thing to do. But he quickly realized that a lot more benefit – for both Caine and himself as a documentary filmmaker – could be achieved with additional focus and effort. In doing so, he aligned his self-interest with recognition for a deserving child.

In your organization, how often are their opportunities to align the rational self-interest of your employees with the needs and goals of the organization? I don’t just mean the obvious payment of salary or wage in exchange for labor. Employees have a desire to learn, to develop their skills, knowledge, and competencies in order to progress in their careers. The win-win scenario arises when ample learning and development opportunities are provided that are of interest to employees and aligned to business needs (e.g., filling skill gaps in the organization.)

Another driver of employee engagement, beyond L&D opportunities, is through recognition and rewards. By giving recognition and rewards – whether appreciation and honor in front of peers, exclusive face-time with organization leaders, gift cards or other material rewards, etc. – you can thank employees for past successes while at the same creating a virtuous cycle in the organization that will more likely lead to more of the same. In this way, you create a win-win scenario, a trade in which both sides get value for value.

In conclusion, I hope you enjoyed – and found enlightening – the story of Caine’s Arcade. Now ask yourself – how many Caines do you have in your organization? Where are they and what are they passionate about? What knowledge and skills do they have that are related to these areas of passion, and are they being leveraged by the organization? How do you know? Do you have reliable talent intelligence, not just about a chosen few high potentials and high performers), but about all of your people?

A Grocery Store that People Love

I grew up in upstate New York, in a small town outside of Rochester to be exact. From a business perspective, Rochester is well known as the birthplace and headquarters of Kodak – a company with a great history, but that has obviously had struggles of late. Over the years, many would have considered Kodak the pride of Rochester – but there is another company started and still based here that would actually get my and many other people’s vote. And that is the private supermarket chain Wegmans, a very innovative company in their industry, and a dominant force in the Northeast US. I’ve never worked for Wegmans, not even as a teenager (another chain had a store in my hometown). And yet, Wegmans has always been an important part of my life – in fact, proximity to a Wegmans was a major reason that we bought the home that we did 12 years ago. And I’m not alone in this regard – I’ve heard stories of people leaving the Rochester or similar Northeast areas, who when asked why they were moving back, gave as one reason the abysmal grocery store options they had, and the fact that they really missed their Wegmans.

For these reasons, I was not really surprised a few years ago when I saw an interview of Alec Baldwin on the David Letterman show. He was asked about his mother, and why she doesn’t move out to California. He said he has tried to convince her to do so, but she won’t because they don’t have any Wegmans stores on the west coast. For the uninitiated (and yes, even for me), that got some laughs – but it was also PR gold for Wegmans. Baldwin appeared on Letterman again last year to follow-up and explain a bit of the story behind shooting a commercial for Wegmans, which featured both he and his mother. In the closing lines of the commercial Baldwin speaks for countless Wegmans customers: “Low prices, incredible service, best ingredients, help with meals, and friendly, caring people who make you feel like family… what an amazing experience.” He then ads a humorous quip, perhaps a nod back to his exchange with Letterman about his mother’s refusal to move: “You know I might leave show business, to be closer to Wegmans.”

Putting Employees First, Even Before Customers

So how does Wegmans produce such “amazing experiences” – the kind that Baldwin talks about in the commercial, and the kind that I see almost every day? Wegmans succeeds, where other organizations struggle and often fail, by actively focusing on their employees first – yes, even ahead of customers’ needs directly. They do this because they know a secret: that by focusing on your organization’s talent, by keeping them engaged, happy, and productive, the best possible customer experiences will almost always follow naturally.

For Wegmans this is not mere executive-speak, marketing hype, or a recruiting line. They regularly appear in Fortune magazine’s prestigious “100 Best Companies to Work For” annual list. And they don’t just appear in the list, they regularly appear in the Top-10. In the recently unveiled 2012 list, they ranked 4th. They actually ranked 1st back in 2005, and since then have come in 2nd (2006), 3rd (2007, 2008, 2010, 2011), and 5th (2009). Indeed, they’ve been on Fortune’s list since the ratings began in 1998. That is an amazing accomplishment for a company that now boasts over 40,000 employees, in an industry that typically doesn’t come to mind as producing a lot of “great places to work.”

In fact, at the outset of the 2005 Fortune article about Wegmans, “The Wegmans Way,” Matthew Boyle summed up these challenges nicely: “Supermarkets aren’t often thought of as desirable employers, what with low pay, grueling hours, annual turnover rates that can approach 100% for part-timers, and labor unrest… .” But Boyle also noted the critical ingredient in Wegmans approach to overcoming these challenges: “The biggest reason Wegmans is a shopping experience like no other is that it is an employer like no other. ‘You cannot separate their strategy as a retailer from their strategy as an employer,’ says Darrell Rigby, head of consultancy Bain & Co.’s global retail practice.”

Critical to Success: Training, Learning, and Development

No doubt Wegmans hires the best individuals that they can to join their team. Recruiting the right people into the right roles is a key foundation. But as noted above, in the grocery retail business, many positions are entry-level, and require significant knowledge-based and on-the-job training. Competitors might at times have lower prices, but to differentiate themselves Wegmans focuses on their employees and particularly on training and development.

Wegmans’ focus on their people first – and specifically on their training, learning, and development – doesn’t ebb and flow like it does in many organizations. A 2004 article by Michael Prospero in Fast Company quoted Danny Wegman as saying that knowledgeable employees are “something our competitors don’t have and our customers couldn’t get anywhere else.” Prospero aptly notes that Wegmans relies on smart, deeply trained employees to create a “theater of food” and that it all adds up to what the company calls “telepathic levels of customer service.”

The 2005 Fortune article about Wegmans and their number one ranking provided some specific examples:

[Wegmans] thinks nothing of sending, say, cheese manager Terri Zodarecky on a ten-day sojourn to cheesemakers in London, Paris, and Italy. The proof is in the stores every day. The smiles you receive from Wegmans employees are not the vacuous, rehearsed grins you get at big-box retailers. They are educated smiles, with vast stores of knowledge behind them, cultivated perhaps through company-sponsored trips to Napa Valley’s Trinchero winery. After all, what good is it to offer 500 types of specialty cheeses if you can’t explain the origin of each, what type of cracker to serve them on, even what wines they should be paired with? “If we don’t show our customers what to do with our products, they won’t buy them,” says Danny Wegman. “It’s our knowledge that can help the customer. So the first pump we have to prime is our own people.”

Fast forward seven years and we see articles like fellow-Rochesterian Michael Hess’s boldly titled “Why Wegmans is the Best Company in the World” at Business Insider in September. Or last month’s article by David Rohde in The Atlantic titled “The Anti-Walmart: The Secret Sauce of Wegmans is People.” Rohde notes the now familiar refrain: “The Wegmans model is simple. A happy, knowledgeable and superbly trained employee creates a better experience for customers. Extraordinary service builds tremendous loyalty.” He quotes Kevin Stickles, Wegmans VP of HR as saying “Our employees are our number one asset, period. The first question you ask is: ‘Is this the best thing for the employee?’ That’s a totally different model.”

Specifically regarding training and development, Rohde notes a few examples: “Cashiers are barred from interacting with customers until they have completed 40 hours of training. Hundreds of staffers are sent on trips around the U.S. and world to become experts in their products. … It sends butchers to Colorado, Uruguay and Argentina to learn about beef. It sends deli managers to Wisconsin, Italy, Germany, and France to learn about cheese. Last year, it awarded $4.5 million in college scholarships to employees.”

