Hiring strategies straight from the field

By working with our clients to help them better manage their labor-related expenses, I've had plenty of insight into shifting hiring practices throughout the year. The shift, I believe, can be summed up with a single word: maturation.

What we've seen becoming more frequent is organizations of every type striving to consider their entire workforce singularly. This effort is so every single area of labor-related expenses, both direct and indirect, can be controlled.

Some examples:

• A large chemicals firm is aggressively evaluating the manner in which they leverage their standard Statement of Work (SOW) processes to identify areas where simple packaged skill sets can be used for more cost effective staff augmentation. This same firm seeks to better define their talent acquisition processes in every area of their 'non-employee' workforce.
• A global business application development company froze hiring and eliminated all of their recruitment contractors shortly after the crisis of September 2008. They now seek to establish recruitment best practices that will allow them to quickly ramp up targeted areas of staff without incurring the cost of recruitment they experienced pre-2008 financial crisis again. In addition, they have consolidated the entirety of their contingent workforce spend in North America, as well identified approximately $2M worth of improperly categorized independent contractors.
• A retailer has identified indirect unnecessary costs of their stores staff equaling approximately $9M annually. They are responding with a strategic scheduling initiative that allows them to aggressively staff stores with the right mix of personnel in order to help convert inventory to cash and increase revenue per store - both metrics directly associated to the talent found at each store.
• Another client of ours is preparing for the hiring uptick on the horizon by implementing an RPO program. During the lean times of the past few months, their corporate recruiting teams were downsized. To address late Q3 and Q4 hiring, this client is leveraging an outsourced approach to ensure talent acquisition. SLAs are met, and hiring managers are not burdened by the process.
  

In general, regardless of industry, most of our clients' operations have streamlined dramatically. When our clients' overall company revenue was increasing year-over-year, and the business units were meeting and exceeding goals, their corporate centers were often relegated to a "support function." As recent as just one year ago, the business units determined much of the workforce composition, job categorization and talent acquisition channels.

But, the economic shift has given our clients a fortuitous opportunity. Over the past year, they've instituted controls that now provide leadership with a holistic view of their workforce. By enabling centralized practices, our clients are confident that they are positioned for success when market demand returns to peak levels. On the surface, this shift may appear convoluted, but by putting workforce processes and methodologies into place, our clients are freeing business units to build up the workforce. Now, hiring managers and divisional leadership may more indiscriminately engage contract labor and hire - as long as they follow corporate policies and practices for acquiring talent.

Defining 'opportunity:' what and where is it?

I recently read that an SAP official reported there are 30,000 job openings for SAP consultants globally. If you happen to be an SAP consultant, that's probably good news. For the rest of us who are in workforce management or connected in any way to our company's hiring strategies, bells should be going off.

First, whether you believe we are still in a recession or beginning to come out of it, the fact remains that competition for certain skills remain strong. Those candidates who are in demand are looking for companies that can provide good pay, good benefits and a good environment. It's going to take more than cold hard cash to keep top performers around.

Second, for those lucky enough to have stayed gainfully employed, the strain of the past couple of years and a deteriorating work environment has started to take its toll. I got an e-mail today advertising an upcoming HCI Engagement and Retention Conference with the opening line: "After two years of recession and bad news, many employees are tired, discouraged and waiting for an opportunity to jump ship." Retaining the performers you have today has become even more challenging.

Lastly, I believe that when the dust settles, the world and particularly the technology workforce will be changed forever. If I'm an SAP consultant or someone with a good technology skill set, will I be content working in a cube in the IT department of a large corporation? Or will I look for that young start-up, mid-sized performer or exciting short term project? What are those 30,000 openings and how are they real opportunities for me?

Companies will need to adjust their workforce strategies to evaluate how and when they bring people into the organization. We are no longer talking about a single door that everyone comes through. More than ever, the future will be about engaging employees the way they like to work and understanding the dynamics that go into how best to recruit and retain them.

In the recruiting business, a classic opening line to a recruiting call is: "Hi, I have an opportunity I'd like to talk to you about." For any company looking for top performers in the future, it's going to be more important than ever to define what the actual "opportunity" is for that potential employee.

