Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member and Skeptical Guy, John Hollon. 

When some people talk, others sit up and listen. 

So it is with well-known HR technology analyst Josh Bersin. He recently wrote that he believes that the U.S. economy is getting ready to take off, and that a booming job market will be right behind it. 


Others have been making the same case, but Bersin takes the forecast to another level when he says that, "We are about to enter one of the hottest job markets in a decade." 

That's a bold statement considering how strong the job market was prior to the global pandemic and lockdown, but he points out that we're already operating with 13% more open jobs than we had a year ago, and, that estimates from Goldman Sachs predict that the unemployment rate will drop to 4% by the end of the year. 


That's amazing given what we all experienced in 2020, with a year-long lockdown and some of the worst unemployment numbers since the Great Depression. 

Making the most of an internal talent marketplace 

What's even more surprising is that Bersin not only makes the strong-but-obvious case for better funding and management of your talent acquisition team, but also to "accelerate your internal talent marketplace" as well. And THAT tells you that the concept of an internal talent marketplace has now graduated from niche concept to mainstream business practice. 


Don't know what an internal talent marketplace is exactly? 

Here is some background: It's a more efficient, technology-driven employee management and retention system. Better retention is the one of the big end-goals, and an internal talent marketplace does that by tracking the skill-set of employees and then helping them to develop and build upon their skills. This sometimes means upskilling (building upon and advancing someone's current skills), or reskilling (training in new skills). 


But an internal talent marketplace does something else as well -- it tracks what skills employees have, what jobs they have worked in, and works with them to build a career path within the organization. The larger goal is to better utilize employees when internal openings occur. As a result, filling openings with current staff as part of their career growth experience becomes more important than just recruiting people from the outside whenever a position opens up. 

Some companies have done this for years, but the pandemic and lockdown made the internal talent marketplace a more important concept and built on the notion that current employees were important resources that could be utilized all over an organization. 


As Bersin put it:
"(During a labor shortage) It starts to take months to find people, and employees with in-demand skills start job-hopping. This makes an even bigger case for internal mobility.

One of the most exciting innovations in HR is the creation of internal talent marketplaces. Big companies like Cisco and IBM have had strong internal mobility programs for years. Now, technology can help any company manage and facilitate internal mobility much more efficiently. 


For example, if you have a good talent mobility system, you can identify employees with key skills (such as marketing professionals, software engineers or analysts) and move them from business unit to business unit based on demand. This is a good thing for employees' careers and greatly increases the dynamism of your company. It's also much less expensive than hiring externally."

Filling that opening with someone right under your nose 

It sounds obvious -- Why wouldn't companies want to look to current employees first and give them a shot at internal opportunities that open up? 


Well, as people who have worked for a few years know, a great many organizations are pretty terrible about letting employees know about open positions inside the company. And, growing and promoting employees takes a deep commitment from top management and a strong company culture that puts a premium on making it happen today, tomorrow, and in the months and years to come. 

Deloitte probably described the thinking behind internal talent marketplaces best: 
"The business opportunity is clear-cut. First, you can avoid replacement and recruitment costs incurred when people leave. But even greater is the opportunity to reshape your employment brand and workplace culture. Many of today's youngest workers are eager to build their careers rapidly and want to work for organizations that challenge them and promote them quickly. Internal mobility – how that happens–is not just a way to retain talent. It also helps to create a powerful magnet for people outside your organization who seek professional growth. 

The result? The talent market can see your organization as one that champions ambition and performance in everything it does. Think about what kind of talent you'll attract and keep – whether inside or outside your organization." 


Yes, maybe the U.S. economy is ready to take off and recruiting and hiring will go gangbusters again. But even if it does, embracing internal talent marketplaces is a good thing for smart companies to do. After all, the person who may be the best fit for that job you're trying to fill might already be working for you ... and right under your nose. 

Today's post comes to us from Workforce Institute board member John Frehse.Here he discusses why a slowing economy doesn't release top talent for you.

