I had that singsong experience again yesterday while (phone) sourcing.

What’s the singsong experience?

It’s when a Gatekeeper starts offering information, in a continuous pattern, to your request.

Don’t misunderstand — I had spent several hours sourcing into a particular entertainment company with very little — almost none — success.

Several hours.

Admittedly, the customer said it was a challenge.

Then I got “lucky.”

It was 7 my time and 4 on the West Coast where my target was located.

I was frustrated.

I was slightly angry.

That’s how I get when I get frustrated.

Infantile — I know — you don’t have to tell me but sometimes it serves me. Other time I just try to stay away from other people, but last night what felt like an unproductive day motivated me.

I hate to go to bed feeling like a loser.

I kept dialing.

Finally, on one call I was transferred from the Gatekeeper’s console to an executive assistant (to one of the Executive VPs who reported to the CEO).

She answered!

Most at this company had not been answering throughout the day. I had been doing a lot of “stabbing in”* with few results.

I had been given a list of names inside the company and the request was to fill in the reporting structures under those names.

I needed the reports of the EVP she reported to. I had one of them from the customer. My gut was telling me there were several more.

‘Hi Judy — whatcha’ need?” she asked, all friendly-like.

I’m sorry, Marla, this is Maureen–”

(Before the receptionist/gatekeeper transferred me I asked her (quickly) whom she was transferring me to. She gave me the EA’s name (Marla) so that’s why I knew it. Marla didn’t say her name when she answered.)

She cut in before I could finish. Actually, I was finished. I say as little as possible when I’m calling.

“Oh, you’re coming in from the reception desk — no matter!” she chirped. “Whatcha’ need?”

Now, don’t ask me why she said “no matter” and then don’t ask me why she asked me what I needed. She just did. It happens, sooner or later. You just have to get to the later sometimes.

I told her what I needed:

“I was trying to reach Peter Boyle’s group — I understand you support him?”

“Yes,” she answered, pleasantly.

“I understand Matt Hogue’s title has changed (the receptionist/gatekeeper had given me that much).”

“Yes, he’s the CFO now. He was the VP,” she confirmed, still pleasant.

I could feel myself tensing. When you’re phone sourcing you reach a do-or-die moment when you can sense if the person on the other end is going to proceed (or not). I was at that moment and my neck and shoulder muscles were hurting from the day’s frustrations. I sensed she would go on.

“But I don’t have the other members of the group. Can you tell me who they are?” I dice-rolled.

Like I said, this do-or-die moment is fraught with emotion for many phone sourcers — the phone sourcers reading this know what I mean. Phone sourcing is a high-stress activity, admittedly. It’s a big part of why many people don’t like doing it.

She trilled off seven names.

I was tired so I misspelled a couple, tripping on the keys as she was trilling but I got them down best I could without interrupting her roll.

I knew once I had the names I could cipher out the titles somehow.

Maybe even with her.

The names are the most important thing.

I gambled further, knowing from experience if she told me this much she’d go further with me:

“And can you tell me, Marla, what Jerome’s title is?”

“Accounting Manager,” she shot back.

“I think I misspelled Ann’s last name. What is it?” I asked, all the while horrified at the indecipherable mess I had made of it.

“Schuster?” she asked. I recognized the incongruent letters I had typed and also recognized how the mess I was staring at could be Schuster.

“Yes; with a ‘c’ or no ‘c’?” I vollied.

“With a ‘c’: S-C-H-U-S-T-E-R,” she slowly spelled.

I said nothing, listening to the silence when she finished.

I felt she wasn’t (finished).

“And she spells her first name with an e,” she added, breaking the silence.

“Thanks. I had it without,” I told her, matter-of-factly.

I was fighting to control my voice.

“And Lisa? What’s Lisa’s title?” I went on, holding my breath.

“Reservations VP,” she said.

Here comes the singsong part — it’s always music to my ears.

