Friday, July 27, 2018

How to Find, Hire and Lead Great Talent



I don’t believe in the war for talent.  Yes, there are some specialized skills that are challenging to acquire but since most people are dissatisfied at work for largely the same reasons involving company culture, managers and rewards, even ‘hard to find talent’ is open to making a change.

FINDING GREAT TALENT

You can hire great people without making extravagant offers or breaking the budget by following three simple rules:
  • Be creative: Everyone out there’s looking for the same hard to find profiles, but what you really need is someone who can succeed in the job.  If you can’t get the exact skills you are looking for in your price range, look for transferable skills or consider bringing in a contractor to meet your short-term needs while searching or training someone (see my blog post on HR and the Gig Economy).
  • Be flexible: There’s no shortage of qualified and hard-working people out there who, because hiring them feels risky, are often overlooked: moms returning to the workplace, remote workers, people who want to change careers, young professionals looking for growth opportunities, people not currently employed, semi-retired people, etc. 
  • Have a talent pipeline: One of your jobs as a manager is to have a rolodex of potential talent you’d like in your team should the right opportunity arise.  If you have an opportunity to travel to events, talk to people, connect with interesting profiles on LinkedIn, and keep people in mind who applied for previous job postings. 


HIRING GREAT TALENT

So, those are some tips for finding and making yourself attractive to great talent, but the trickier bit is knowing who to hire.  Again, a few simple rules have served me well over the years:
  • Have an audition: Ask your candidates to prepare a presentation to showcase how they approach work.  AI may help identify talent in future, but so long as LinkedIn keeps showing me Spanish speaking sales jobs I’m not holding my breath.  Profiles can be gamed but a solid presentation can’t be faked.  Inviting people who will be working with the person you hire will enable them to weigh in on and buy into the decision.
  • Don’t be Goldilocks: I wrote a short post about Goldilocks Syndrome here.  You should always wait until you find someone who can succeed in the job and complement the team, but I’ve seen job posts with completely unrealistic expectations.  Similarly, don’t immediately write off people who seem too senior, as they can bring invaluable experience to the team.  Instead of ticking skills boxes, hire people who can learn, play well with others, and think on their feet.
  • Hire people who can grow: According to the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, if you are selecting from a pool of candidates that all share a basic level of competence it doesn’t really matter who you hire, because they will learn on the job.  I totally buy into that, having learned coding on the job early in my career and pretty much everything else at an advertising agency in Tokyo.  An audition or trial period will help you assess growth potential.


LEADING GREAT TALENT

So now you’ve hired someone and it’s your job to help them be successful and grow professionally.  A few tips:

  • Let people be stars:  Managing ambitious high potentials can be challenging, especially when they think their work is better than it is – it takes humour, lots of listening and putting your own ego on mute.  There’s also a body of thought leadership that is pro-team and anti-star, which I find interesting but limited.  In my experience, everyone has star quality if you help them find and express it at work.  
  • Be dream compliant: At the recent Club Talentsoft event, Co-Founder Alex Pachulski predicted that organizations will need to become dream compliant and help people connect with opportunities (more about the event and his presentation here).  Money aside, the best way to keep ambitious self-starters happy is providing opportunities and encouragement to try things, grow, take responsibility and make visible contributions, and be recognized. 
  • Expect people to move on: People leave bad bosses, but good people leave good bosses, too.  If you lead in a way that attracts high potentials and performers to work for you, and give them opportunities to grow, chances are they will at some point receive a better offer.  That’s OK, first because you want what’s best for them, second because they’ll go the extra mile for you to wrap up and/or transition projects before they go, and third because it creates opportunity for others on the team.  Voluntary attrition helps keep the team fresh.
Look, most of what we thought we knew about talent management has turned out to be wrong, and everything we think we know today probably will, too.  I believe part of the reason is a tendency to over-engineer talent strategies, but fortunately, basic leadership principles never change: 

If you hire people who love to learn, encourage collaboration and new ideas, recognize contributions, and weed out trust-destroying behaviours, you’ll never have trouble finding, hiring and leading great talent.