Another specific example of training and development at Wegmans is provided by a June, 2011 blog post “Ever Wonder What Happens Before a New Wegmans Store Opening?” by Phil Quattrini, store manager for the new (at that time) store in Frederick, Maryland. He notes that:

Training is our main focus prior to opening our stores. Anyone can build the beautiful buildings that we have, but it is the people we staff them with who define our company. Our employees are trained extensively, sometimes for many months to ensure they have the tools and learning’s they need to offer incredible service on day one. We start hiring our folks a year out depending on the job to make sure our folks get comfortable performing them. They work in an existing store so they get familiar with systems and other folks who they will work with. Every position has different training needs that could require months of training (e.g., Sous Chefs or Cheese Mongers), but typically employees will receive 6-8 weeks of training before the store opens.

Training and Development Leads to Results

The point is as Rohde notes: “Wegmans… shows that a business can generously train its workforce and profit handsomely.” I often hear of organizations who fear spending a lot on training and development, only to see their best talent leave for other opportunities, or worse, their direct competitors. I don’t mean to belittle that concern: it can be a very real challenge, as I’ve experienced personally with some struggles we had at a past employer where we did train employees well, only to see them leverage that investment and leave after six months or a year. So admittedly an emphasis on training, learning, and development needs to be accompanied by other reasons for people to want to stay and perform at a high level: a positive work culture and environment, a high level of trust, solid benefits, strong internal mobility, and more.

But Wegmans, as much as any company I know of, has proven that if you truly focus on your people, and specifically on their training and development – as a core, consistent mission, day in and day out – a virtuous cycle can develop that ultimately leads to impressive results. Rohde quoted Stickles as saying “When you think about employees first, the bottom line is better. We want our employees to extend the brand to our customers.” As proof of this Rohde notes that “Employees are omnipresent in stores and do seem knowledgeable. With little prompting, they launch into exhaustive but friendly accounts of where the meat, fish or produce they sell hails from, what each item tastes like and how best to prepare it.”

And I can add a personal example to help further illuminate this point. My local Wegmans is in Perinton, New York, and I shop there many times a week. My wife and I do our primary weekly shopping together in the early afternoon on Sundays. Around this time, more often than not, the baker is set up with a tasting station, usually giving out samples of “triple berry pie” or some other fresh dessert. I’ve watched the baker do his job: he isn’t a pushy salesman, barking out offerings of pie tastings as people walk by. Rather, when customers show an interest, he engages them in friendly conversation, answering questions about the product, asking if they’d like ice cream with the pie sample, explaining about the ingredients and methods they use, and so on. He even wisely makes sure that any children who walk up eager for a sweet treat have first gotten permission from a parent or guardian. Very often people will buy one of the pies, but not always – at least not at that time. But the baker has been a great brand ambassador, and given Wegmans’ customers another “amazing experience” on their Sunday afternoon.

Can you become the Wegmans of your Industry?

In Rohde’s article, Mary Ellen Burris, a Wegmans Senior VP, is quoted as summarizing the results of Wegmans’ philosophy this way: “What some companies believe is that you can’t grow and treat your people well. We’ve proven that you can grow and treat your people well.” In this respect, Wegmans is a model all organizations can learn from.

The question for you to consider is: how can your organization become the Wegmans of your particular industry? Your organization’s circumstances no doubt vary in some important ways from Wegmans (industry sector; private vs. public status; current culture; etc.) But there are some key lessons you can learn from Wegmans. If you truly focus on your most important asset – your people – in a consistent and meaningful way, they will be more engaged and happier in their work, become strong brand ambassadors, be less likely to leave, and ultimately produce incredible business results. A critical ingredient in this recipe for success is to see training, learning, and development opportunities not as a cost, but as a core driver of your organization’s success.

If you’d like to learn more about the important role of learning and development in your organization’s success, the many reasons that business leaders are increasingly focusing on this driver, and the critical role that talent intelligence solutions can play, I encourage you to read the Taleo Research paper released earlier this year “Learning and Development: The New Business of Business Leaders.”

One of the items we covered in the webinar was the concept of over-investment and under-investment around talent data.  Across both data proficient and data deficient groups, we found that organizations typically have pretty good data about tactical data, but almost no information around strategic metrics.  Here are a few examples:

Workforce Data

Nearly all respondents ranked “Employee Engagement” and “Competency Skill Gap Analysis” as more important than “Total Turnover” and “Open / Vacant Positions” metrics.  Yet in nearly every case, respondents could more easily measure the less important data.  One way to interpret the gap between the “importance” rank and the ability to “reliably measure” is to frame it in terms of investment.

Given the near 40 point gap between “importance” and “reliable access”, companies are clearly not investing enough in understanding and tracking “skill and competency gaps.”  On the other hand, they do seem to be adequately invested in “total turnover” – the ability for most organizations to access reliable data on this metric exceeds the strategic value they place on the data.  It may be a step too far to call this an “over-investment” per se, but it does reveal a strange disconnect between the subjective assessment of value and the objective ability to measure value.

The only two conclusions we could reasonably draw were that 1) respondents were lying about what they really think is important (perhaps to satisfy some sense of what they *should* value more highly) or 2) they are abjectly failing in their efforts to align talent data strategies with their ability to access such data.  The reality is probably somewhere in the middle – we know we should aspire to track more meaningful data, but it’s a giant hairball of a challenge requiring expertise in areas where HR practitioners are typically weakest (analytics, technical integrations, data scrubbing, statistics, number crunching etc…) and where the current norm of silo’ed HR systems presents additional barriers.

Hiring and Onboarding

A similar story plays out when reviewing the Hiring and Onboarding data.  “Quality of Hire” is far and away the most “important” metric yet it’s the one respondents knew the least about.  “Number of Applications per Hire” is the least important metric yet it scores near the top in terms of “reliable access.”

By considering the disconnects, it’s possible to guess at one of the root causes.  Why might quality of hire be so hard to track?  Well, for starters, the data is typically held in two different data silos – Recruiting and Performance Management Solutions.  And that assumes that the performance management solution isn’t just about manager opinion, but includes hard contributions (such as quota fulfillment), peer reviews, promotion history, goal completion, related measures of performance.  In the absence of this additional data, even those systems that do manage to connect the dots between recruiting and manager-driven review processes aren’t *really* answering the question.  Until companies begin to seriously invest in deep performance management solutions rather than just yearly manager-led reviews *and* connect these systems to their recruiting systems, “quality of hire” is aspirational at best.

Another key challenge is revealed in the differences in the rankings for “Average Time to Hire” and “Average Time to Hire for Critical Roles.”  Not surprisingly, respondents ranked the “Critical Role” data as more important, yet they had better access to the non-specific “average time to hire” data.  Why?  The only logical conclusion is that have no decent mechanism to slide and dice the data.  This strongly suggests yet another system or data challenge, but as with the “quality of hire” issue, the real root of the problem is a lack of strategic vision.

Performance and Compensation

Ok, last but certainly not least – performance and compensation metrics.  In some ways, this set of data is the most shocking.  Top Performer Retention?  Number one issue is terms of relative importance.  The two worst performing metrics in terms of “reliable access”?  “Top Performer Flight Risk” and “Top Performers Without a Career Plan.”  Kind of boggles the mind a bit, right?  We know from decades of research as well as the most recent BlessingWhite data that “lack of opportunities to grow and advance in my career” is the number one cause of dysfunctional turnover, yet we can’t identify top performers who don’t have a career plan?  We list “Top Performer Retention” as the critical metric in this category, but we have no data on “Top Performer Flight Risk”?