“And Jan is Marketing Director, John is Director, Business Operations, Pam is Regional Director of Sales and Ken — Sr Director Product Development,” she sang trippingly off her tongue, getting the job done.

“And you have Matt — CFO,” she finished.

It’s almost like they go into some sort of trance.

“Yes, I do have him,” I admitted, with an emphasis on “him.”

That’s it?” I asked, doing a final check while still typing what she had just told me, the last part from memory. I’m lucky in that voice/sound seems to “implant” itself into my memory (I keep hearing like what it was said) for a few seconds after I hear something.

“That’s it,” she answered, convincingly.

Quickly, I then said, “Marla, you’ve been a great help — I do appreciate it. Thank you and Good-bye!”

She said “Good-bye” and I hung up.

I breathed a long sigh and sat back, arching and stretching my arms around my keyboard and adjusting my head on my shoulders. I heard cracking and felt relief.

Now, you’re wondering why she told me all that she did and why, finally, it got easy? I don’t know for sure but I have my suspicions. I’d like to hear yours first, though. Tell me what you think.

*stabbing in When you call in to a company’s internal dial system; willy-nilly with the expectation that someone will answer at their desk who will be able to give you information. It’s (usually) a very effective phone sourcing technique!

As we prepare for a new year, and as I look forward to preparing for a metrics panel at the Spring 2012 Expo, I have been pairing a series of thoughts on metrics and measures that are important to talent acquisition.

For the past several months, my team has reviewed dozens of articles, blogs, and white papers that outline foundational and basic aspects of “How to do Metrics.” There is a tremendous resource available by simply using search engines to find information on metrics.

I am encouraged by the amount of content that is dedicated to subjects such as what metrics can be tracked, the quality of hire conversation, the candidate experience, and how metrics can serve as a stepping stone to a real relationship with business leaders. I will also admit that the meat behind many of these blogs, articles, or white papers is pretty lean, but there are exceptions. Shout out to Chris Brabic at Smashfly for his tutorials that break into some of the detail.

As I prepare for the metrics panel for the spring ERE conference, it occurred to me how statistics and analysis tends to not be standard training for recruiters. There are some recruiters who were engineers, programmers, or MBAs, and as such they would have some basic to intermediate statistics training. But it is likely that statistical analysis or training is likely reinforced by using Excel with tables, pie charts and graphs — not using the actual definitions, architecture, and structure of true statistical analysis.

Which brings me to this post, and the danger of correlation and causation. It is not new to hear that metrics, when pulled together and compared to each other, tell a story. Much of that story has to do with correlation. As an example, if you spend more money (increase cost per hire), you may reduce your time to fill. Well, sometimes that is true. Sometimes.

That relationship may not be a causal relationship: One does not necessarily cause the other. The dependence that we wish was there is actually not there in the strength that we need it to be, or even at all. There is a common scientific and statistical concept that states “correlation does not imply causation.” I find that to be very true in recruiting and talent acquisition metrics.

We try so hard to find how one metric impacts the other. Technologies, branding companies, consultants, and so on use metrics to drive home value — and they should. We all try hard because we just really want to sort out why things are happening and what can we do to change what is happening, and that is a worthy endeavor.

However, I caution trying to correlate metrics together in order to force causation. It is more likely that two or more metrics correlate and have less of a causal relationship then having a causal relationship.

As you review your metrics and measures for 2012, I encourage you to:

1. State which metrics you are correlating together, and challenge yourself to see if you are hoping for a causal relationship, or if a causal relationship actually exists.
2. Prove that the causal relationship has validity and can be repeated time and time again.
3. Go back to your executive presentations and record where you did indicate that correlations and causal relationships exist. Remember that those statements are now out there, and it is possibly expected that the causal relationship will sustain.
4. As you create or refine goals for your recruiting teams or the hiring managers, be aware of these causal and non-causal correlations, as it will help you declare and meet expectations in the marketplace.

