Unfortunately, it’s a common dilemma; hiring the candidate that has the right experience, qualifications, and work history, only to find three months later that their style, approach or behavior are inconsistent with the values of your organization. While skills and experience are critical, research increasingly points to organizational fit as a key differentiator in who will contribute faster, perform better and stay longer. So how do you balance the importance job fit and culture fit in your selection process?

In a webcast today with Ken Lahti and Tracy Kantrowitz from Previsor, we explored the significance of culture fit, how to identify the right match, and the new techniques and tools available for assessing candidates. We also discussed how organizations have effectively aligned measurement for culture fit, skills and experience to ensure the candidate hired is the best for the job and company.

What is “fit?” 

According to Lahti and Kantrowitz, “Job fit refers to the alignment of individuals’ characteristics with those required by the job.”  Whereas, culture fit is “the compatibility between an individual and a work environment that occurs when their characteristics are well matched.” (*Kristoff-Brown, Zimmerman, & Johnson, 2005)

Of course, culture assessments rely on solid analysis- and just like job analysis require research and commitment to get it right.  The outcome is pleasant, however, as Kantrowitz shares that higher alignment to culture fit also reveals improved engagement, satisfaction, and turnover.

Are you evaluating your talent for culture fit?  Job fit?

Whether pulling staff from an existing bench or searching for talent outside company walls, building an effective “shared services” team that fits business requirements and meets an organization’s finance, technology, and talent demands can be challenging. Not only do businesses need to understand the specific skill sets that each team requires, but they also need to retain the right talent.

In today’s webcast, we closely examined the strategy for sourcing, hiring, and retaining informational technology professionals with Mark Minichiello, Director of Global Recruiting for Akamai, and Jim McCoy, Senior Vice President at Veritude.  (Side note:  “If you use the Internet for anything - to download music or software, check the headlines, book a flight - you’ve probably used Akamai’s services without even knowing it.”)  As competition for talent intensifies, organizations with multiple locations or a global workforce may find efficiently staffing a development team even more challenging. Compounding things further are country-specific privacy laws, cultural expectations and labor rates that vary by locale. Yet taking a cost-conscious approach to where you find talent in a competitive market requires a creative, comprehensive and flexible strategy. We also identified five key components and processes to help you execute your staffing strategy for successful project development.

During the webcast Jim and Mark shared their five strategies for shared services in IT:

1. Redeploy in-house talent
2. Create a staffing rate card to effectively compare costs
3. Evaluate locations for optimum cost benefit
4. Coach project leaders
5. Find staffing partners that complement your efforts

Here’s some knowledge for your morning, from C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan, and to be featured in a webcast this afternoon.  In their new book, The New Age of Innovation:  Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks, the authors build upon a thesis expressed as N=1, R=G.  What does this mean?  From the book:

1.  Value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers.  Firms have to learn to focus on one consumer and her experience at a time, even if they serve 100 million consumers.  (N=1)

2.  No firm is big enough in scope and size to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time.  All firms will access resources from a wide variety of other big and small firms- a global ecosystem. (R=G)

So what exactly are the implications for talent management professionals then?  From Dr. Krishnan:

New levels of transparency to skills, talent and performance

Decoding the dominant logic and enabling change

Integration of HR with Operations & Strategy

Talent analytics for contextual insights

New policies and evidence based corrections

I’m going to hold off on my own comments until after the webcast- and ask for yours as well!

“There has been a philosophical shift in the nature of recruiting.  [The Candidate] Lifecycle is not a finite process with a beginning, middle and end: it is a relationship – an ongoing communication.  To build a pipeline of candidates that we can draw on whenever we have a need, we must build a community.  It’s a marriage – not a one-night stand!”  Angela Gardner, Vice President of Talent Acquisition, Fox Entertainment Group, Inc.

Angela shared, during today’s webcast, some great advice from her background as a headhunter and from her tenure at Fox on mastering the candidate lifecycle.  We had some terrific questions asked as well- we’d love to hear from you on solutions!

What steps can we take to get our regional communities involved in our organization’s talent brand?

Where are the best areas to spend our recruiting budgets?  Brand? Systems? Labor?

How can an organization balance agile recruiting with compliant recruiting?