So what do respondents know best?  By now you can probably guess the general shape of the answer: tactical data that they rank as less important.  And of course you are correct:  the performance and compensation data that they know best is “Average Performance Review Scores” – a metric that they themselves rank as the least important.  Clearly, we have some work to do in realigning priorities and our resulting strategic investment in our systems.

Barriers to Change

Surprisingly, the number one ranking barrier to change for both data proficient and data deficient organizations isn’t money or even CEO buy-in, it’s “lack of analytical skills.”  HR professionals simply lack the core competencies and skills to tackle this challenge.  This probably isn’t news to you.  HR is by nature a touchy / feely sort of role – it’s about people skills primarily, not number crunching (well except for those crazy Compensation folks…).

It’s easy to get discouraged about the prospects of addressing this gap given the clear disconnect between current skills and required skills, but it wasn’t so long ago that marketing and sales were in similar positions.  Sales people are by nature driven by interpersonal dynamics as well.  Yet any reasonably professional sales team is driven today by deep sales analytics that measure pipeline to close ratios, sales funnel progression, anomalies in sales stage drop-off rates between teams, and many other critical metrics.  Marketing has made a similar transition.  Ten years ago, most marketing teams would have been hard-pressed to measure any business impact.  They were free-wheeling creative types who were hip to the latest memes on the internet but couldn’t spell ROI if you asked them to.  Today, marketing teams measure ROI on individual campaigns, specific events, the number of touches before a lead converts to a suspect, and even the value of social interactions in driving awareness and shaping market perception.

How did these teams go from people-focused and creative-focused work to hard-core number crunching and analysis?  It’s pretty simple really – they maintained a focus on their core skillset and invested in operations people and operational systems.  On the people side, any reasonably professional sales or marketing team has an Ops group whose sole mission to measure, track and quantify key data.  They also oversee systems integrations between related systems such as Eloqua (marketing automation) and Salesforce (sales automation) and any related third party systems that might plug-in.  They also bring core competencies in data manipulation, statistics, analysis, and data normalization.  This enables the core team to do what it does best while also measuring the strategic impact and adjusting priorities accordingly.

Some Next Steps

In the case of talent management operations, the skill set challenge is one that can be almost immediately addressed with the right hire(s).  The platform challenge is a bit harder.  On the one hand, you could task your new Operations team with connecting the dots between multiple silo’ed systems in the same way that marketing and sales ops connect the dots between Eloqua and SFA tools.  But this means that your ops folks will spend nearly all their time on integrations.  Probably not the best use of their time and skills.

Another approach would be to connect the dots through a unified suite.  This would immediately resolve key data challenges such as unified talent profiles; historic and current job histories; linkages between recruiting, performance, and retention; connections between career plans, goal plans, and learning plans; and many other thorny data issues.  The ops team would then be free to spend their time on strategic efforts like building dashboards; looking for correlations and patterns in the talent data; investigating differences in talent acquisition or employee engagement across divisions, managers and regions; workforce planning and analysis; build / buy / rent decisions as they relate to key organizational initiatives…  In other words, the stuff that really moves the needle…

HR’s current ability to satisfy its self-identified talent data aspirations is shockingly poor.  The good news is that we’re aware of the gap.  The better news is that the road to success has already been paved by our sales and marketing teammates.  Perhaps the best news is that according to our research, money isn’t a major barrier for most companies.  So what are you waiting for?  If you aren’t already on the way, you need to build out a Talent Operations team and get on the path to a unified suite.

We’d love to hear your experiences:  are you already moving in this direction?  What’s working?  What are your roadblocks?  What kind of strategic metrics are you tracking?

There were some silver linings to this morning’s numbers, such as a strong uptick for the manufacturing sector in March. But when even the mainstream economic commentators who are generally cheerleaders consistently show sour faces, you know this latest data was disappointing.

While this is only the latest month of such data, given the results I think the post I wrote in December – “It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times: Why Talent Management Matters All the Time” – seems particularly relevant. There I described how the same critical talent management questions that are relevant in a rebounding or high-growth economy remain important during a slow-growth or even recessionary economy. In this follow-up post I’d like to take it further, and consider several more reasons that recommend an increased focus on talent management practices, processes, and technology during slow (or recessionary) economic times.

Net vs. gross, turnover, and application floods

For talent management professionals, there is a sense in which paying too much attention to macroeconomic indicators is a distraction. Even narrowing one’s focus from broad figures such as the national or even local unemployment rate to one’s own industry can still be too broad. What matter’s more are questions specific to your own organization, and the impact that even slow economic times can have on your talent management practices.

For instance, in a slow economy with stubbornly high (if not increasing) unemployment, many organizations will receive an increasing number of resumes as an greater supply of candidates applies for scarce vacant positions. This will vary a great deal depending on the organization and industry, and as noted earlier factors such as labor participation rate declining in part from discouraged workers “not looking for work” can lessen this flood of applications to some degree. But while net new hiring might be low for an organization, overall hiring can remain high. This can be the result of many factors, one being a high degree of churn – turnover amongst your employees due to low employee engagement, lack of development and mobility opportunities, and competitive poaching.

This is the basic difference between net and gross new hires – and even when the former is low, the latter can be high, and therefore require an increased, not decreased, focus on talent management practices and solutions. Even when your business leaders have warned of a slowdown in hiring for the coming months or year, they are likely speaking of net new hires – of expanding the size of the organization. But unprepared organizations can still find themselves buried under an avalanche of applications to backfill critical roles, so you’ll still need the ability to find quality talent amongst that large quantity. An optimized recruiting solution can mean the difference between sifting through thousands of resumes and more efficiently finding and hiring the best candidates before the competition does. It can also keep the organization from wasting cycles only to hire mediocre individuals or even worse, a bad fit, which can damage team cohesion and decrease the productivity of your existing employees.

In short, for all but the smallest of organizations, hiring never stops. It marches on – whether for new positions created through growth or strategic shifts, or to backfill existing positions due to churn. Given this, a strategic hiring process that captures best fit talent quickly is essential to mitigate the financial drain from open positions and unfulfilled needs.

The tiring nature of “doing more with less”

In a job market where unemployment rates are rising or steady at high levels, it can be the case that retention is less of an issue – for a while. This is because many will consider themselves “lucky to have a job” and will not be eager to risk leaving the known for the unknown.

But if such downturns drag on indefinitely (as the current one has) an organization’s top talent – its high potentials and top performers – will grow restless and in time seek or passively find new opportunities. One reason for this is that smart, productive people will naturally grow weary from constantly being asked to do “more with less,” filling in temporarily (and in some cases permanently) for key tasks performed by those who have been laid off or voluntarily left for greener pastures. Wearing many hats is an acceptable request in the short-term, but eventually the neck pain from those hats becomes too great to bear. Attractive opportunities elsewhere can relieve those burdens, including options available in other geographies where growth rates are higher. And for many sectors and job functions, there are ample opportunities for top talent.

It is therefore critical that organizations have access to true talent intelligence, meaning robust talent profile data that can provide insights regarding who are your high potentials and top performers – and then importantly – who amongst them are your top flight risks. Additional critical talent intelligence data about your talent includes who among them are not on succession plans, lack career paths, or lack solid development opportunities. Unfortunately, many of these metrics are amongst those that organizations indicated they often lack reliable data access (for details on this point, see our recent research, co-authored with HCI, titled “The Business Impact of Talent Intelligence”).