Happy metric-ing, and see you at the Spring ERE!

This article is part of my continuing series on passive candidate recruiting. The key principle underlying all of these articles is that you can’t recruit and hire passive candidates using the same workflow, nor the same recruiters, used for active candidates.

According to a recent survey we conducted with LinkedIn, 83% of fully-employed members on LinkedIn consider themselves passive when it comes to their job-hunting status. While this is a huge and important pool, most companies over-emphasize the 17% of candidates who are active. Then to make matters worse, when they do target passive candidates, they clumsily use their active candidate processes.

To assist talent leaders in understanding the differences between active and passive candidate recruiting, I’ve developed a recruiter competency model addressing the similarities, differences, and overlaps. Contact me directly if you’d like to learn more about this. It’s highlighted in the graphic showing the 12 most important competencies alongside a very rigorous 1-5 ranking system. For example, a 4-5 ranking requires outstanding performance, some type of significant recognition, and continuing accolades from the recruiter’s hiring manager clients.

What’s surprising about a new analyst report from Aberdeen is that in 2012 HR professionals still need to be reminded that talent management is as much a strategy as a tactic they should be captaining.

“HR still struggles to become a ‘strategic partner’ with the business, engaging employees and aligning integrated talent management initiatives with overall organizational goals,” write the authors of an Aberdeen Analyst Insight about developing a “Talent First” culture.

Drawing  from an upcoming Aberdeen report, analysts Madeline Laurano and Mollie Lombardi say HR’s day-to-day work and the lack of support and buy-in from other business leaders and senior management stand in the way of developing the strategic approach that HR leaders say must be a part of their skill set.

Yet there’s some sort of disconnect here. The analysts note that in Aberdeen’s Quarterly Business Review, the 1,300+ business leaders in the survey named workforce and talent concerns in half of their top 10 business challenges. However, 35 percent of the HR leaders participating in the forthcoming HR Executives Agenda 2012 complained of a lack of buy-in from their senior management.

Integrated talent management will help with this, say Laurano and Lombardi. “An integrated approach to talent management can help organizations carry out key talent initiatives that will benefit the business,” they write, citing evidence from “Best-In-Class” companies. These are the top 20 percent of scorers on three Aberdeen metrics: Employee engagement, bench strength, and hiring manage satisfaction.

This Best-in-Class group reported improved retention, high employee engagement, and achievement of key performance indicators. Overall, 70 percent of the group credited their integrated approach to talent management with achieving organizational goals.

As the authors note, “integrated talent management is not a new phenomenon.” Fine-tuning recruiting methods to the performance of workers three months, six months, even a year after hire has been going on for years. Projecting worker and skill needs into the future, based on company growth, workforce demographics, competition, and so on, and then using that intelligence to plan recruiting, is much more recent, yet hardly brand new.

These examples are part of the drive toward developing a unified approach to talent within a company. Many, note the authors, have “succeeded in breaking down traditional HR silos.”

“Without integration,” they add, “HR operates in one department, rather than spanning the entire organization.”

In many ways technology can hasten the integration. Besides shifting paperwork to managers or to the employee themselves, and thus freeing HR for more strategic work, it brings to line managers information once available only in HR.

Integrated talent management technology isn’t the determinant of a “Talent First” culture, but it does make big-picture viewing easier, and sometimes even possible. “Analytics matter,” say Laurano and Lombardi. Technology makes it simpler to access the data that leads to business insights.

“Organizations that integrate talent data with business data are three-and-a-half times as likely to achieve Best-in-Class as those that do not integrate data,” they write.

How should HR move forward in its quest for integration putting talent first? By first eliminating the silos and integrating management processes, while focusing on improving employee engagement. As the company becomes more sophisticated about talent management as a critical business strategy, the authors say talent management must be tied to business goals, progress has to be measured and success defined.