According to Dr. Ken Lahti, in today’s webcast, “[i]nterviews are an integral component of selection, yet they remain highly subjective & inconsistent, creating potential exposure to legal challenges.”  

What is a “good” interview?  Simply speaking, a good interview does what it says it will do:  actually predicts amongst candidates who will be successful in the job and who won’t.  Designing a good interview, however, is not so simple, but it should always be scientific, and hinges upon a couple of key components.

Job Analysis: What are the requirements necessary for the job and how is the work performed?  It is such a basic statement, yet it is shocking how few companies have current and accurate job analyses.  This process is work intensive, but is so critical for a majority of other human capital management practices.  The challenge exists to workforce scientists to invent a way to make this process take less time.

Interview Structure: Poor interviews lack consistency, and are unable to reproduce similar results from one session to the next.  Not surprisingly, this leads to an inability to fairly assess a group candidates.   Inconsistent interviews also leave mortar-sized craters of legal and compliance fears and true risks.

Interviewer Ability:  I used to begin every hiring manager interview debrief with this rhetorical question:  Is it a fact or is it a feeling?  It is woeful how inadequate most interviewers are at assessing talent quality- especially when coupled with how good they think they are.  As a profession, we really need a group or organization to design and offer a certification process for interviewers.  Any takers?  Training can easily address such deficiencies as interviewer bias, lack of skill, and proper preparation.

Let’s not forget the endgame of interviewing:  hiring the right person.

How deep is your organization’s talent pipeline?  How many years will it serve?  If you are one of many industries in the world facing looming talent shortages, these questions are of critical importance.  And let’s face it, those talent needs are not going to be satisfied simply be playing the recruitment version of musical chairs.  Is it your turn to hire that one local professional that every competitor in town has employed for 2 years?

In our live webcast today, Robin Miller, Director of Staffing at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, and Susan Milliken, Executive Director of Futures for Kids (F4K) talked about BCBSNC’s talent pipeline programs and how to bridge the gap between employers, students and careers.  At BCBSNC, their strategy targets both entry-level talent and professional talent.  Their entry-level needs are served by high school partnerships, including established ventures with:

• National Academy Foundation Programs
• Business Advisory Boards
• Career Fairs and Mock Interviews
• Futures for Kids:  I have had the pleasure of working with F4K starting in a past life.  In a nutshell, F4K “bridges the gap between the hopes and dreams of our students and the workforce development needs of our communities.”  Through targeted programs at middle- and high-schools, F4K
• Uses the Internet to help students discover what makes them tick
• Allows kids to explore careers that match their unique talents
• Gives every student a career coach to talk to
• Empowers educators with information about their kids’ career goals
• Enables businesses to grow their future workforce locally
• Shows our kids careers that can make them happy

Additionally, their professional talent pipeline is filled through:

• College Internship Program- think of this as a “broad-stroke” solution designed to give rising seniors from participants universities experience in multiple facets of careers at BCBSNC
• Apprenticeship Program-  is truly a part-time experience while enrolled in university
• Direct College Hire Program- a training program that includes leadership and technical courses

I am really impressed by how thoughtful and successful BCBSNC has been in designing and implementing these programs.  Want more info about partnering with F4K in North Carolina, Canada or pilots in the world beyond?  Check them out online.

Today’s webcast will focus on work/life initiatives and how to measure the impact of these programs.  What does work/life have to do with talent acquisition?  We’ll discuss that in a bit.  First- let’s define what “work/life” is.  According to our presenter, Dr. Amy Richman of WFD Consulting, “[w]ork-life is a perspective. Companies that take a work-life perspective regard employees from a whole person point of view. They acknowledge that it is not just skills, abilities, and career goals but also work environment and personal and family life that give employees the energy and commitment to contribute fully. “

Creating, fostering, and nurturing a healthy work/life strategy is a competitive edge in talent acquisition- especially amongst semi-retiring Boomers and smart young Millennials.

Dr. Richman encourages organizations to ask this question: Does your company’s work-life effort have these components?

•Dependent care programs & policies

•Health and wellness programs & policies

•Education benefits and programs

•Financial and legal programs

•Flexible work practices

•Organizational culture that enables employees to work efficiently and manage work and personal responsibilities

•Workload and work redesign efforts to eliminate low value work and achieve business results

•Community focus and collaboration to leverage investments

Are there any  missing components?  Do you disagree with any?

