Tapping Top Talent in a Downturn

Tapping Top Talent in a Downturn

HR leaders often are faced with the task of downsizing in one business unit and recruiting highly skilled professionals in another. They have to cope with an exponential increase in applicants for a much smaller number of open jobs, maintain morale in constantly shifting external and internal environments and help their organizations retain key employees. This must be done with reduced recruiting and HR staffs and slashed budgets, at a time when brand image is a critical success factor.

Today, more than ever, organizations must recruit and select the best talent where they have openings and upgrade talent in areas where it will advantage the business. Change in the business environment has happened so fast, many organizations have been slow to adjust and take action. In the current economic climate, it is necessary to take a step back and evaluate workforce plans, as well as talent acquisition processes and enabling technology and determine a strategy that works for the organization in the new recruiting reality.

A Fresh Approach

The biggest mistake an organization can make in this challenging environment is to let down markets drive its vision and shut down recruiting completely. Don't ignore reality. Take a well-planned, creative approach to workforce planning and talent acquisition.

When recruiting departments are faced with more work and fewer resources, build in efficiencies, maximize existing tools, eliminate waste from existing processes, innovate, manage vendor relationships and establish strategic partnerships.

Consider the following steps:

1. Re-evaluate recruitment marketing strategies.
Don't stop running ads and posting jobs, but do be strategic and take a planned approach. The market has shifted from a scarcity to an abundance of candidates in a very short time - adjust accordingly. Don't overspend or spend in the wrong areas. Now is a great time to be out in the market as the competition for talent is much lower. Take advantage of it.

Also, renegotiate existing vendor relationships; don't pay last year's rates this year. There will still be skill shortages and geographic recruiting gaps, so rewrite copy and spruce up the company's look. Speak in a genuine voice for the organization by working with the marketing department.

2. Leverage the hidden gold mine.
Arguably the most commonly overlooked tool in any organization is its existing database. A real gold mine of information, the resumes collected by recruiters and HR staff during the past few years should provide great leads on passive and active candidates. For instance, run a Boolean search on the company's internal ATS database.

3. Improve competitive insight.
Leverage candidate interviews to collect market data on competitors. Actively call leads and network to gain insight into their knowledge about competitors. As talent managers interview candidates from competitors, gather critical information to help position the company to win in the market.

4. Tap the current employee pool.
Take a fresh look at the existing employee pool. Which individuals shine in the downturn? Identify individuals who have been interested in gaining experience in other functional areas and who would be willing to wear two hats during difficult times.

For the right employees, the current climate might provide real opportunities to gain much needed and desired experience in another area. Strong employees will appreciate the opportunity for long-term career growth, and it will show them how much they are valued.

5. Maximize social networking in recruiting.
When used properly, social media networks are an effective tool. The time demand is surprisingly low. If an organization has limited time, choose one or two networks to try. One recommendation is LinkedIn, which is targeted to professionals and requires little maintenance.

6. Automate candidate contact, and employ well-designed self-service.
Tracking down candidates can be time-consuming and frustrating, not to mention costly. Be efficient. One of the easiest solutions is to work with a provider to automate the process. There are myriad tools and software options on the market. The most attractive are those that include auto-scheduling, online minimum qualification screening and telephony/video interviewing platforms. Talent leaders also will want to improve and perhaps automate selection tools to ensure they find those few best needles in the now huge haystack.

Many talent managers can relate to the challenge of responding to the growth in candidate calls to "check status" and a single candidate applying for multiple positions. Turn on auto e-mails. A recent Pinstripe survey showed that less than 20 percent of organizations use that functionality in their ATSs.

Books Are Fun Ltd., a Chicago-based subsidiary of Reader's Digest, and the world's leading display marketer of books and gifts, experienced the benefits of automation firsthand. To meet expansion goals and cover attrition rates, Books Are Fun recruits 250-300 independent sales representatives every year. Before automation, the company's six internal recruiters spent 70 percent of their time screening applicants.

"We knew that the most important part of the recruiting process is the late-stage conversation that we have with a candidate about the job as a lifestyle change rather than just another position," said David Hammond, vice president of sales recruitment. "We needed our internal folks to focus on these late-stage conversations. It was a waste of time for my staff to handle the screening process."

Books Are Fun outsourced the sourcing and screening process to an organization that was able to reduce costs and time to fill by streamlining candidate tracking; managing all recruitment marketing efforts including postings and active and passive candidate sourcing; and accessing additional resources, including community-based recruiting from libraries and organizations, franchise and sales-niche recruiting, various national and regional job boards and TRM contact searches.

7. Find the right candidates from the onset.
Many organizations put too many people through too far in their processes. Design talent acquisition, screening and selection processes carefully and stick with them. Screen people in - and out - early.