To reach Best-in-Class status, analytics have to be a priority. “An HR professional today must keep analytics as the backbone of any talent management strategy,” conclude Laurano and Lombardi. “Analytics will help HR gain support for integrated talent management, and improve the reputation of HR throughout the organization.”

While talking about customer service on a radio program, I shared a customer service nightmare story last week that also happens to be a perfect analogy for the mistake so many employers make. More specifically, the way the business allocated resources to advertising vs. customer service mirrored the costly mistake employers make when it comes to recruiting, employer branding, and onboarding.

It’s a mistake you want to ask yourself if you’re making.

The story speaks to how often employers waste time, money, and creative horsepower when it comes to attracting and retaining talent because they put their attention in the wrong place.

So here’s the story … 

Years ago a friend of mine was telling me how much he loved his Audi. In the same “I love my Audi” story, he mentioned that he will never buy another one again … ever. Before I could ask how Statement A leads to Statement B, he told me that the one and only Audi dealer in the area was a nightmare to deal with. The car-buying experience felt sleazy and the service experience after the sale continued to be a horror show.

He then went on to tell me about another customer of he had met. That customer had brought his car to a dealership out of state for the very same reason my friend disliked this particular dealership.

I knew the name of the dealership, but never had an opinion of them prior to his story.

Fast forward two weeks.

I hear this dealership’s ad on the radio. It is incredibly creative and clever.

When it’s over, I think:

“Isn’t this classic. They spend all this money and creativity coming up with clever ways to get people through the door, only to drive them back out the door by the experience they deliver.”

Since I love analogies and tend to see them everywhere, I then found myself thinking:

“Isn’t this a perfect analogy for what employers do? They spend all kinds of time and money trying to get the best and brightest through their doors, only to drive them back out — or drive them crazy — by the frustrating, disrespectful, and spirit-crushing work experience they deliver.”

Wouldn’t it make sense to invest just as much time, money, and creative horsepower delivering the work experience you promise as you do making a compelling promise to job prospects?

Doesn’t it make sense to invest as much in making sure talent stays once they come through the door, rather than creating a revolving door experience?

Doesn’t it make sense to create a work experience that makes your employees not only happy to stay, but also want to tell their talented friends: “This is an awesome place to work. When there’s an opening, I’ll let you know”?

Think of how much money you could help your employer save in recruiting costs if you helped them create a work experience that turned your employees into a volunteer recruiting firm.

If all this makes sense to you, here’s what you can do about it.

Share this article with your leadership team and suggest that you, as a team, examine:

• Whether you truly deliver the work experience your recruiting campaign promises.
• Whether you really know what kind of work experience you deliver.
• Whether you truly understand the key components of an inspiring, commitment-generating work experience … and how to deliver them.
• Whether your managers know how to manage in ways that inspire loyalty, passion, and pride.
• How much you are investing in telling the world you are a great place to work, and how much you are investing in actually being a great place to work.
• If you are doing the things Todd described in the comment here that are the things that make a workplace a good workplace: appreciation, interesting work, the chance to make a difference, opportunities for new skills, work/life balance, recognition, flexibility, health and retirement benefits, nice co-workers, smart co-workers, good managers but not micromanagers, training, a good location, money, promotions, and raises.

Share this article with your employees as a conversation starter. Find out from them whether they would recommend you as an employer, and why … or why not. Don’t just do this as a survey. I have found over the years that interviews and focus groups provide much richer, more actionable information. I don’t recommend replacing surveys with them, but combining the two.