Oh, and if you happen to be an SAP consultant, you've probably gotten three calls, an instant message, two tweets and 12 e-mails about "opportunities" since you started reading this. Let us know which ones you answered...

In case you missed it: Sept. 18

The workforce is changing, not only in composition (contingents, full-time workers, temps, etc.) but also in terms of demographics and attitude. And in turn, HR managers, recruiters and business leaders are adjusting their workforce, recruitment and business strategies.

Here's a recap of some of the indications of this shift we've seen over the past two weeks:

Harvard Business Publishing: Inside Proctor & Gamble's New Values-Based Strategy. As companies contemplate how to emerge from the recession, some are radically adjusting their business strategies. Proctor & Gamble, for one, just announced a new values-based strategy that will focus primarily not on profits, but on touching and improving the lives of customers.

Marketing Charts: Older Americans to Fuel 93% of Future Workforce Growth. A new report from Pew Research Center's Social & Demographic Trends Project shows that older adults are staying in the workforce longer, while younger adults are delaying their entry. In fact, 93 percent of growth in the U.S. labor force from 2006 to 2016 will be among workers ages 55+. The survey attributes this trend to a number of demographic, economic and attitudinal factors.

Workforce Management's Global Work Watch: From Disposable to Recyclable Employees. The post recaps the findings of recent studies that looked at employee security, satisfaction and loyalty, and insinuates that there needs to be a movement away from viewing employees as dispensable. Companies should create a culture of respect and show they are invested in helping their employees develop their skills and careers. Results will follow.

The Wall Street Journal: A New Job Just a Tweet Away. Skyrocketing unemployment has led to major overcrowding of online job boards. Sorting through the scrolls of resumes and applicants--many of whom are inapplicable--has become a time-consuming and costly task. To cope, many larger companies (for instance, Google) are changing the way they recruit, abandoning or limiting their activity on the boards, and instead using the microblogging site Twitter to post open positions and find candidates. They say it's a cheaper, more convenient and more personal way to attract candidates.

These are just a few examples, but I'm eager to see what other new strategies emerge in the coming months. The workforce has irreversibly changed, and it's going to be interesting to watch how businesses--and employees themselves--adapt.

How is your organization responding to the evolving workforce?

Deadline extended: Win a complimentary pass to this year's CWS Summit

Earlier this week, we announced that The Seamless Workforce and Yoh would be giving away a complimentary pass to the Contingent Workforce Strategies Summit in Orlando this Nov. 3-4. Today is your lucky day--we've decided to extend the registration another week! Click here to register by noon EDT on Friday, Sept. 25.

The CWS Summit will address a major challenge facing today's business: creating a fully integrated workforce that minimizes labor-related expenses while ensuring talent quality and risk mitigation. You won't want to miss out, so keep those entries coming!

Win a free pass to CWS Summit

Delivering a fully integrated workforce that minimizes labor-related expenses while ensuring talent quality and risk mitigation is challenging. The Contingent Workforce Strategies Summit in Orlando this Nov. 3-4 is an excellent conference to network with peers to accomplish these goals.

Given this year's economic condition, The Seamless Workforce and Yoh are giving away a complementary pass to CWS Summit ($895 in registration savings)! Just register by noon EDT on Thursday for a chance to win.

In addition to amazing networking opportunities, CWS Summit is also Staffing Industry Analysts' venue to unveil new data and trends on the workforce. Yoh will also be hosting a round table discussion on optimizing workforce strategies for organizational success.

Check out the full conference overview for more details.

Employment brand: How important is it?

We're not the only ones stressing the importance of a company's employment brand. We've seen many posts recently on this very topic, though the one I want to highlight is from a few months ago.

"Brand - Employment Brand: What's the Difference?" delineates the difference between a company's brand and its employment brand. The blogger essentially concludes that company brand is consumer facing, its strength measured by how often consumers choose to use that brand over a competitor's.

Employment brand, on the other hand, is employee facing, and is measured by how often candidates choose employment at your company over a competitor. Employment brand is heavily influenced by how your current employees express their job experiences and satisfaction to the community at large.