"In the past, Books Are Fun offered a contract to the first qualified candidate that appeared. Now we want to offer a contract to the most qualified candidates only," Hammond said. "Our new system generates enough volume of qualified candidates to provide us with real choices."

8. Review the funnel and revise processes.
An organization may have fewer openings, but now there will be more people applying, which will significantly increase the amount of time spent screening and responding to applicants. This can exhaust an HR team, particularly one that recently reduced staff, and could increase effective cost per hire.

Adopt a high-volume recruiting model to process a high volume of candidates in a time of low job requisitions. Technology enables the process in a candidate friendly way. Move online prequalifiers to the top of the funnel, and save the paid online screens and assessments for the spot where the funnel is slimmer.

Books Are Fun revised its process and brought about significant improvements, including a 45 percent decrease in costs, a decrease in time to fill from 52 to 42 days and clear recruiting metrics including weekly summaries, pipeline reports, hiring funnels and detailed process maps.

9. Protect the brand.
When an organization is one of a few that is hiring, and getting 500 resumes for every job posted, process change is necessary. Work with experts to ensure the company doesn't miss good people or alienate future prospects and customers. This is particularly important if an organization is a major consumer brand, and every applicant also is a consumer.

Be polite and respectful every time. Companies are not usually good at this, and HR will find it especially important to partner with marketing and hiring managers when everyone is being asked to do more with less.

Times are tough and the human resources function is on the frontlines of the battle. But remember, every downturn yields winners and losers. Some organizations will not merely weather this storm; they will seize the opportunity to emerge as a more efficient and successful.


[About the Author: Sue Marks is founder and CEO of Pinstripe Inc., an HR and recruitment process outsourcing firm serving large- and middle-market domestic clients, as well as the Global 5000.]

Effective Organizations

Effective Organizations(Organization Development)

The trend toward reducing the number of management levels in organizations is being driven by the need of organizations to increase the speed and accuracy of communication. Traditional organizations, with their many levels of management, process information slowly. Plus the information gets filtered along the way, often for political reasons which can conflict with the overall good of the organization.

Processing information quickly and accurately, then acting upon what is learned, is critical for the success of an organization. Another key item is selecting relevant information for measuring organizational performance relative to organizational goals. This can be challenging in light of today's information rich environment. (Selecting the wrong metrics, those which pull the focus of the organization away from what is most important for its ultimate success, will harm an organization). After selecting the appropriate metrics, organizational performance can be further enhanced by linking the performance results to individual or team incentives.

Performance Management is a process that can facilitate the flow of information in an organization. Performance Management includes the following:

1. A flow-down of goals beginning with the organization's strategic plan, to the annual organizational goals, to the President's or CEO's individual performance goals, on down to all employees in the organization. Thus each member of the organization can ultimately tie their individual performance goals to the organizational goals .


2. A formal feedback system in which individual performance results can ultimately flow back and influence the organization's strategic plan. Feedback must occur frequently.


3. A mutual (between the employee and manager) establishment of duties and responsibilities and criteria for measuring success. Also, performance results are mutually determined. The mutuality is what encourages the feedback.

Executive Coaching and Business Strategy

Successful executive coaching requires sophisticated understanding of organizations as well as of individuals. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the intersection of business strategy and the executive coaching that supports it. Senior leaders play a critical role in setting direction, defining strategic positions, and providing focus for the business operations needed for successful execution. Through executive coaching, a leader can be more effective, as an individual, in guiding the execution of the strategy. Furthermore, given the positions these individuals occupy in their organizations, coaching can also affect the formation of strategy.

An essential HR responsibility is to support the business strategy with initiatives, programs, processes, and business partner consulting that may help the organization achieve its business goals. Executive coaching is one area in which HR has the potential to support not only the execution of the strategy but its development as well. Involvement of HR in executive coaching may take a variety of forms that include supporting an ad hoc request for coaching, developing a coaching program as part of a larger HR or executive development strategy, or providing executive coaching directly as an internal coach.

Four Different Coaching Roles

This approach (Witherspoon and White, 1996) defines each coaching role according to its purpose:

• Coaching for skills, which focuses on specific skills required for a current job
• Coaching for performance, which focuses more broadly on a present job
• Coaching for development, which is directed toward learning for a future job
• Coaching for the executive's agenda, which focuses on learning that is related to an executive's agenda in the broadest sense

The last role, coaching for the executive's agenda, is the most directly relevant to strategy. Building on Witherspoon and White's model, in this role, a coach might:

• Be a sounding board for an executive who needs to explore the feasibility of several potential strategy scenarios

• Help test an executive's assumptions regarding marketplace realities and the opportunities they present

• Point out blind spots on the part of the executive that are impeding implementation

• Enhance creativity

• Support the efforts required to pursue a given strategic direction by helping an executive lay out a change strategy that supports the business strategy

The role of coaching for the executive's agenda seems to have the greatest relevance for strategy; however, any of the roles could help focus learning that relates to business strategy. For example, when coaching for skills, an executive may need to address some of the following areas:

• Acquiring more knowledge about the new Internet economy in order to fully understand emerging strategic options

• Honing negotiation skills for new partnerships with customers who simultaneously become partners, suppliers, and competitors

• Further refining expert communication skills with the goal of implementing and providing leadership through major organizational change.
The other two roles, coaching for performance and coaching for development, may also be appropriate for specific situations involving strategy formation or execution.