Invest in helping your managers learn:

• What key practices create an inspiring work experience where employees feel not only valued and respected, but they also have the resources, support, and training to do great work.
• What key human needs drive employee performance and engagement, and how to create a work experience that satisfies these human needs. Here are just a few: the need for meaning and purpose, the need to learn and grow, and the need to feel a sense of control over one’s experience.
• How to become more mindful of critical Managerial Moments of Truth that affect employee engagement and morale. Examples of such critical Managerial Moments of Truth include: 1) Onboarding a new employee, and whether it’s a “sink or swim” experience or new hires get the message: “We’re glad you’re here, here’s how we are going to help you succeed”; 2) Giving employees feedback and doing performance reviews; 3) Communicating to employees about major changes; 4) How you ask employees for input, and what you do with that input.
• The critical communication skills that make it comfortable for people with less power — i.e. their direct reports — to speak honestly and openly about difficult issues.
• The myriad of other skills and the managerial practices that bring out the best in employees.

If you are serious about not just getting talent “through the door,” but also keeping them and bringing out the best in them, forward this article to your management team and your direct reports, and get the process rolling.

Note: I’m writing this “think piece” as part of a series of articles designed to expand your thinking about strategic HR.

HR and talent management leaders are constantly striving to become more strategic. But more often than not it seems that when they are presented with a strategic alternative that really breaks new ground, they retreat and stick with the status quo. However, if you are serious about making a strategic impact and you take a minute to reflect, it’s hard to think of many things that could have more of a strategic impact than increasing corporate revenues.

This is because increasing revenue or “topline growth” is on every CEO’s agenda and it is also almost always a top corporate goal and an executive success measure.

Other business functions like marketing, sales, supply chain, and product development have become corporate heroes (and are richly budgeted as a result) because they have demonstrated that they have a direct and measurable impact on this critical strategic goal.

HR has historically focused exclusively on cost cutting, but realize that increasing revenue is a far superior goal. That is because almost anyone can cut costs using an arbitrary number. However, in order to generate more revenue in the marketplace from your customers, you must meet a much higher standard, which requires that you be competitive in every aspect of the business.

Now if you are an HR traditionalist or someone who is happy to maintain HR’s status as a service/overhead function, you are probably already thinking that a strategic goal to impact revenue is a ridiculous idea. However, you would be wrong. We know that HR can directly increase revenues because several firms have already succeeded in demonstrating to their CFOs that they could directly increase revenue. At least take a minute and look at a quick example where HR has increased revenue.

Think it’s not possible? Here is a quick example to demonstrate the possibilities.

It’s obvious that average salespeople produce revenue and good salespeople produce more. So in an attempt to hire better salespeople, this technology firm analyzed its current sales hiring process and reengineered it, so that it measurably identified and hired better salespeople.

If the new process hired salespeople that sold on average 10% more (than those hired under the previous recruiting process), you could (with the CFO’s blessing), publicly state that this HR action had improved sales revenue by X dollars (i.e. the actual amount would be the 10% improvement in the average salesperson’s yearly sales revenue, multiplied by the number of new salespeople who were hired under the improved process).

Still skeptical? Here is another quick example of how HR can increase revenue.

The recruiting function at this Midwest bank realized it was losing significant revenue every day that a loan officer position was vacant. Obviously, with no one in the position, you can’t make or close any revenue-generating loans. In order to reduce the number of days that loan officer positions were vacant, it called on recruiting to apply its speed-hiring techniques on these positions.

By speeding up the requisition process, placing the best recruiters on these positions and identifying and eliminating “deadtime” throughout the hiring process, it cut the number of vacancy days nearly in half. At $5,000 per eliminated vacancy day, over dozens of requisitions, it increased the bank’s revenue by millions. Everyone from the CFO on down agreed that HR had substantially increased revenue. If these two brief examples are not enough for you, the next section contains the top 15 HR actions that can lead to increased corporate revenue.

The Top 15 Talent Management Actions With the Highest Impact on Revenue

Even if you’re not ready to implement an HR-wide coordinated “revenue impact strategy,” realize that there are many independent actions that the functions within talent management can take in order to increase organizational revenue. If you’re looking for some “low-hanging fruit” actions to take, here are some to consider (those with the potential for producing the most revenue impact listed first).