Having such data enables robust talent mobility programs, which map the skills and aspirations of your employees with your current openings and opportunities, allowing for far greater horizontal and geographic movement in the organization, not just (often limited) vertical movement. With such talent intelligence data and the insights that you’ll gain from it, you’ll be far better able to make better business decisions to improve retention and in particular reduce the loss of frustrated top performers and high potentials.

A unique factor about this current period

The relevance of the ongoing recession / slow-growth economy to talent management practices and priorities is being exacerbated by a further, unique factor: demographics. HR and especially talent management professionals have for years been hearing dire predictions about the coming wave of baby boomer retirements. But the reality of the demographic situation in the US, and similar other countries, is more nuanced. Yes, there is a major wave – the Boomer generation – who have recently started to retire and will continue to do so in ever larger numbers. Data however indicates that many in this cohort are staying in the workforce longer – although often as consultants or in part time roles.

While moderating in some respects, this means we’ll likely still face at least one core challenge from this demographic shift: a significant need for development of the next generation to replace them in the leadership ranks of organizations. And there are at least two challenges here. The first issue is basic numbers: the so-called Generation X is not nearly as large, meaning there will be a serious scarcity for top skills and leadership talent in this age group. The second issue is that teenage unemployment is at all time highs.  While today’s teens and those in their early twenties are larger in number, and studies have shown that early work experience serves as a gateway to the “real” workforce.  But the problem is that if relatively fewer teens are getting that early work experience, then we’ll soon see relatively fewer seasoned 20-somethings ready to step up into middle-management and leadership roles.

In study after study, business and HR leaders seem aware of this major challenge. One recent example was Deloitte’s latest Talent Edge 2020 report, released in January, which asked nearly 400 senior executives and talent managers at large companies what their three most pressing talent concerns were, and the number one response was “leadership development and succession planning.” Other key takeaways in this area included:

• A majority of executives surveyed expressed concern about their organizations’ ability to retain company leaders.
• Across all talent areas, executives predicted the most severe shortages will likely occur in leadership, particularly in the Americas and EMEA.
• Accelerated leadership development was rated the number one emerging talent strategy among global executives who participated in the survey.
• Executives surveyed rated leadership development a high priority at their companies—yet far fewer rated their leadership development capabilities highly.

So what we have is a wealth of basic demographic and employment data, and acknowledgement by many senior executives, all pointing to an increasing leadership and top talent shortage. The question for you is: do you have in place the talent management practices and systems that will provide the robust talent intelligence you need to face this significant challenge?

What can you do?

A year ago, in light of the seeming economic recovery, my colleague David Wilkins advised organizations to pursue the following three strategies:

• If you haven’t done so recently, immediately do a talent audit with particular emphasis on critical roles and skills, flight risk, bench strength, top performers, and high potentials.
• If you can, spend the dollars today to engage and retain the team you have – even a heavy spend now will cost you far less than spending later to fill key roles.
• If you expect losses no matter what you do, take a hard look at your sourcing, recruiting, on-boarding and training processes so that you can move lots of bodies through your hiring pipe.

As you can likely guess by now, he and I both think these three strategies nicely summarize the recommendations for organizations not only during economic recoveries or booms, but during recessions and slow-growth periods as well. Not following these prescriptions is likely to lead your organization to suffer increased departures of top talent and high potentials and increased sourcing, recruiting, onboarding, and training costs – either in absolute terms and/or relative to your competitors who do take talent management practices and systems seriously.

While individual circumstances vary, on average it comes down to this: in good economic times, the considerations above (and the questions discussed in my earlier post) are critical for your organization to grow and flourish; in slow and volatile economic times, the same considerations and strategies are critcal for your organization to at least survive and create competitive advantage.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the good fortune to participate in a few events and meet a few people that have changed my thinking a bit.  I want to share a few of these people and events with you so that you can see the same benefits:

• Elliott Masie
• eLearnity Symposium, David Wilson, and David Perring
• Donald H. Taylor and the Learning and Performance Institute
       

Elliott Masie

Let’s start with the only logical place to start when it comes to learning and development: Elliott Masie.

Any reasonably decent analyst can tell you “what is” in any given industry – including any domain within talent management, whether it’s recruiting, onboarding, performance, learning, or compensation.  Survey enough clients, do a few case studies with leading edge companies, and you can pretty quickly see current practices and the general shape of near-term emerging trends.  This is not to suggest that this work is easy.  I’ve run enough research projects to know that companies that do this at scale – notably Bersin & Associates and Aberdeen – deserve a ton of respect for the information they provide regarding current practices, spending, investment, case studies, and emerging trends.

That said, Elliott Masie plays a different role.  He’s the CEO of the Masie Center and like analysts, spends a lot of time talking to clients and understanding trends.  The difference is that he looks quite a bit further into the future.  He’s a sense maker.  He sees the patterns across multiple trend lines and then connects the dots, typically well ahead of the market.  Let me give you a specific example:  back in the late 90’s, I remember hearing Elliott suggest that customer and extended enterprise training would eventually be as big or bigger than employee training.  Not many people thought he was right – basic eLearning for employees was barely off the ground and here he was talking about the extended enterprise.  Flash forward to today – extended enterprise training now accounts for over 40% of all LMS use cases with a trend-line toward 50% within a few years.  He was similarly out ahead of mobile, video, and social approaches with equally accurate assessments of what was to come.

So two weeks ago, when I had the chance to interview Elliott about emerging trends in the learning and development space, let’s just say that it was a “big deal” kind of moment for me.  The learning geek equivalent of singing a duet with a long admired superstar (though to be fair, he still did most of the singing…)  For those of you that couldn’t make that session, I’ve embedded it below – full slides and audio.  And below that, you’ll find the Twitter chat that we held during the event.  There were a ton of great sidebar conversations so in addition to catching up on Elliott’s thoughts, I’d encourage you to take a read through of the related comments.  It’s well worth the effort, and if nothing else, you might find some great new people to follow on Twitter.

SlideCast of the Top Four Learning Trends Webinar

Twitter Chat from Top Four Learning  Trends Webinar

Holly MacDonald‏ @sparkandco
RT @TaleoResearch: Elliott Masie: If I ask 4 help, isn’t sign of weakness, but strength – understand that my ntwrk cn assist #TaleoLearn

David Wilkins‏ @dwilkinsnh
Just wrapped a webinar with @ElliotMasie – still one of the smartest, most forward thinking ppl in our space. #TaleoLearn

Taleo‏ @Taleo_Corp
Thanks Elliott Masie for a great presentation & thanks everyone who joined the conversation on Twitter! http://bit.ly/wQcwGL #TaleoLearn

Taleo‏ @Taleo_Corp
Visit @TaleoResearch on Slideshare, a leading source of thought leadership in the Talent Management market http://slidesha.re/zZlHYG #TaleoLearn

Cheryl Lasse ‏@EdutainmentM
Mass customized learning = self-directed learning. Give each person only what they need, no more, no less. #sdl #sdle #taleolearn

Cheryl Lasse‏ @EdutainmentM
RT@TaleoResearch How do we reskill our workforce to meet changing business needs? Employee-driven curriculums. #TaleoLearn #sdl #sdle

Taleo ‏@TaleoResearch
Thanks Elliott Masie for a great a presentation, and thanks everyone who joined in the Twitter backchannel for this event! #TaleoLearn