Friday, July 13, 2018

Is HR Ready to be GIGantic?



In my most recent post HR and the Gig Economy, I talked about how the workforce is changing as managers staff their teams with more contingent labour.  HBR also wrote a thought-provoking article Run Taskrabbit Run, exploring a not-so-distant future where businesses no longer have employees.  Since my very talented former colleague Stacy Chapman, the CEO of SwoopTalent, has predicted that more doomsayers will write more about this topic… challenge accepted.

I'm actually not a doomsayer, at least I don't think I am.  I personally see the gig economy as an opportunity for HR rather than a threat, at least in the medium term (y’ know, before HR gets replaced by chatbots), because contractors are people.  For too long HR has let procurement own services talent as the proportion of contingent workers steadily increases.  It’s time for HR to step up and reclaim the people agenda.

Here are some of the challenges HR needs to be ready for to stay relevant in the gig economy:

People Data: I know we’re all still high fiving about moving to the cloud, but to prepare for the gig economy, your HR solution needs to track data for contractors as well as employees.  You need to know where your contractors are placed, when, for what, and how much they cost.  You also want to know if they are effective, which will be a challenge since they aren’t included in your performance appraisal process.

Compliance: There are some legal challenges with making contractors feel too much like part of the team - not to mention employment insurance - but someone needs to figure that out for the business.  Who better than HR?  Not procurement, unless HR also wants to share ownership of core competencies, performance management and employer brand.  Yeah, I didn’t think so.  : )

Organizational development: What is the right employee to contractor ratio?  Where should external skills be brought in on a project or fixed term basis v. in-house?  Most importantly, how can HR add real value to this discussion, rather than just consolidating input from different parts of the business?  Own this!!!

Recruiting: HR plays an active role in recruiting talent but not – typically – in acquiring contractors, besides signing the contract with the agency and/or sending over the NDA.  However, just like employees, contractors have diverse skills and personalities, and some will be a better fit than others.  Does HR really want to leave this up to chance, allow mission critical work to go to the lowest bidder, or fail to consider skills augmentation in a broader company context?

Performance and Engagement: Like employees, contractors need to be engaged and assessed for organizational fit and quality of work.  After all, they perform critical tasks for your company, provide a crutch for your company’s core capabilities, and cost money.  It’s important to make them feel like part of the team, help them succeed and establish some metric to assess the quality of their work.  

Skills Development: If we envision a future where most or all of the workforce is project based, at least in some industries, how will HR shape core competencies in that future?  What will core competencies even mean?  And how do you ensure today that skills for hire are also transferred, and that any skills or knowledge gaps your contractors have are addressed so they can work as efficiently as possible?

Leadership: Managing contractors requires somewhat different skills and perspective than managing employees.  It’s HR’s job to make sure managers are ready to lead a truly diverse workforce made up of employees, contractors and non-humans.

Rewards:  As more contractors are brought in to augment teams, compensation equity and company perqs will take on a new flavour.  There’s no one right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, and it needs to be considered in light of what is best for the business.  Ideally, you don’t want rewards to create a divide between internal and external team members, which is what will happen if contractors get treated like second class citizens.

Collaboration: The right collaboration and project management tools can help teams work more productively.  With the gig economy, having the right tools to streamline processes and tasks while linking work to company goals has never been more important.

Internal support: This one has long frustrated me as a hiring manager.  New employees get the red carpet rolled out by HR, a new laptop, a new workstation, etc., whereas contractors need to go on a treasure hunt to find a place to sit and get signed onto the system.  Which the company pays for in lost productivity, frustrated engagement and an hourly rate to boot.

Employer Brand: Just like employees, some contractors are a better fit for your organization than others.  How do you help ensure your organization attracts the best contractors, and equip them to deliver the best results?