The easy way to create a GREAT employee brand, then, is to provide a great place to work. Easy enough. After all, we have all seen or heard company buzz terms such as "respected and valued employee setting," "collaborative team environment," or "dynamic work climate." However, are employers really delivering on these claims?

According to a recent survey, companies appear to be failing miserably. Here's what the study found:

• Two-thirds (66 percent) of American workers are not currently satisfied with their compensation.
• Seventy-eight percent are not satisfied with their company's overall retention efforts, and 76 percent are not satisfied about future growth opportunities at their company.
• Almost half (48 percent) of workers aren't satisfied with the relationship they have with their boss, and 59 percent aren't satisfied with the level of support they receive from their colleagues.
• Seventy-seven percent of workers aren't satisfied with the strategy and vision of their company and leadership.
• And finally, 68 percent of workers aren't satisfied with their company's contribution to their retirement plans.

With such a high level of dissatisfaction among workers, and the explosion of social networking as an avenue for employees to voice and advertise their discontent to the global community, companies should be concerned and focused on managing their employee brand.

Since many companies are operating with employee levels at minimum thresholds, the need to acquire talent will inevitably occur. And when the economy turns around and hiring resumes, not having a good workforce acquisition strategy is very likely to have a negative effect on employee brand.

An example of this is unfocused recruiting efforts. Without a clearly defined plan, companies could end up flooding the market, exposing qualified candidates with repeated pitches for the same job opening. Such tactics position the client as a disjointed organization -- an image that can be compounded by the potentially slanderous remarks within the social network forum. These factors combined can drastically impact offer acceptance rates and access to the best candidates.

So I ask you, how important is employment brand?

In case you missed it: Sept. 4

It may just be my imagination, but the economy's tumultuous ride this year seems to have spurred an even greater number of surveys and studies focused on the state of employment. As we gear up for the release of today's BLS report on unemployment, here's a look at some of the highlights we've seen over the past two weeks:

Online Recruitment Magazine. Heaviest job cuts are behind us. Typically, Labor Day initiates some of the heaviest downsizing periods of the year, but this year could buck the trend. In an analysis of layoff trends, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. found that the heaviest job-cutting of the year may have occurred in early 2009, with 711,100 positions being slashed between January and April. Job cuts between May and July totaled 282,948. (August data is still being compiled.)

The "Productivity Drain" survey, as reported by The Boston Globe: Employee survey: Layoffs can hurt productivity. In a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute and Kronos Incorporated, 40 percent of respondents whose workplaces experienced layoffs in the past year felt that the overall productivity of their organization has been negatively impacted.

The fifth annual Employment Dynamics and Growth Expectations report, as reported by Reuters: U.S. Employers see hires in year ahead. A survey conducted by Robert Half International and CareerBuilder.com found that more than half of employers surveyed (53 percent) plan to hire full-time employees in the next 12 months. Four in 10 employers plan to hire contract, temporary, or project workers, and another four in 10 plan to hire part-time employees.

Workforce Management's Global Work Watch: A 21st Century Connection With Workers. A report released in August by Watson Wyatt Worldwide found that 43 percent of firms expect a permanent decrease in staff size in three to five years compared with pre-economic crisis levels. Blogger Ed Frauenheim points to the effect these reductions in the workforce will have on how companies engage workers in the future.

These reports seem to confirm that the worst is over for the American workforce, and are a glimmer of hope that the economy will rebound soon is emerging. And they also lead us to wonder if maybe layoffs weren't the most effective way to deal with the recession after all ...

Social and market norms applied to the workforce

I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. For those of you who enjoyed Freakonomics, this book is another pick in a similar vein. I came across a chapter that discusses social and market norms. The implications this notion has on the workforce were astounding to me.

One experiment Airely featured included college students being asked to participate in monotonous computer tasks while monitoring their productivity. It was remarkable that the most productive students were not those paid for their participation, but those merely asked to participate as a favor or those rewarded with a gift. The whole concept of this experiment brings up the workforce's productivity and loyalty.

As Ariely says in the book: "Companies have also tried to establish social norms with the employees. It wasn't always this way."