Cheryl Lasse ‏@EdutainmentM
@RobObermeier The key to search is to bring the learning outside the LMS so it’s visible to search – well said! #sdl #sdle #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: You won’t keep your best people if there is a high degree of uncertainty and a lack of a strong learning culture. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @Knowledgecomm: Secretary of Education Riley says: Knowledge has ½ life of only 4 years. Presentation by @ElliotMasie #TaleoLearn

Naava Frank‏ @Knowledgecomm
Secretary of Education Riley says: Knowledge has ½ life of only 4 years. Presentation by @ElliotMasie #TaleoLearn

YUSchoolPartnership‏ @YUSchoolPartner
Secretary of Education Riley says: Knowledge has ½ life of only 4 years. Presentation by @ElliotMasie #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @RobObermeier: Reskilling learning professionals to use these technologies is going to be interesting. Basic skills are there #taleolearn

Rachel Miller ‏@rachelloumiller
RT @taleoresearch: Elliott Masie: We need a blend of learning formal, informal, social, performance support, on the job coaching #TaleoLearn

Robert Obermeier ‏@RobObermeier
Reskilling learning professionals to use these technologies is going to be interesting. The basic skills are there. #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: In many of our job roles, we don’t create a long-term competency attitude. We need to do so, in an agile way. #TaleoLearn

vic_passion  ‏@vic_passion
Blend learning, OJT, coaching, and performance support to achieve long-term competencies #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: We need a blend of learning including formal, informal, social, performance support, on the job, coaching. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: If I ask for help, that isn’t a sign of weakness, but rather strength – understanding that my network can assist #TaleoLearn

Shelley (Berg) Gable ‏@shelleyisgoing
RT @TaleoResearch: I’m not looking for how many corporate friends I have, but rather what access to expertise it provides? #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @BridgetLewis: #TaleoLearn subject matter NETWORKS & expertise. Focus more on character of relationships – trust and relevance.

Bridget C Lewis‏@BridgetLewis
#TaleoLearn the network reflects the wisdom of the organization.

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: Noting the difference between the org chart and the network of the organization — the latter reflects the wisdom #TaleoLearn

Bridget C Lewis‏ @BridgetLewis
#TaleoLearn subject matter NETWORKS & expertise. Focus more on character of relationships – trust and relevance.

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @RH_Amina: Great webinar on 2012 learning trends from #TaleoLearn–looking forward to incorporating into RelayHealth Education offerings

Thomas Stone‏ @ThomasStone
RT @JakiBG: @emasie advises to focus on the character of social learning relationships more than the technology #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: When we hire people today, we don’t just look for expertise, but at their ability to truly network for expertise #TaleoLearn

Sarah White‏@ImSoSarah
yes! RT @TaleoResearch: I’m not looking for how many corporate friends I have, but rather what access to expertise it provides? #TaleoLearn

Shelley (Berg) Gable‏@shelleyisgoing
Agree! RT @vic_passion: I agree with Elliott: learners don’t need to memorize. What do they need to do vs *find* how to do? #taleolearn

JakiBG‏ @JakiBG
@emasie advises to focus on the character of social learning relationships more than the technology #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: I’m not looking for how many corporate friends I have, but rather what access to expertise does that provide me? #TaleoLearn

Amina Khattak ‏@RH_Amina
Great webinar on 2012 learning trends from #TaleoLearn–looking forward to incorporating into RelayHealth Education offerings

Kelli Urry‏ @kelli_u
the learner becomes part of the design process in learning w/ frequent assessments – Elliott Masie. #TaleoLearn

Robert Obermeier ‏@RobObermeier
When you fly airplanes, they make you remember what you need in an emergency or use in seconds. Everything else is checklist #Taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
David Wilkins: We are moving from Subject Matter Expertise as individuals, to Subject Matter Networks. Critical trend in L&D. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: Stressing how important checklists and other performance support tools are to the overall learning culture. #TaleoLearn

vic_passion  ‏@vic_passion
We should also train our learners how to use the performance support materials #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @WLSTrainingCo: #TaleoLearn Learners want transactive learning experiences. They want to know where to find the knowledge.

WLS‏ @WLSTrainingCo
#TaleoLearn Learners want transactive learning experiences. They want to know where to find the knowledge.

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @BridgetLewis: #TaleoLearn on-demand learning – the key to A-la-carte experience for maximum learning application.

vic_passion  ‏@vic_passion
I agree with Elliott: learners don’t need to memorize everything. What do they need to be able to do vs *find* how to do? #taleolearn

Thomas Stone‏ @ThomasStone
See the Betsy Sparrow keynote presentation that Elliott Masie is referring to (plus much more): http://bit.ly/tyULbF#TaleoLearn

Robert Obermeier ‏@RobObermeier
#taleolearn The key to search is to bring the learning outside the LMS so it’s visible to search

Thomas Stone‏ @ThomasStone|
Elliott Masie is referencing Betsy Sparrow’s research from Learning 2011 in November — I was there, interesting presentation. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: Smartphones and tablets are leading to rising expectations by learners for how they control and use content. #TaleoLearn

WLS‏ @WLSTrainingCo
#TaleoLearn on-demand learning – the key to A-la-carte experience for maximum learning application.

Bridget C Lewis ‏@BridgetLewis
#TaleoLearn on-demand learning – the key to A-la-carte experience for maximum learning application.

Thomas Stone‏ @ThomasStone
RT @rachelloumiller: #taleolearn The future is now – on demand personalized learning

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: Analogy between personalized learning and customized personal menu in restaurants. Employees learn the same. #TaleoLearn

Rachel Miller‏ @rachelloumiller
RT @wlstrainingco: #TaleoLearn What is the strategic role of learning in Today’s organization? Learners play key role.

JakiBG‏ @JakiBG
We need to be prescriptive from the point of hire in personalizing learning based on a new emp’s identified area of weakness #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: No candidate for a job is perfect; what is missing can lead to failure later. Personalized learning is needed. #TaleoLearn

Rachel Miller ‏@rachelloumiller
#taleolearn The future is now – on demand personalized learning

Orlando Talent ‏@Orlando_Talent
Are you familiar with @Accenture “Workforce of One” view of the #futureofwork … check it out! http://www.accenture.com/us-en/Pages/insight-talent-management-customization.aspx #TaleoLearn

vic_passion  ‏@vic_passion
Yes, the learning should be as relevant as possible to the adult learner #taleolearn

WLS‏ @WLSTrainingCo
#TaleoLearn What is the strategic role of learning in Today’s organization? Learners play key role.

Bridget C Lewis ‏@BridgetLewis
#TaleoLearn What is the strategic role of learning in Today’s organization? Learners play key role.

Chris Kaplan‏ @slappytpt
@RobObermeier How is it possible to sep assess from learning? Isnt learning constant itterative reflection and assessment? #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @RobObermeier: Thats the key, separating the learning from assessing. #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @shelleyisgoing: Masie advocates for agile learning resources for individualized learning and efficiency. #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
RT @BridgetLewis: #TaleoLearn Today’s learners need a more agile mix to meet their learning needs.

