If you weren't in attendance at yesterday's Future of Talent event here in Dallas, presented by Kevin Wheeler and Susan Burns, you really missed something good! Here's a highlight of just some of the gems I noted from Kevin's presentation on the general trends he's observed relative to the HR/Recruiting space. Consider this a copy of my notes, along with some of my musings.
Talent is the core: Just as raw materials or capital was core in past decades for companies to grow and remain competitive, talent is the key ingredient for success today. Kevin defines talent as the skills and competencies needed to achieve a business's objectives. There's nothing earth-shattering about this observation -- but the juxtaposition of the past decades' reliance on materials and dollars--and not people--was what I found most notable.
Mobility-Plus: This trend highlights the notion that today's life and work take place, moving. And thus, little is place-fixated anymore. Therefore the age-old requirement that employees have to work in the office is antiquated and quickly being replaced with virtual work arrangements. Especially among the Millennials, it's far more important to find ways to assess the performance and results of today's employees than to make sure you can see them on your worksite. Don't you wish you had attended? Mind you, these are my notes and according ideas. For the full story and "nothing lost in translation" version, you'll just have to attend a Future of Talent presentation yourself. About Alise Cortez: my day job is VP of Marketing & Sales at Improved Experience, where our mission is to capture the voice of experience one job search at a time for employees and empower employers with the metrics of engagement and retention. Technorati tags: Future of Talent, Kevin Wheeler, Susan Burns, HR trends.
Personalization: Essentially, this is the idea that people want it their way, just like Burger King said 25 years ago ("Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce. Special orders don't upset us. All we ask is that you let us have it your way!") No one wants a canned product or service -- and job seekers don't want to suffer through a sterile process of getting hired. Of course, my immediate thought was, "Whew, boy am I glad we discovered how to customize our suite of online survey products!" We can customize all the demographics and drop-down selections, question content, and messaging as our clients wish.
Technology-driven: No matter what generation we belong to, we must continue to find ways to integrate technology into our personal and professional lives. It's not going away, and the sooner we get comfortable with it and learn how to best harness its power, the more competitive we'll be as employers seeking the best talent.
Generations: There is a fight between Boomers and the Millennials to decide the landscape of the work environment in corporate America. Gen X, which is the least able to get along with the other three generations and is sandwiched among the older and younger groups, has no say in this fight. Also, Boomers base work on the number of hours put in, while the younger generations focus on working anytime, anywhere, and getting results (hence, you can see their disconnect when the Boomers demand they arrive by 8 am and stay at least until 6 pm.) Furthermore, Boomers and the Millenials (also called Gen Y) can get along fairly well, which makes sense, oddly, since the former is the parent of the latter. Millennials don't care about a career -- they want opportunities and the chance to learn new skills. I found myself wondering what our friend and channel partner Gen InsYght and CEO Sherri Ellliott would have to say about this topic, as she has written a generations book called Ties to Tattoos.
Transparency/openness: Kevin stressed the "Facebook conundrum" and the gap between generations in their approaches to censor social media in the workplace, a stance he views as "stupid" since employees will look for other ways to connect with others with or without such censorship. Susan added that it's important that employers trust their employees to be productive while enjoying such social media. Jim Wahl from 7-Eleven spoke up and said that companies did need to take into account the additional technicalities involved in supporting such social media sites likes You Tube, since large companies like his with so many employees would ultimately have to add many more servers to handle the internet load associated with the video requirements. My own mind went to our candidate experience product Get Better Hires and the number of times we'd seen candidates pen open-text comments to our client employers - saying how much they appreciated the employer's candor and transparency in allowing their opinion about the hiring experience to be heard. I liked the idea that we are playing some kind of small role in facilitating transparency from employers to employees and job seekers.
Age of women: Two-thirds of degrees are currently earned by women. And further, women are not the ones being laid off right now. Today's jobs require collaboration, right brain thinking, creativity -- all skills or traits generally associated with women and lacking in men. There is massive male unemployment and that's very disturbing to Kevin. Think about it, he says, what's associated with an idle male? Alcoholism, crime, and even revolution. Kevin said he could think of a few revolutions that have occurred in history when similar conditions were present -- Hitler's rise to power came to mind. Interesting food for thought, indeed.