So, you get the idea.  As contractors become part of the mix at work, HR needs to start thinking in very real terms how to attract, retain, engage and develop them.  Or… become less relevant to the business as the workforce changes.


Visual courtesy of Business in the Workplace.

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

HR and the Gig Economy


Not long ago I made a decision to leave my executive job and embrace the gig economy.  I had a number of personal reasons for doing this that you can read about here, but the main reason was that I could.

What changed – besides a growing desire to define a new deal for myself – was the epiphany that organizations have problems they need solved but don’t always have the skills or the headcount to solve them.  

I experienced this first-hand in my previous role, in which I led a global team of FTEs but also brought in fixed term contractors to help with everything from content and customer marketing to maternity leave coverage to organizing our sales kick-off event.  

This article is not about replacing FTEs with contractors, or even about creating the right mix of internal and external talent, a great topic in its own right.  What I’m talking about here is the difference working with contractors makes to a line manager when it comes to working with HR... because it changes everything.

‘I need more headcount’

Consider the following scenario: You lead the content team at a medium-sized global organization and your team’s responsible for rolling out three large global campaigns, including key messages, headlines, content, thumbnails and a full social media plan.  Your global content team consists of three people, one of whom has been co-opted to support the field marketing organization in your largest market.  How are you going to create all that content? 

You talk to HR and long story short, there's no headcount.  Now, you can either continue to plead your doomed business case or use part of your operating budget to hire a contractor instead.

IT is dead.  Long live IT.

I don’t know if you remember what happened to IT when cloud computing changed the business application market forever, but the biggest change had less to do with technology than with how IT organizations were impacted.  Suddenly, global software projects were no longer controlled by IT because solutions were designed to be selected, implemented and used by business users. 

At the same time, the subscription model for cloud-based applications meant departments could pay for them out of their operating budgets.  Modern solutions were easy to use and included visual reports at the touch of a button, with amazing drilldown capabilities, and business users could even build their own.  Best of all, they were designed to be quickly implemented with no more upgrades!

In short, cloud computing left departments free to innovate and try new things without waiting for IT to catch up on the backlog of upgrades and issues created when the the current solutions were rolled out. 

So, what did IT do?  Something quite brilliant, actually.  They regrouped, downsized and transformed themselves into a service organization.  As point solutions popped up like mushrooms across the business, they demonstrated a new kind of value managing a complex ecosystem of solutions and responding to the business more promptly when special cases came up.  After a brief struggle against the inevitable move to the cloud, IT embraced the new reality and discovered it’s a lot more fun to be a hero than a gatekeeper. 

Embracing the Gig Economy

What does this have to do with HR?  Two things: First, HR has already responded to the call of the cloud but still has some work to do helping leaders acquire, develop and retain great talent.  Second, the gig economy will again change everything for HR, because the entire workforce composition will change.

Current cloud-based HR applications may not be able to keep up, because while they were designed for the cloud – some more than others - they may not have been designed for the gig.  In other words, if all that fabulous employee data you’ve been collecting only describes part of your actual workforce, you have a major blind spot.

But that’s not all: Just as the cloud enabled departments like HR to get around IT, the gig economy lets department heads go around HR.  For starters, consider how much easier it is to bring in a contractor than it is to hire someone.  It’s also cheaper because it’s on demand and you don’t have to pay benefits or invest in career development.

Working with contractors creates its own challenges but if it’s easier - not to mention cheaper -  for managers to bring in contractors, guess what they’ll do.

Also note that more skilled workers are choosing the gig economy, either because they’re having difficulty finding a permanent role, or because they want to spend less time jumping through administrative (or political) hoops and focus on the work they love doing.

So, the gig train has left the station but HR still needs to climb aboard.  Just as the introduction of cloud-based point solutions enabled IT to step in and propose a more coordinated IT ecosystem, having contractors popping up all over the business costing money and doing ‘something’ presents a golden opportunity for HR.  

If you'd like to read more, I've written a follow up post here about how HR can step up and be... GIGantic.

Thanks for reading.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...