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Dave Wilkins notes the imp. of Khan Academy; Elliott Masie notes he is working w/ Salman Khan to bring key aspects to corp. L&D #TaleoLearn

Robert Obermeier ‏@RobObermeier
That’s the key, separating the learning from assessing. #taleolearn

Shelley (Berg) Gable ‏@shelleyisgoing
Masie advocates for agile learning resources for individualized learning and efficiency. #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: Connected employees today get multiple sources of knowledge, including external and from their network. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: Who drives the learning mix? Manager? Instructional Designer? More often today, it is the learner themselves. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Welcome! RT @vic_passion: I’m attending the 4 Learning Trends for 2012 and Beyond with Elliott Masie #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: Different employees in a class have different motivations/etc. Agile learning requires we treat them differently. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: We need to take a deep breath as learning professionals. Goal is to become agile, and this requires some changes. #TaleoLearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie: How do we continue to reskill our workforce to meet changing business needs? Employee-driven curriculums. #TaleoLearn

T21 Solutions ‏@T21solutions
Great session on trends in learning, featuring Elliott Masie and hosted by Taleo … #TaleoLearn http://www.masie.com/ http://fb.me/NPZVNCLh

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
L&D takes on a more strategic edge during times of change. How can we use Learning to drive innnovation, inc. global presence? #TaleoLearn

Shelley (Berg) Gable ‏@shelleyisgoing
Currently attending Elliot Masie webinar: 4 learning trends for 2012. #taleolearn

Taleo  ‏@TaleoResearch
Elliott Masie being introduced as today’s webinar speaker on Four Key Learning Trends for 2012 and Beyond #TaleoLearn http://bit.ly/y3Lw0R

Following Elliott

Twitter: @emasie

Masie Center: http://masie.com/   Here you will find links to his conferences, his wiki, and Consortium membership.

eLearnity Symposium, David Wilson, and David Perring

For those of you in the US who haven’t heard of eLearnity, it’s time to take notice.  These guys know their stuff, and they host an amazing event.  Both David’s know the European market cold and they know learning – not just the technology, but the design, implementation, and strategy side as well.  And they have been around this stuff for as long as or longer than me – which is saying something.

That experience brings moderation and insight.  They’ve seen it all, probably tried most of it, and then settled on what’s worked – they know that new technologies usually don’t displace old ones overnight, and that the often more pertinent questions are “what new problems does a change in technology help us solve?” and “what existing problems are better solved with new technologies or new approaches?” and most importantly, “what still works just fine the way it is?”  Like I said, moderation and insight.  It’s a rare trait among thought leaders to evangelize new approaches in a thoughtful, balanced way, but that’s what they do, and it’s why I respect them as much as I do.  They “get it” in ways that most folks don’t.  Needless to say, you should follow these guys and pay attention to what they say.  Even more so if any part of your company does learning in Europe since that is their home turf.

Given the above backdrop, it shouldn’t be surprising that these guys think about events differently too.  Here’s how the eLearning Symposium works:  round tables at which multiple vendors and multiple talent practitioners sit.  The practitioners kick off a discussion topic that they are collectively interested in discussing from a list of about 40 suggested subjects (all based on questions and insights from the eLearnity consulting practice), and the vendors then share their thoughts and perspectives.  Perspectives lead to dialog and conversation, and in this exchange, buyers and practitioners get a sense for the vendors’ worldviews and directions, and vendors get a broad sense of the overall issues facing the market.  20 min per table, then the vendors switch to a new table and new set of questions.  Rinse and repeat three times per session across three sessions.

After participating in just two of these sessions, I had more info and a better sense of the market than I could have gotten in multiple days’ worth of client and prospect meetings.  And for the talent management practitioners, they heard more collective expertise about market trends, exemplars, and best practices than they would get in multiple days at a conference.  Here are just a few of the topics that we discussed:

• The trend toward “learner-centric” approaches and what they mean from a strategy and design perspective.
• Planned adoption, roadblocks, strategies, and directions related to mobile learning.
• Key design principles and best practices in blending formal, social, and informal learning models.
• Key causes for LMS implementation failures or “failure to meet expectations.”
• Platform discussions regarding the pros and cons of enterprise social platforms vs. social tools inside the LMS.

Good stuff right?  What was great about this exchange was that format fostered honesty and authenticity.  It was also pretty obvious which vendors knew their stuff after just one or two rounds of discussion, and which ones were just serving up talking points.  It was equally obvious where the practitioners were in their adoption curve for emerging trends.  If you’re based in Europe, this is definitely an event to check out next year.  If not, I’d still follow the eLearnity team – David Wilson and David Perring in particular.  They know their stuff, they know what matters in the trends that are happening, and they can give sage advice about how to get “there” from “here.”

Following the David’s and eLearnity

David Wilson on Twitter: @dwil23

David Perring on Twitter: @davidperring

eLearnity — Here you can find links to their Knowledge Center, their blog, and upcoming events.

Donald H. Taylor and the Learning and Performance Institute

Last but not least: Donald H. Taylor.  This one admittedly was a bit of a surprise.  As the meeting was originally described to me, we were connecting with Donald to discuss some learning related webinars for his Learning and Skills group.  After flying over from Boston that morning and literally heading straight into the office (with a quick change of clothes in the “loo”), I have to admit I was not initially looking forward to the discussion.  As it turned out, it was one of the best parts of my trip.  Why?  In three words: Donald H. Taylor.  Yet another Brit who gets it.

I remember thinking about ten minutes into our conversation that I needed to get out to the UK more.  Like the David’s of eLearnity, here was someone else who has been at this for awhile and sees the bigger connections between learning, knowledge management, EPSS, and HPT models, and more importantly, the way that social and mobile innovations are finally fulfilling some of this promise of these approaches.   While the conversation was fantastic, the real highlight for me was his description of the Learning and Skills Group and the Learning Technologies Conference.  He is Chairman of both.

Here is the basic gist in a few sentences:  most learning and development professionals have very little, if any, formal education about instructional design practices, HPT, human factors, organizational psychology, or really anything that would enable them to do their job strategically or even tactically in some cases.  Why?  Most learning and development professionals are promoted into training roles because they are subject matter experts with the rare ability to communicate well.  So they are asked to do some training.  Training leads to managing, managing leads to directing, directing leads to VP and CLO roles.  And then we end up with an industry at least partially led by folks who know very little about business and often even less about effective instruction and related disciplines.  Yes, this is harsh, but it’s also unfortunately, blindingly obvious to anyone who has the required educational underpinnings and who has been in this space for more than a few years, let alone as many as Donald or I.

So Donald has set about to change that.  His Learning and Skills Group is a community of practice that is attempting to define the core skills, competencies and capabilities that learning professionals should possess, along with assessment tools to help folks see where they are at.  While the Learning Conference is more of a typical learning conference, there is a clear thread of topics that are designed to help bridge some of the skill gap challenges.

To be quite honest, I was a bit inspired by the vision behind his Learning and Skills Group.  I’ve noted many of the same challenges myself both publicly and privately, and where I could I’ve tried to help – largely by creating reams of content: checklists, webinars, white papers, keynotes, presentations…  But I’ve never really stepped back and thought through the conceptual framework for the core skills and competencies on which all of the content needs to hang.  Which partly explains why, on occasion, I’ll deliver a presentation which I know to be rock solid, and get puzzled looks in return.  Donald’s efforts, I think, get to the root issue and could help to improve the overall acumen and capabilities of our industry as a whole.  Whether you are an old salt like me or a mid-career learning and development professional, this might be a good way to “give back” while helping improve the professionalism of the overall discipline.  I, for one, plan to join this effort to see how I might contribute.  I hope you’ll join me.

Following Donald H. Taylor

Twitter: @donaldhtaylor

Learning Technology Conference: http://www.learningtechnologies.co.uk/learning-and-skills-group/  – This is the largest learning conference in Europe.