Talented employees are a precious resource. The Container Store has a famous mantra: Three good employees are equal to one great employee. I agree with them. Great employees contribute more, promote a positive culture, and drive extreme results. Unfortunately, they are also becoming harder and harder to find.

The problem with talented employees is that they are always in demand. As global markets retract, the need for talent may actually increase as companies require a higher level of performance from fewer employees. This may cause the supply of available great employees to shrink, creating wage pressures and trapped revenue for those that cannot function without them.

Great employees are dedicated and rarely available in the free market for hire. They must be lured away from companies that place a high value on them. When negative market trends appear, they are the last to be considered for layoff. What does happen is medium to low performing employees become greater in supply and this does not improve hiring situations for companies in need of talent.

Challenges upskilling and large skills gaps are already clearly defined in areas such as manufacturing and technology, but this may only get worse.

It would be an incredible advantage if your company was better than the rest of the marketplace at identifying and hiring talent. As technology catches up with the marketplace for great employees, it has become easier to identify talented employees (and to hire them away from companies who do not fully appreciate them). Visibility into individual employee thought leadership, project work, and general accomplishments is on display on LinkedIn and other platforms, and more hourly employees are participating than ever before.

Because of sites like Glassdoor and social media in general, talented employees also have more visibility into the true culture of companies in their field of interest than they ever have before. It is easier to identify the great companies but also the underperformers. This visibility into areas of compensation, culture, and total rewards is allowing employees to find the right employer. Companies talking the talk but not walking the walk are getting punished both on social media and business sites. Transparency is allowing talented workers a job mobility they have not always enjoyed. This will only increase as technology improves this visibility into the truth.

So, what can be done? The first step is to look within your own company and be honest about the culture. Too many organizations suffer from the Pollyanna effect. This is when companies ignore realities and refuse to discuss internal challenges (which all companies have). Instead, they promote a false narrative about how everything is perfect. No company is without challenges, and employees know the truth. Not addressing this truth perpetuates a broken culture and this will inevitably spill out into public view.

Today's post comes to us from board member David Creelman.

Dr. Rob Briner recently kicked off a conversation on LinkedIn about personality tools such as this one used by the National Health Service in the UK:

Creelman

 

If you've been around HR for any length of time you'll have seen dozens of similar models. If you've studied the academic evidence on these models you'll know that most have little scientific validity.

But, admit it, these personality maps are still fun, aren't they?

The Tension between Fun Models and Evidence-based Practice

Talking about personality is useful because we need to be constantly reminded about how people are different. These models are fun because they help us launch a conversation we are interested in. If we think of them as conversation starters, then there's no harm in using them. Kenny Moore, co-author of The CEO and the Monk once used horoscopes to achieve the same thing. The issue is not whether horoscopes are scientifically valid, it's whether they provide a helpful spark for a conversation.

However, if we are using a personality tool to aid decision making (such as who we hire) then we have to use valid tools. There is no shortage of highly educated industrial-organizational psychologists who can help you distinguish between valid and invalid tools.

Moving HR Forward

If a tool is a conversation starter, then we shouldn't dismiss its value even when it's not scientifically valid. If a tool is a decision aid, then we need to be rigorous in assessing its scientific validity.

The problem within HR is that too often people are not aware of the distinction between a conversation starter and a decision aid. Professionals, especially HR managers, need to study evidence-based practice and when to use it.

 

Today's post comes to us from board member China Gorman.

Everywhere you look these days people are focused on the future of work: who will do it, what skills will be needed, how many jobs will robots take? But what about the future of talent? Shouldn't we be focusing on that as well?

In the next 10-15 years global business enterprises will change dramatically. These profound changes will impact current and future employees in terms of the required speed to adapt to the changing business climate. The demands on employers, educators and policymakers to deliver a new generation of talent for success in an increasingly fast-paced environment means that these three influential groups must collaborate to develop the talent landscape necessary for continued world progress and financial success.

