Mar 11, 2016
Given the significant investment and subsequent increase, in ‘disruptive HR tech’ products coming onto the market, there is often pressure on Resourcing Leadership teams to show they are innovating and keeping up with the competition.
While there has indeed been a massive increase in the available Resourcing tools and techniques, innovation can mean different things to different organisations. They key to identify those products which are aligned to your organisational objectives and can complement each other well to show a measurable benefit. Avoiding the pitfalls of vanity projects is important.
There is also a balance to be found between shorter term business outcomes and looking at the problems we’re going to be solving for beyond the next five to ten years. There have been some interesting research pieces by Deloitte and others on the future of work, generational behaviours and impact of technology. For example, the advancement of Artificial Intelligence may well mean the roles we consider critical skills now, such as Financial Analyst, going forward will no longer exist in the way they do today.
Key Tips
- Focus on supporting your own organisation’s goals. Understand the external market but don’t obsess about the competition. There is nothing wrong with being a fast follower rather than an innovator.
- Future proof your organisation by properly understanding the market you’ll be operating in over the longer term, but also leverage the current tools to show some shorter-term benefits. You should find a balance to avoid innovation being perceived as a luxury or worse still a crystal ball gazing talking shop.
Colliding generations
There are countless articles and opinions on the needs of Generation Y (and now Z) and what we should all be doing to accommodate this demanding and vocal cohort of entrants into the workforce. Personally, I think they seem vocal as we keep surveying them. The point here is to understand the candidate community you are engaging with, for example, attitudes to mobility, flexibility, hierarchy, etc.generation, but try to avoid making too many generational generalisations, and then applying those generalisations on a global basis. For further reading, Universum is a company that has done some interesting research on MillenGenerationZ.
What should you be looking to impact?
During time working in the RPO sector I spoke to a lot of organisations across multiple industry sectors. When asking what their drivers for change were, I would get varying answers but always on the same theme. It could typically be boiled down to the following:
Help me to…
1. Reduce my cost per hire
2. Reduce my time to hire
3. Reduce my risk
4. Increase my quality of service
5. Increase my quality of hire
Cost and quality of hire are the two that Resourcing Leadership teams are often most under pressure to address. David Green formally of Cielo has written an insightful piece challenging the cost per hire measure using data from Bersin.
I have to say I agree with him. If a business was to invest $300,000, they would be asking what is the return on that investment. However in Resourcing, we just focus on whether the average cost per hire is $4000 or $5000. If the successful candidate is a high performer clearly that will dwarf the impact of a slightly higher cost per hire. While we may never escape it, Resourcing Leadership teams need to re-position this tactical measure, look at it in context and try to better evidence the quality of hires.
Quality of hire however is not an easy thing to measure effectively. For the most part I have seen organisations use attrition in the first three or six months as an indication of performance of the Resourcing Function. With the data available today there is much more that can be done to address this key metric. Attrition for example doesn’t capture the more dangerous population who might be average performers, but stay in your business for many years.
IBM’S Smarter Workforce analytics team are levering business related data and HR/Resourcing data to build a more robust picture of performance. This goes beyond an annual performance rating where commonly there is a scale of one to five, with the top and bottom rating rarely used. This means a significant majority of employees are bunched into three ratings. Used in isolation it does not support a true measure of performance. IBM is proposing to look at other business related metrics such as contact centres average call times, first time resolution success, overtime/shift patterns, absenteeism and NPS scores etc.
The challenge is of course translating this approach more broadly within an organisation. The investment however is worth it if Resourcing Functions are going to engage and recruit high performing talent who will genuinely impact on your organisation’s objectives.
A final practical tip
So with the cost per hire and quality of hire in mind, what new tools in the market can help? Personally I think the new LinkedIn Referral tool launched at the end of 2015 is interesting. Referral programmes are of course not new but when the onus is on the employee to be aware of their entire network’s skills and movements, plus their entire organisation’s active roles, it’s unlikely to ever yield significant results and there will certainly be missed opportunities. LinkedIn for the first time is integrating with various ATS to take your live roles and automatically match them to your employee’s first degree connections. There is plenty of research suggesting that referred employees become competent quicker, perform better and stay longer. If this is the case, perhaps it’s worth investing some of your innovation effort for 2016 in this space.