Donald’s blog: http://donaldhtaylor.wordpress.com/

Learning Performance Institute– The Learning and Performance Institute is a global Institute for Learning & Development professionals.  Individually the Institute provides members with the support and guidance needed to over perform against personal objectives.  Collectively the Institute is the voice of the Learning & Development community with a commitment to support a continuous improvement in Learning & Development standards.

Developing Your Professional Network

So there you go: some folks you should be following and some events and initiatives you should know about.  I suspect many of you already knew about Elliott, but perhaps the UK guys are new to some of our US readers.  What became obvious to me this week is that I need to continue expanding my horizons.  Understanding Europe’s learning and development challenges may provide insight into ways to rethink some of what we do in the US, and I suspect the reverse is true as well.  What else might we learn from learning professionals in South Korea or Brazil?

With the advent of social learning, we talk a lot about diversity of perspective, collaboration, and subject matter networks.  But how broad are yours?  Are you following the same experts and thought leaders year after year?  Maybe it’s time to follow a few new people and come at some of your challenges with a fresh set of eyes.  UK experts are a great place to start – same language, similar beer, and a fantastic sense of humor, yet a slightly different take on challenges and solutions, different enough perhaps to spark new lines of thinking and new insights.

So I’ve shared my key professional inspirations from the past couple of weeks.  What are yours?  Who do you follow to grow and develop professionally?  Who are your sources of new ideas?

Essentially, the research found that external hires are typically paid more (18% to 20%) than internal hires, but tend to perform worse. The premium paid for external hires is attributed to a couple of factors:

1. External candidates tend to be evaluated on their “externally observable attributes” (e.g., education) and will tend to have higher qualifications than an internal candidate, hence the need to pay more. Yet such qualifications are not a reliable indicator of future job performance.
2. External candidates will often need encouragement to leave their current position, where they may be performing well, have job security, and so on. Hence the offer of a premium salary.

So, if internal hires are lower cost and better performing in their new role, the business case for internal mobility must be strong, right? Yes it is, but there are a few obstacles that can make it very difficult for many organisations to fully embrace internal mobility rather than just pay it lip service.

Organisational Culture

Firstly, organisational culture can make internal mobility difficult. Line managers can deliberately block internal moves as they don’t want to lose team members. It may be frowned upon to keep your talent profile up-to-date in corporate HR and talent management systems, as it makes the employee look as though they want to change jobs. And internal mobility processes themselves may discourage internal applications.

Data from Taleo Research’s talent mobility studies in 2011 support the existence of these challenges. In a survey of 500 HR decision makers in the UK, and 100 in Australia, it was found that only 37 percent of organisations in the UK and a mere 15 percent in Australia have robust talent profiles that include pre-hire data for their employees. Further, in Australia, 54 percent of respondents indicated that managers are not held accountable for moving talent throughout the organisation, and only 16 percent said that mobility data is traced and used to assess manager performance in their organisation.

Addressing and overcoming these obstacles largely centers on encouraging (or forcing if necessary!) organisational change. For instance:

• Line managers can be incentivised on the number of their direct reports that are promoted;
• Employees should be actively encouraged to keep their talent profile up to date through corporate communications and direct encouragement from their managers. We all keep (or at least we all should) our LinkedIn profiles up-to-date, so why not your company talent profile? It seems crazy not to;
• Internal mobility processes need to be taken apart and put back together again, removing those steps that inhibit mobility, i.e., asking for manager permission to apply for an internal vacancy. Internal controls are of course necessary to maintain organisational stability but they should be balanced with the financial and organisational imperative to encourage internal moves.

Merging Internal and External Recruitment

Secondly, we sometimes see internal and external recruitment managed by different teams, using different technology, tools, and processes. The internal recruitment team are often the poor relation, using inferior tools, with fewer resources and with a focus on managing incoming internal applications rather than proactively managing mobility by identifying internal candidates.

Internal and external recruitment should be managed by a single team using the same technology and tools. The recruitment processes for internal and external candidates should be broadly similar with exceptions for compliance and sensitivity to the employee status of the internal candidate, i.e., don’t ask existing employees questions you should already have the answers for. Onboarding is often mistakenly viewed as a process for external candidates only – but internal candidates need the support and structure that a robust onboarding process offers just as much as external hires.

The Important Role of Technology

Finally, technology or the lack of it, can limit the ability for employees to search and apply for vacancies and for HR to identify internal talent. The Taleo Research data from the UK and Australia support this point: In the UK, the top three barriers to increasing talent mobility were lack of visibility into talent gaps and opportunities, lack of systems / technology to support talent mobility initiatives, and the quality and reliability of employee talent data (each indicated by around 30 percent of respondents). In Australia the same three barriers rated highest, but the number indicating these were lacking was even higher, at around 50 percent for each.

In fact, I have heard on a number of occasions HR Directors bemoaning the fact that LinkedIn holds better and more reliable data on their employees than their own internal systems. The LinkedIn conundrum could be the result of:

• An organisational culture that discourages internal mobility (see above);
• The lack of a corporate talent management system;
• A corporate talent management system that is difficult to use;
• More active professional networking communities externally, engendering an attitude of “why bother with what the company offers?”

Implementing modern, easy to use, integrated recruiting and talent management systems will go a long way to overcoming these issues. On the “demand” side, employees will be able to search and apply for vacancies using the same tools, tweaked for internal users, as external candidates, offering them a level playing field (or even one leaning slightly in their favour). If you are in one of those organisations where LinkedIn has better data on your employees than your own internal HR systems, you could even allow employees to apply for internal vacancies with their LinkedIn profile!

On the “supply” side, HR will be able to search and/or leverage rich employee talent profiles, internal talent pools, succession plans, and career plans. The more advanced talent management systems will also help your organisation ride the wave of collaboration we see in the consumer world. For instance some talent management systems allow managers and employees to nominate employees for inclusion in succession plans. Such an approach draws on the wisdom of the crowd to provide internal talent pipelines for key positions, and strong candidates may be identified quite naturally by the number of nominations received.

Internal mobility clearly makes a lot of sense but it can require organisational change and robust technology to be successful. Have you come across some of these internal mobility challenges in your organisation? We’d love to hear how you overcame them.

Perhaps for those who regularly ride trains where they are constantly reminded to “Mind the Gap,” the phrase is easily ignored, becoming background noise in the hustle-and-bustle of getting where you need to go. For me, when I first rode the London metro, the repeated audio recording “Mind the Gap” became an earworm that I couldn’t lose for days upon returning home to New York. But then an interesting thing happened: it transformed into a part of my regular conceptual vocabulary. It became a phrase that I would think of in many contexts in life, whenever I was facing an important gap, disconnect, or other space that needed closing.

Mind the Skills Gap

The most obvious application of “mind the gap” in talent management is perhaps in the context of “skill gaps” — either your own personal areas in need of development, or the broader skill gaps you have in your department, division, or organization as a whole. Jason Averbook of Knowledge Infusion wrote a recent blog post on this subject, “The War for Talent Comes Into Focus.” He did some research on just how prominent the drumbeat of “skills gap” has become lately, and provides links to several recent articles noting skill gaps in a range of areas and industries. He then discusses key results from a study that Accenture released at the end of last year, The Accenture Skills Gap Study. In particular he notes that one reason for the skill gaps we are seeing is that:

“…employers may be hindered by not be having a complete picture of all of the skills they have within their organization to handle specific jobs. Only about half (53 percent) of the respondents said their companies document their skills. And a little over a third (38 percent) said their employers look only at specific job experience and education to match employees to jobs, rather than looking at all of their talents and capabilities.