A new organization is being formed to consider this perspective - globally. The Future Talent Council, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden with staff members in Singapore, the U.K., Australia, and the U.S., is focused on creating an invitation-only membership organization to consider the looming talent issues facing employers all over the world. Members, who are joining now, are from global employer C-suites, University administrations, and policy-making/governing bodies all over the world.

The Council's first step was to identify 8 Imperatives that all three stakeholder groups need to understand and work together to address:

1) Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Automation

2) Big Data and Predictive Analytics

3) Diversity/Employing and Empowering Marginalized Populations

4) Ethics, Transparency and Sustainability

5) Flexibility and Work-Life Integration

6) Global Workforce

7) Leadership

8) Lifelong Learning

The second step was to begin to interview global executive leaders in all three stakeholder groups. Today, more than 165 of these interviews have been recorded, with more to come. Whether we talk with the CHROs of global organizations headquartered in North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific; or the heads of Universities in Hong Kong, Kenya, and the U.K.; or government ministers/leaders in Luxembourg, Lithuania, and The Netherlands; the Council is striking a chord among global leaders who are eager to participate in this future-focused collaborative.

The third step is about to be launched: a global survey of more than 50,000 leaders and managers from organizations in the same three stakeholder groups: large global employers, universities, and regulatory bodies. The survey results will inform a series of white papers, podcasts, newsletters, and webinars.

And the fourth step - an annual step - will be the convening this fall of our first Summit of Council members in Amsterdam for two days. We will “roll up our sleeves” in a variety of working sessions to further identify and discuss the issues impacting the Future of Talent, and lay the groundwork for closer collaboration between the three stakeholder groups to ensure business and societal success.

As the Managing Director of the Council, I can share that our membership is growing every week and the interest in participating in this work is getting stronger and stronger. It's clear that there is some engagement between these stakeholder groups in national or regional forums, but none that are global and dedicated to the long-term engagement of serious leaders, working on serious solutions. The Future Talent Council is leading this effort.

The Future Talent Council is the outgrowth of founder Lars-Henrik Friis Molin's history of innovation in the global landscape of talent, education, and policy. If you'd like to participate in our global survey, or would like to nominate a Council member, please reach out to emir.cetinel@futuretalentcouncil.com.

Future Workplace ExperienceThe following post is by WFI board member, Jeanne C Meister, Partner at Future Workplace and Co-author of The Future Workplace Experience: 10 Rules for Mastering Disruption in Recruiting and Engaging Employees.

The future of work is about developing a workplace that emotionally connects to employees and customers, understands the impact of technology on the workplace and provides myriad ways to learn and grow on the job.

This is the call to action of my latest book, written with my colleague Kevin J. Mulcahy, The Future Workplace Experience. In our book, we include findings from The Future Workplace Forecast, a survey of 2,147 global HR leaders and Hiring Managers across seven countries and ten industries probing new practices companies are using to adapt to the future workplace.

We summarize these practices into ten rules to master disruption in the workplace. Here are three of those rules:

1. Make the Workplace an Experience: The essence of making the workplace an experience is to integrate all the components of work–the emotional, the intellectual, the physical, the technological and the cultural - into one seamless experience. The goal: the employee experience should mirror the best customer experience. Companies that excel at making the workplace an experience listen to what their employees and customers are saying, and then makes changes based on that feedback. One example of this is the Empathy Lab at Facebook, which gives Facebook engineers the chance to experience for themselves how employees and customers will use their products giving them an emotional connection to their customers. There is growing evidence that businesses are more profitable when they are empathetic to the needs of their customers. In fact, the top 10 companies in the Global Empathy Index 2016 increased in value more than twice as much as the bottom 10 and generated 50% more earnings.