Finally, Dr. Richman demonstrates how to measure the impact of work/life programs, and share some metrics from a case study at IBM.  And those metrics are pretty darn powerful- through the lens of an employee survey, IBM found that over 40% of their employees ranked work/life balance as the 1st or 2nd reason for continuing to work for the company.

A couple of weeks ago, Zach Thomas, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, presented on a webcast on Career and Social Website Evolution.

Social Technographics®

Source: Forrester’s NACTAS Devices & Access Online Survey, Q4 2006

Internally at HCI, we have a formal strategy to attract all of these users, and of course, this blog is part of that strategy.  A great fringe benefit is the heavy-lifting it will do in assisting with developing our talent brand.

How is your organization planning on capturing visitors to your social recruitment network?

I promised in an earlier post to tell you about my June traveling roadshow- HCI, MonsterTrak and Monster MediaWorks teamed up to go on a three city tour across our great country with pitstops in Chicago, LA and New York City.  Along the way, we showcased some great information about recruiting young people on campus, and met some terrific recruiters.

Our first stop was Chicago, and the event was held at the University Club of Chicago.  I love these old clubs- the decor of the space was so collegial and last-century.  (I’ll include some pictures that I took along the way here as well.)  For those of you that haven’t been to an HCI Innovation Tour- it’s a great experience.  Typically these are free, breakfast, networking and information events.  In this tour, we decided to feature the co-authors of Recruit or Die, Chris Resto and Ian Ybarra.  Chris was the keynote speaker in Chicago.

I’ve already written a bit about Recruit or Die here.  After Chris’ keynote, we had a panel session with Chris, Ian, and Carrie Dacey from Accenture.  We started out the panel discussion with my proposition of the following main challenges facing employers looking to recruit college grads.

The Challenges…

• Finding the right young talent
• Exponential growth in social media
• Crafting an appealing message
• Delivering the message
• Standing out in a crowd!

If you have suggestions of other challenges I missed, or would like to delete one from the list, feel free to say so in comments.

We ended the day by engaging our panelists in some thought-provoking questions, and the couple that I found the most interesting were:

• Q:What are some examples of innovative ways organizations are using social media? 
• A:From Chris and Ian:  Don’t just use it to use it.  Make sure you already have a great recruitment process in place and that your social media strategy works to elevate one or more aspects of Career, Glamour, Gossip.
• A:From Carrie: I’ll be writing about Accenture’s awesome strategy in the next few days.  They include blogs, Facebook, podcasts and SecondLife, among others.
• Q:How are employers delivering (career opportunity) messages?
• A:From Carrie:  Accenture uses an integrated web-based approach to delivering messages to recruits: Drive candidates to website or dedicated landing page through electronic newsletters, email campaigns, online banner ads, one-on-one conversations, search marketing tactics, campus events and presentations, print ads and on-campus ads, and print collateral.
• A:From Chris and Ian:  Compile case studies of past hires - their background, other companies they could have worked for, how they grew in their roles, options they had later and where they are now.   Post-offer management - multiple contacts at firm, visits to office, extended decision periods, and community building

 

I am thrilled to be launching a new blog on talent acquisition- what a fantastic place to discourse on the good, great, and not-so-great practices, people, and ideas I have the privilege of hearing every day.  It is my role and pleasure to direct the content we present to you on the topic of finding and hiring talent, and I spend most of my days seeking out the very same.

I’d like to set the tone for each consecutive entry you’ll read here by offering an opinion on a consistent theme I see behind every organization that gets it right.  And I’m not talking just about hiring the best folks, I also mean offering the most to the world, reaping great returns and generally exceeding where others fail.  My proposal is this:  that greatness balances on the edge of one individual’s passion.  It all begins with one person’s devotion and enthusiasm, and can’t succeed without it.  So what am I saying?  That passionate recruiters- those loyally devoted to hiring the best and staking their claim on nothing less- are the first critical component to hiring terrific people.

Look around you- who are these rock stars of talent acquisition?  I encourage you to nominate them here- we need to showcase their passion.  Maybe it’s even you!