This kind of limited talent intelligence suggests that an inadequate ability shift employees to different jobs within their organizations (talent mobility) is preventing companies from fully utilizing their workforce’s existing skills. The typical reaction is to look externally, only to be frustrated by a shortage of hirable skills.”

He goes on to highlight data from the Accenture survey that backs this up, as well as the six strategies that Accenture recommends to better “mind the gap,” if you will. In addition to reading Averbook’s excellent post, for more on this topic don’t miss the new paper Build, Buy, or Lease? Leveraging Talent Analytics to Plan for Tomorrow’s Workforce, by Stacia Sherman Garr, Senior Analyst with Bersin and Associates. Just released in February, this excellent report details considerations of the several strategies you can take in dealing with skills gaps, including building current employees, buying talent from the outside, engaging alumni, and leasing contingent workers. The critical role of talent profiles and talent intelligence is covered, as are key benefits, risks, and case studies for each approach. This report is a must read for anyone who needs to “mind the skills gap” in their organization.

Mind the Gaps Between TM Practice and Technology Areas

I’ve also frequently thought of the phrase “mind the gap” when it comes to various areas in talent management. Many of these – including recruiting, performance management, learning and development, and others – have evolved over the years in many organizations to be at least somewhat separate silos within HR. There are separate teams, separate systems, and separate software – often from separate providers. While this has allowed focus in each area, the trend in recent years – and with good reason – has been to increasingly seek the benefits that integrated talent management practices, processes, and technology can provide.  Our own latest research, The Business Impact of Talent Intelligence, speaks to some of these benefits, as true talent intelligence comes from strong data and insights that only arise from integrated talent systems, and having such strong talent intelligence correlates with several measures of business success. Indeed, several of the “Nine Most Important Talent Intelligence Metrics,” such as quality of hire, are not easily obtained without well integrated talent management technology.

Taking a “mind the gap” approach to talent management means identifying the gaps that are keeping your organization from obtaining the synergistic benefits that come from integrated talent management practices and technologies. Unless you are already far along in this journey, you likely have significant gaps between areas including recruiting, performance management, learning and development, and more. By closing those gaps, talent intelligence data – that was previously not easily obtainable – will provide invaluable insights that will drive better business decisions.

Mind the Gap between Performance Management and L&D

As I discussed in my recent post “Bridging the Gap between Learning and Performance,” the L&D profession has rightly evolved from a focus on training, to a focus on learning, and increasingly now a focus on performance improvement. To successfully achieve this goal, organizations need to better connect their performance management and learning and development systems. The following are some of the critical questions to ask as you “mind the gap”:

• Do you have development plans that link development activities to both specific goals and instantly accessible online learning?
• Do those development plans that include the full range of learning activities that employees engage in, from formal training to experiential, informal, and social learning?
• Can each learner’s progress be tracked from within those development plans, without needing to move to another application?
• Is a searchable learning content catalog accessible from within the employee’s development plan?
• Can they launch learning activities from within development plans?
• Do employee talent profiles include their full learning histories?

Mind the Gap between Recruiting and Performance Management

It is fairly intuitive that raising your organization’s quality of hire will have a significant impact on performance and outcomes, whether you are thinking of star sales people, innovative product designers, creative marketers, or trustworthy, motivating executive leaders. But as noted earlier and discussed in my recent post “The Nine Most Important Talent Intelligence Metrics,” for many organizations quality of hire is a challenging talent intelligence metric to reliably obtain. Our recent research (see “The Business Impact of Talent Intelligence”) found that reliable access to quality of hire data was relatively low, even for organizations generally considered data proficient. In fact, it was by far the lowest relative to its indicated importance amongst all sourcing and onboarding metrics in our survey. One reason for this is that quality of hire requires data inputs from both recruiting (information about the individual as a hire) and performance management (information about the individual’s work quality later on the job). If you have a gap between these two areas, particularly a lack of strong technology integration, then obtaining a quality of hire metric that you can have confidence in to help inform business decisions will not be easy.

Another key gap between recruiting and performance management often arises during the onboarding process. To gain a new hire’s buy-in and commitment, you need to clearly articulate the role that they play in the organization and how their goals align with the overall organization’s objectives. Further, during onboarding the new employee’s pre-hire data needs to quickly become new hire data. Pre-hire data from the recruiting process should flow directly into a new hire’s talent profile with as little re-keying of information as possible. This data should then be exposed and leveraged by the larger organization, as one of the unsung benefits of new hires is the diversity they bring – diversity in perspective, job history, skills, competencies, and expertise. Tapping this new talent data leads to better decisions, but it also validates and affirms the new hire’s value to the company, increasing their engagement and connection to the company. By minding the gap between your recruiting and performance management processes and systems – by pursuing a more integrated talent management approach – you can obtain these benefits and more.

Mind the Gap between Recruiting and L&D

Back in May of last year, David Wilkins wrote a great blog post on the various ways that recruiting and learning and development can and should interact with each other. In some cases, especially where talent is scarce, offering training to candidates can be a great way to improve your external talent pool. Your recruiting practice can also be positively impacted by improving your hiring brand by offering strong learning and development opportunities to your employees – a practice which will likely increase referrals, boomerang hires, and the overall quality of applicants. And by targeting your L&D efforts in roles where external recruitment is most challenging, you’ll improve retention and thereby alleviate pressure on external hiring.

But as we saw previously, perhaps the most obvious synergy between recruiting and L&D is during the onboarding process. Looking beyond efficient compliance and policy forms, one of the more strategic onboarding steps is determining what skill gaps the new employee is walking in with, and finding the right learning and development approaches to close those gaps. Being able to see the individual’s relevant pre-hire data and the job requirements, alongside the available catalog of L&D possibilities – including all classroom, virtual classroom, self-paced e-Learning, coaching/mentoring programs, and informal/social learning opportunities – is the surest way to “mind the gap” and decrease the new hire’s time-to-proficiency. And an integrated talent management system that provides robust talent profiles is the surest way to provide such consolidated talent intelligence data and insights.

Mind the Gaps to Leverage Strategic Talent Intelligence

If you mind all of these gaps, as well as others involving the intersection of the above practice areas with compensation, leadership development, succession planning, and more; you will naturally be taking a more unified approach to talent management. This will put you in a better position to pursue highly strategic and impactful talent management strategies such as:

• Efficient and ongoing talent mobility to make sure you have the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
• Accurate identification of high-potentials for the next leadership development program cycle.
• Establishing stronger bench strength for all critical roles in the organization, not just the top executive levels.
• More effective reward-for-performance models that can improve productivity, engagement, and retention for specific roles.
• Greater retention of high-performing individuals through the alignment of L&D opportunities with the individual’s goals and clearly aligned organizational goals.
• Developing deep talent pools composed of both internal and external candidates.

In summary, consider again what our research found to be the “Nine Most Important Talent Intelligence Metrics,” and then think about which of those you have reliable access to today. Where do you lack reliable access to such critical talent intelligence data? What process and technology gaps do you see? With answers to those questions, the next step to achieving the benefits of integrated talent management is to “mind the gaps.”

PLEASE NOTE: To learn more on this subject, attend our webinar on April 17th, “Reskilling the Workforce: Essential to Business Success.” Don’t miss this interactive discussion with Dave Wilkins, VP of Taleo Research,  on the how learning and development can not only improve the skills of your workforce now—but also fill long-term skill gaps.