And he's right. America used to be a clock-punching workforce -- in at nine, out at five. This was a fair market trade: Forty hours of work for X dollars per hour. But then something shifted when technology became integral to the business world. With BlackBerries, laptops, aircards, and video conferencing, work left the office and got into our homes. By asking workers to cut into family time and travel at a moment's notice, employers are "asking for a favor," which is a standard social norm far removed from the traditional market norms of the workplace.

By having employees work on a salary (not hourly) basis, and requiring them to make whatever time required (at work and at home) for projects and customers to be successful, social norms are playing a bigger role than ever before in the workforce.

"Although some companies have been successful in creating social norms with their workforce," says Ariely, "the current obsession with short-term profits, outsourcing, and drastic cost cutting threatens to undermine it all."

By workers logging hours around the clock to meet deadlines and make the company happy, they've developed an underlying assumption that they will be taken care of by their employers in the long-run. Downsizing and cutting benefit programs undermines this entire social contract.

This paradox has created a stick situation for employers. "... when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose -- once a social norm is trumped by a market norm -- it will rarely return," says Ariely.

With this clarity, job-jumping behavior in the workforce begins to actually make sense. Workers have been jaded and are taking it out on the employer, making corporate loyalty a rarity.

In short, it seems companies just can't have it both ways. The social and market norms are lines that shouldn't be blurred. Cuts and changes in benefits are a great way to sever the employer-employee social relationship.

An example that Ariely used in the book to illustrate this was with a daycare center. When the daycare center had a social norm in place, parents were merely asked and expected not to pick up their children late. Although there were a few parents that broke this rule, overall, the daycare ran smoothly. Then, when charges were instituted for this parental faux pas, late pick-ups ran rampant.

This trend, according to Ariely, was because the social contract of being a good parent was replaced with the market contract of paying a fee for the convenience of picking your child up later. When the daycare reverted back to the old ways and removed the fee, behavior did not follow suit. In fact, late pick-ups continued to be an issue because the social norm had already been tainted.

The fact of the matter is that the influence of technology in the workplace will only amplify, and the days of a pure market norm for employers is long gone. After taking Ariely's approach into consideration, companies must develop and nurture their social norms for the workforce. This means that they must make a commitment to maintain strong, competitive benefits.

A company who has gotten this approach right is Google. If you look at the Google workforce, they are pressed to the max each and every day, working around the clock, but the benefits and commitment from their employer make it worthwhile. Benefits aren't always pensions and amazing health care plans. Benefits can also be remote working, job sharing, on-site child care, workplace concierge service, or pet-friendly offices. By rethinking the social norms in the workplace, employers may see the oxymoron of corporate loyalty correct itself.

RPO partnership vs. vendor relationship

The August issue of Talent Management contains what I think is perhaps one of the best articles published on what a true RPO partnership is, and isn't. In particular, the section titled "RPO is More Than a Vendor Relationship" struck a chord with me, since I find many organizations often struggle to truly embrace their RPO provider as they should -- that is, as a trusted consultative partner.

In my experience, the most successful RPO engagements are those in which the RPO company truly partners with the client to bring strategic and innovative solutions to the outsourced agreement. This consultative partnership starts in the sales process and really comes alive during implementation. This is where a change management strategy that is created and led by key stakeholders in the company (not just leadership) is essential.

Additionally, client organizations should evaluate what their RPO partners are telling them throughout the life of the partnership, by way of metrics, vetted best practices, etc. Continuous process improvement should take place throughout the engagement, and the RPO company should find that by measured success, the partnership continues to expand. Companies should not let themselves become involved in the tactical details of the account, or attempt to micro-manage the agreement as they likely would in a vendor relationship.

Furthermore, it is absolutely essential that the leadership of the client organization is "bought in" to the partnership and its impact on the success of the company. This isn't typical with most vendor relationships, but again, this is what makes the RPO partnership a different ball game.

Lastly, and most importantly, companies must recognize why they entered into the RPO engagement in the first place. Most often, it's because they saw a gap internally that needed to be addressed. Bringing on a partner that is an expert in that space can address that need, and save the company time and money as well.

Companies who trust their RPO partner to act on their behalf with their best interests in mind will without a doubt see the greatest success in their venture.