Is Talent Acquisition function alike Sales function?

There was a discussion on a very interesting topic last week on LinkedIn.

Human Resource (Talent Acquistion fuction) is alike sales fuction,Do you agree?If yes, then how will you contrive fixed or variable % in compensation structure?

Below is the answer to the above question and my feeling on how this interesting matter be addressed.

This is a very interesting topic to discuss. I believe that the major KRA of the Talent Acquisition Function is to hire the best talent at affordable rates from the competitive markets. It’s all about having the best talent at the right place at the right time. So, the Fixed and the variable structure should be planned out keeping in mind two major factors – Retention of the existing talent and New Talent Acquisition.

Accordingly, Fixed part should be paid for the retention of the existing talent and the variable to paid for hiring the best talent as per the job requirement, SLA adherence, and the hiring cost saved. Now dividing the compensation structure into percentage is an organisation call.

Your suggestions are always welcome.

Employee Referral Schemes

Employee referral scheme pertaining to recruitment depends upon the nature of industry. Some of the industries which are more man power intensive always fall short of man power. Under these circumstances HR department always remain under pressure for recruitment and retainment of employees. Employees referral scheme plays a big role in this context. It has both positive and negative impacts on the organisation. Negative impacts can never be eliminated but yes these can be minimised for further consolidation of scheme. Some points need to be taken care of, while preparing the employee refrral program:-

1. Policy should be meant for a particular category of employees. This will help in maintaining the professionalism in the company.

2. Employees must be made aware of the parameters expected by the company from new recruit.

3. Monetary benefits can be shared with the employee whose recommendations helped organisation to finalise management in selecting the candidate.

4. These monetary benefits can be shared in number of stages e.g 15% of cost of hiring may be paid to concerned employee on joining of new employee. Another 25 % after completion of one month of service by new joined and balance after the completion of three months of service or after confirmation of employee in to services of company.

5. The reasons behind the above is that the recommending employee will help the new joined in apprising the culture of organisation thus reducing the settle down time.

6. Back ground of the new selection can be verified from the present employee.

7. The recommended employee should have minimum two years of service in the organisation.

8. Employees who have been issued warning letter or chargesheeted in the past should be barred from entering the scheme.

9. Not more than two recommendations should be accepted through one employee during a year. This number may depend upon requirement and present strength of organisation.

10. Negative impacts like unionism may enter into the organisation. Unity among the known are more as compared to independent. Psychometric impacts on known cases are more effective and may result in frustration and demoralisation.

Employee Engagement: Doing It vs. Measuring

It seems today that employee engagement is in vogue. Everywhere I look I hear about balanced score cards that include a placeholder for employee engagement, and I learn about organizations making their living out of measuring engagement and trying to explain it to their clients. I like the idea, but I worry about it. I worry that this is what employees would call “another HR thing.” Let’s face it – we have lots of “HR things.” They are called fads. These are the bandwagons upon which we hop.

Perhaps it’s time to evaluate whether employee engagement is a fad or a new knowledge domain from which HR executives can help make their companies a better place to work. One key difference between an HR fad and a real intervention is who owns the new process. Therefore, in this article I would like to evaluate who owns employee engagement with the goal of deriving ways in which we can make employee engagement a useful process and not just one more fad. But before going further, I want to define employee engagement.

Defining Employee Engagement

I like to define engagement in terms of what people do at work. I use something called role theory to elaborate on that definition. Role theory reviews different roles that people engage in at work, and it explains reasons why people engage in certain roles and not in others. My colleagues and I have been able to use role theory to understand conditions under which employees are either engaged or disengaged and examine what happens under both conditions. In particular, we uncovered five work-related roles that exist in any company. These roles are:

1. Job holder role – employees come to work and do the job that is listed in their job description.

2. Team member role – employees go “above and beyond” to help members of their team work toward common goals.

3. Entrepreneur role – employees come up with new ideas and processes and try to get those ideas implemented.

4. Career role – employees do things to enhance their career in the organization; they learn, they adapt new skills, and more.

5. Organization member role – employees do things that promote and help the company even if it’s not part of their jobs or their team’s duties.

Employees are in a highly engaged state when they are doing the nonjob roles. In general, we find that most employees have a sense of fairness, and even if their employer treats them poorly, most will show up to work and do the job role. But having employees show up at work simply doing their jobs gets an employer nowhere in terms of long-term competitiveness. If all of your employees show up and only do their jobs, then you are not building organizational strength and long-term competitiveness through people because anyone can hire those same employees and duplicate what you are doing.

It’s the synergy that comes from people working together and gathering creative ideas that leads to long-term organization wealth creation. That synergy and “above and beyond” behavior is evidence of employee engagement.

The question that we must ask ourselves is: “what are we doing to engage employees?” I’ve seen some approaches that involve using magical survey questions (the super 15, 30, 100, or more questions) to investigate and understand what you have to do in order to transform your workforce from disengaged to engaged. This means the process of engagement is dictated by the specific questions that one chooses to measure engagement. This approach worries me because it seems that we are trying to MEASURE engagement without necessarily helping individual managers really AFFECT engagement in their day-to-daywork.

Ref: Theresa Welbourne

Importance of Human Resource Metrics

The processes of recruitment and selection are not as easy as they may seem. Any person who works for the human resource department of any company can certainly attest to this. This is because there is no definitive means of distinguishing which of the applicants for a particular position would be efficient on the job from the ones who would not be as efficient. If there were some sort of definitive system of discerning such, maybe companies all over the world would not experience such high turnover rates! This is why human resource departments of companies worldwide recognize the need to come up with human resource metrics, or HR metrics.

The term HR metrics, when you put it as simply as possible, refer to guidelines. These guidelines are measurable and are used by companies to come up with cost-effective strategies that are primarily aimed at the ensuring high-end performance of the workforce. The operative concept in HR metrics is employee assessment. Unless you have years and years of recruitment and selection under your belt, it is actually quite hard to assess the efficiency of an applicant right off the bat. Without the proper training entailed in being a recruitment specialist, it is close to impossible to assess applicants accurately. There are even times when even the most experienced HR specialist would have problems going about with accurate assessment for this!

This is precisely why HR metrics are very much needed by any personnel working for the HR department of a company. With the proper HR metrics system, the HR department of the company can determine which of the applicants would be worth investing on.

Gathering and creating a system of human resource metrics for any company is something that can be done easily; that is, as long as you have the proper guidelines to back you up. The most important thing here is to gather information about the employees. However, not all pieces of information would be used in developing human resource metrics at all. Weeding out the reliable pieces of information from those which are not is the ideal here. But then, at what figure should the gathering of human resource metrics be pegged? The recommended figure by the lot of recruitment specialists and experts here is actually pegged at ten. With this figure, you will actually come up with an effective system of assessing your company's workforce.

Another important thing to remember in the process of developing human resource metrics is that all aspects of the business should be considered. To name a few of these business aspects, these would be recruiting and retention, employee engagement, manager satisfaction, and the productivity of the workforce. There are other aspects and factors to consider, of course. But the underlying concept in ensuring the efficiency of the human resource metrics a company would use is actually very simple: the company should be very goal-oriented. When a company knows what it wants to achieve, then distinguishing the aspects to be retained from the ones to let go would be certainly easier.