Ref: Catherine Fitzgerald and Jennifer Berger

Assessment Questionnaire Instruments

There are some principles need to be considered when designing questions items for 360 degree assessment questionnaire. to be useful, they must be constructed carefully. A simple way to test each of your items is to ask if the item can be described as the following:

Unidimensional. This means that the item measures only one thing. Perhaps the most common survey-item error is the double question, for example, "To what extent does this person coach and counsel subordinates effectively?" Coaching and counseling are two different activities, of course, and they require separate measurement. The item should be recast as two; otherwise, how does the rater respond if the person being rated is effective on one but not the other?

Free of qualifiers. Words like "usually," "always," "never," and "good" can invalidate the rating scale. For example, if you use a "Strongly agree? Strongly disagree" rating scale, and an item reads, "This person always involves others in decisions that affect them," how would a rater respond if the person being rated sometimes does this, but not always! Such qualifiers should simply be eliminated.

Observable. The rater must have had the opportunity to see what is being rated. Asking raters to infer and judge is asking for contaminated data. The item, "To what degree is this person skilled in making his or her points clear under stress?" is preferable to "To what degree is this person good at handling conflict situations?" The former can be directly observed, whereas the latter represents an inference or summary judgment. The difficulty with items that require inferences and judgments is that raters will respond to them, but the recipient of the feedback may not be able to interpret the data or find ways to improve on those items.

Tied to the scale. If you use a frequency scale, the items must be written to conform to it. The item "This person shows competency in being able to locate prospective customers effectively" requires a degree scale rather than a rating of frequency.

Clear and understandable. Ideally, every rater needs to interpret each item the same way. That means avoiding any language that is ambiguous, jargonistic, or at too high a level of comprehension. Good rules are to use easy, common words and to write at the lowest educational level of the personnel who will respond to the instrument.

Ratable by the data sources. Since 360° feedback interventions often involve such disparate sources of ratings as self, bosses, peers, subordinates, internal customers, external customers, trained observers, and friends and family, it is critical that the items cover what these raters know something about; otherwise there will be many holes in the feedback. Our practice is to determine the sources of ratings before constructing the instrument, so that we include only those items that respondents are qualified to rate.

Developmental ("So what? Now what?"). Instrument items should center on things that the feedback recipient can do something about. The goal is to generate reliable, valid data that will be useful for developing self-directed action plans for improvement. Getting feedback on "To what degree does this person display an attitude of optimism?" would probably not be so useful to feedback recipients as one that asks, "To what degree is this person able to assist you in analyzing your problem situations at work?"

Aligned with the organization's vision. The item set should concentrate on what is critical to realizing the hoped-for future of the organization. The connection between what the instrument measures and what the organization stands for and is headed toward should be obvious to all respondents. In a sense, 360° feedback instruments are strong organizational messages about what is important: "If you're going to stay here and flourish, you need to become highly competent in these areas." This approach obviates the need for "importance" ratings; every item has already been decided to be critical to carrying out the organization's intentions.

Content Areas

Developing instruments for 360° feedback entails choosing appropriate content, If you choose to measure other dimensions of individuals, here are categories to consider:

Skills: Sets of behaviors that are shaped toward "objective" standards. Examples: designing meetings, writing objectives, listening, repairing a machine.

Competencies: Developed abilities. Competencies are more general than skills, and often subsume sets of skills. Examples: intervening in conflict situations, providing performance feedback, elucidating vision, strategic planning.

Traits/Characteristics: Descriptions of the feedback recipient as an individual?his or her "character." Examples: trustworthiness, intelligence, creativity/innovativeness, decisiveness.

Attitudes/Feelings: Inferred from behavior. Attitudes are predispositions to behave predictably toward an object or class of objectives. Feelings are emotions that are experienced in reaction to, or anticipation of, situations and events. Examples: "isms," optimism, patience, anger.

Behaviors/Leadership Practices: Observable: what the person actually does. Examples: involving people in planning, interceding for subordinates making "command" decisions, expressing caring.

Ref: John Jones and William Bearley