1. Prioritize revenue-generating business units, jobs, and employees — the highest impact and the lowest cost action is prioritization. HR needs to work with executives, the CFO, and risk management to identify and then prioritize the specific business units that generate the most revenue. You should also identify the highest revenue-generating jobs and employees. Next, you must also identify revenue “impact” jobs, which are jobs that don’t directly generate revenue but the actions of the employees in the jobs directly “influence” the likelihood of subsequent revenue generation. You should also identify revenue “impact” functions (note that product development and customer service are often the highest revenue-impact functions). Finally, you should identify and prioritize jobs where a major error would significantly decrease revenues or increase costs. Obviously after setting your priorities, you need to develop processes that ensure that the most HR resources and the best HR personnel are allocated to those priorities.
2. Targeted recruiting from competitors — recruiting talent away from your direct competitors has a high ROI, because if you are successful, your revenues will go up and theirs will go down. Start by “mapping” the revenue-generating talent at your competitors. Next, recruit away the top sales manager or exceptional salespeople from your competitors. Once you land a “magnet” individual, others are likely to follow. Other high-impact targets for your recruiting from competitors might include innovators, game-changers, pioneers, and individuals with expertise in monetizing products and services.
3. Retain revenue producers — retention has a high ROI because most of the factors that cause top revenue generators to leave are not related to their pay. Interview the most successful revenue producers and those who significantly impact revenue. During the interview, identify the factors that currently frustrate them, as well at the factors that would make their job a dream job. Put together a personalized retention plan to minimize the negatives and to increase the positives.
4. Hire revenue producers — external hiring brings in individuals with a proven track record for generating revenue. External hires also bring with them revenue-generating ideas. Focus your employer branding and recruiting processes on revenue-generating jobs. Reengineer the process so that it leads the industry in its ability to identify, attract, and hire individuals with a superior revenue-generating track record. For example, a major mobile phone network provider found that by adding an online testing component to its hiring process , the resulting call center rep that were hired produced over 10% more revenue than the untested hires.
5. Training on how to increase revenue — revenue generation and the related skills that support it must become a key corporate competency. The T&D function must target its offerings so that they cover all aspects of revenue generation. The quality of the offerings must also be improved, so that individuals show at least a 10% improvement in revenue generation after returning to their jobs after completing the T&D programs. In addition to targeting revenue-generating employees, revenue impact learning modules need to be developed so that every employee (regardless of their position) can understand the concept and subsequently improve their support of revenue-generating employees and business units. In this light, Wal-Mart routinely makes it a part of pre-shift store meetings to make all employees aware of which specific products produce the highest margins and revenue. This awareness allows employees to focus their sales and customer service efforts.
6. Identify barriers — HR must proactively use surveys, interviews, and metrics to forecast upcoming revenue-generating problems and opportunities. HR must also have a process for rapidly identifying current problems and the barriers that restrict revenue generation.
7. Create a fast-reaction team — HR must put together a team of specialists that can respond rapidly to the identified revenue problems that occur anywhere in your organization. Team members should excel at discovering HR related “root causes” and have the skills and experience necessary to solve sudden revenue generation problems.
8. Leadership development and succession must focus on revenue-related competencies – revenue generators also need to be effectively led and managed. So as a result, the leadership function needs to make revenue generation a key competency and development area for leaders. The ability to increase the revenue impact of their team should also be added as a key criterion for promoting managers and leaders.
9. Proactive internal movement — employees and contingent workers need to be proactively placed into the “right jobs” where they can have the highest possible revenue impact. The initial placement of top revenue producers needs to be regularly re-assessed so that key individuals (and even teams) are redeployed to the needed business areas. Seasonal and business cycle rotations may also be required to ensure that there is no excessive idleness among revenue generators.
10. Identify those who support revenue producers — once a year, survey your top revenue producers and ask them which individuals or support positions have directly helped/contributed to their revenue production. Make sure that these impactful support personnel are rewarded and recognized.
11. Release poor performers quickly – the performance management process must be redesigned so that it focuses on rapidly identifying, fixing, and releasing employees who fail to meet their revenue or revenue impact goals. The recruiting function should also continuously be on the lookout for top-performing talent that can be “swapped” with these lower-performing current employees.
12. Implement revenue-impact metrics and rewards – work with the COO, the CFO, and performance management to develop a process and a set of metrics that accurately assess an individual’s revenue generation and revenue impact. Rewards and recognition programs must also be focused and reengineered to better encourage revenue generation.
13. Onboarding — even the onboarding process can impact revenue generation if a weak process means that new-hires get up to speed slowly. As a result, the onboarding process must be reengineered so that new-hires on the first day clearly understand the importance of revenue generation, no matter what job they have. They also need to be informed about how their revenue generation/impact will be measured and rewarded. And finally they need to be educated as to where they can go to get help in this area.
14. Contingent workers and vendors must be included — because a significant percentage of the “workforce” are not technically employees, HR must also work to ensure that contingent workers are hired and evaluated based on their ability to impact revenue. HR should work with purchasing to ensure that vendors, contractors, and consultants are also all capable of increasing revenues.
15. Generate a direct profit — the least ambiguous of any HR action is directly generating revenue from external activities. Firms like Disney, HealthEast, Southwest, and Wachovia have generated revenue as a result of offering their HR services externally in areas including training, temp services, building a culture, and executive recruiting.