2. Pilot Artificial Intelligence in HR: Artificial intelligence (AI) is a huge market, predicted to surge from $8 billion this year to $47 billion by 2020, according to IDC. Some say it resembles the Internet in the mid 1990's, and will be built into all kinds of products and services. Marketers are already using chatbots–or artificial intelligence computer programs designed to simulate a conversation through written or spoken text–to deliver personalized conversational experiences. One interesting new use case for chatbots is as learning assistants in MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) where the number of learners can range from hundreds to thousands. In 2016, Georgia Institute of Technology used chatbot Jill Watson as a teaching assistant for a MOOC entitled, Knowledge Based Artificial Intelligence. According to Dr. Goel, the professor leading the MOOC, chatbot Jill Watson was able to answer 40% of student's most frequently asked questions within one year, freeing the human Teaching Assistants to answer more complex questions. In addition to providing intelligent assistance during a course, AI can also help personalize the learning experience by capturing data and applying machine learning algorithms to create a Netflix-like learning experience where learning opportunities are recommended based on a user's specific areas of interest.

3. Create Accessible On Demand Learning: According to the World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report, 65% of children entering primary school today will work in jobs that currently do not exist. This indicates that being a serial learner, constantly looking for new ways to grow and develop on the job, is now a requirement to stay employable. To enable serial learning, a growing number of companies are creating virtual corporate universities that combine a company's proprietary courses with curated, publically available learning from MOOCs, Ted Talks, podcasts and blogs, to create a personalized learning pathway for learners. Creating more opportunities to access on-demand learning will continue to grow in importance as CEO's like Randall Stephenson of AT&T challenge workers with this mandate: “Spend 5-10 hours a week learning online or become obsolete.” The message is clear: being a serial learner will help you to avoid technological unemployment.

The new world of work is not something we see in the future: it's here. HR leaders must take action to prepare themselves, their teams and their organization for a workplace which requires constant upskilling, piloting new technologies and creating a culture where the workplace is an experience valued by both workers and their leaders.

I love the idea of the "Empathy Lab" at Facebook that helps employees acquire insight about how their customers experience Facebook. What's your organization doing to get ready for the workplace of the future?

Neil ReichenbergThe following post is courtesy of one of our newest board members, Neil Reichenberg.  Neil is the Executive Director of the International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR).  IPMA-HR is a nonprofit membership organization representing public sector human resource managers and professionals, undertaking research on human resource issues, as well as providing professional development, education, and information on pending legislation and regulations affecting HR issues.

March Madness started early for me this year, as I caught seven men's college basketball games in three days at a conference tournament. During the hoopla, I thought about the importance of talent management (perhaps heightened since my Terps did not win the championship), whether it is for a college basketball team or an employer in any sector of the economy. While it is important to recruit and select the best available talent, ensuring that, once selected, they are developed, engaged, and led effectively are critical to success.

Having worked for the past 35 years for a human resources association whose members are employed in human resource management in the public sector, I know that the governmental sector faces the same challenges as the private sector. The public sector also faces the additional challenges of fewer employees than prior to the start of the recession, continuing budget pressures, growing citizen demands, an aging workforce resulting in a large number of retirements, and increasing criticism from political leaders. Government at all levels provide critical services that impact everyone and they need to remain employers of choice in order to continue to provide services in ever challenging environment.

A recent report, “Creating People Advantage in the Public Sector,” which was released by the Boston Consulting Group, stated that “many countries are experiencing a crisis in public-sector human resource management stemming from mounting pressures on a number of fronts.” The report calls for government to take steps to enhance the ways in which they recruit, train, and manage talent and for those working in human resource management to become strategic partners. The three areas the report found requiring urgent action in public sector HR are: 1) talent management and leadership, 2) engagement, behavior, and culture management, and 3) HR strategy planning and analytics.

These challenges are similar to those found in several research projects undertaken by the International Public Management Association for Human Resources (IPMA-HR) where I work. To highlight a few:

Following my first board meeting with The Workforce Institute in December, it's apparent that many of these same pain points from the public sector - talent management, training, succession planning, engagement, and use of analytics - are echoed in the private sector.

How are organizations - private or public - combatting these challenges? We'd love to hear what you're working on to prepare for the future.

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