Rise of the Creative Class: This highly recommended book talks about a coveted group of people that includes scientists, engineers, artists, and Bohemenians -- folks that share a meta competency called an analytical/creative combination -- the critical competency that helps generate wealth today. And these people have chosen to live at the various edges of America in major cities. This leaves the huge chunk of land in the center of the nation with the vast numbers of unemployed or unemployable people over 40 years of age. What to do with that part of the country and that group of people?
Age of Collaboration and Community: Nothing shocking here. Social media (various tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) are important ways people practice social networking. And this connection should be encouraged and fostered within companies and among recruiting and retention efforts.
Growing a Culture of Sustainability: This is relative to both work and lifestyle -- how do we nurture growth that is not explosive and what's that look like to a shareholder? Today, we binge and purge on people in hiring. Europe can't fire so easily so they hire more slowly and carefully. Binging and purging has characterized the last 30 years in the US, and it has helped to create a very negative environment among employers and employees alike. Instead, companies should be looking for ways to reflect shareholder value in smaller, more sustainable increments of growth and profit, an idea which relates nicely to the next noted trend.
Retrain - Redeploy - Refresh: Instead of constantly hiring and firing new employees for specific talent, companies and shareholders need to be willing to essentially "recycle" their talent -- like IBM did. They hired carefully for broad-based skills and long-term cultural fit, and then internally promoted their employees, many of whom stayed for a good 30 years. We need to go back to this model, on a smaller scale and in a different way, as appropriate for each business. While it would be best if our public school system could teach more broad-based skill sets that include a heavy dose of creativity and flexibility in their curriculum, alas, the responsibility of instilling the development of a broad-based skill set that ultimately can be retrained, deployed, and refreshed will ultimately fall on corporate shoulders. Our own school system in Texas is focused on TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) and encourages kids to memorize the one answer for this one question with no room for the assessment of creative thinking. Kevin said an interesting trend is emerging relative to the school effort, though: 20% of kids in our country are being home-schooled (and there is room for creativity and flexibility just given the sheer difference in approach from parent to parent). Magnet schools are better are encouraging creative development, but there aren't enough of them to really impact the numbers needed for "stickiness." Our public school system structure was established in the late 1800s and has little changed since then. <Heavy sigh> We have a lot of work to do to adapt ourselves to the ever-changing demands of 21st century life.
Rise of Entrepreneurship: Daniel Pink has been saying this for quite some time and given the popularity of his book Free Agent Nation - the Future of Working for Yourself, I think Kevin's spot-on right. There is little interest in or availability of a long-term career with any one company -- better to develop a set of skills in demand and offer them for sale as the market dictates. Further, Kevin noted the multiple streams of income the Millennials especially seem to want and are able to create -- all of which relate to the sustainability link. For example, Kevin said his 26-year old son banks all the earnings he makes at his full-time job and then lives on the earnings he makes from the sale of items on E-Bay. Very entrepreneurial and multi-streamed indeed.
Gen Y values go mainstream: Gen Y, or Millennials, value optimism, entrepreneurialism, technology, and flexibility. And oddly, these are the elements fueling workplace trends and success.
From constraint to choice: Again, no surprise here -- people want to have choice in almost everything. However, the abundance of choice can be extremely overwhelming and produce fear and angst about what choices to make for oneself. I think about the sheer number of careers or kinds of work we can have, not just once but perhaps change it seven times over in our life, and it is indeed crazy-making. Our ability to paint our lives today includes the choice of kind of work we do, living location, whether or not to marry or have children, and even what gender we'd like to be. Incredible.
Re-forming the organization: Kevin believes the future calls for companies to have a small group of very loyal employees who will form the basis of the company, and then be flanked by a ring of contractors and consultants who will complement their talent. Interesting idea -- so, much smaller employee-base size, but a lot of contingent workforce.
WSJ had an article (7/15/09) about the design engineer who left the failing Detroit auto industry to return to his native China and its emerging auto industry. He knew his exodus was just one additional yet small move in the collapse of the once dominant role the US played in this huge market.
So many of the observation by Kevin and Susan reinforce the need for embracing change in the employment relationship and our mental model of what an organization looks like and how it operates.
The underlying premise of the Paradigm Shift is that the market leaders at the time of the shift may find themselves on the outside, looking in, if not gone altogether. Robert Zimmerman is still so timely: “For the times, they are a changing..”
Thanks for sharing Alise
Joseph Murphy
Shaker Consulting Group
Developers of the Virtual Job Tryout®
Posted by: Joe Murphy | July 15, 2009 at 05:08 PM