The Benchmark Firm to Copy

In addition to the 15 examples that were provided above, you should also know that the HR function at Google is the world’s leader in operationalizing a business-impact strategic approach. HR leaders at Google consistently use metrics and mathematical algorithms to scientifically improve business performance from programs like hiring, retention, and leadership. HR leaders can tell you the revenue impact of people management offerings like 20% time, free food, workspace design, and collaboration practices. They can also easily show you which business units (i.e. Adwords) have the most impact on revenue.

Understanding the five key components of a “revenue focused” HR strategy.

If you decide to implement this revenue-focus strategy, be aware that there are five key components that make a “revenue-focused” HR strategy successful.

Collaboration with the CFO — the first component is collaboration with the CFO. HR leadership must work directly with the CFO’s office (who is the undisputed “king” of measuring revenue). Together they must develop a credible process for proving when an action has a revenue impact and what the value of that impact actually is. Next, HR can provide the CFO’s office with a list of its intended actions and then finance can help to sort out any on the list that simply wouldn’t be credible no matter what the data said (i.e. an example of an action that might be sorting out as not credible could be the premise that hiring and retaining better janitors would increase revenues).

Make it an HR goal — the second component of the strategy is goal setting by making “impacting revenue” a major HR and talent management goal. As a major HR goal, it would need to be part of every HR function’s execution plan. The importance of the goal would be reinforced by adding revenue impact to the HR reward and metric structure. Together these actions would help to get everyone in HR to focus on this goal.

Prioritization — the third component is prioritization. If you start with the assumption that there will be no additional budget at least initially for this strategy,focus and concentrate your current HR budget and your best HR people on the business units, the jobs, and the employees that have the most impact on increasing revenue. Instead of equal treatment or first-come first-serve, high-priority jobs and employees would be serviced first. Resources would also be channeled toward the HR programs and processes which proved to have the most success on increasing revenue (i.e. usually they are hiring, retention, training, metrics, and rewards).

A process for identifying problems and barriers — the fourth component of the strategy involves identifying barriers to prohibit revenue from increasing. By applying benchmarking, research, and analyzing metrics, HR can determine which “people management problems” or barriers are having the most impact on reducing revenues. (Examples of problems include extended position vacancies in revenue-generating jobs, high turnover among top salespeople, salespeople unwilling to attend sales training etc.). The same effort should be put into identifying “positive people management opportunities” that when taken advantage of, directly increase revenues.

Best-practice sharing – the final strategy component is best-practice identification and sharing. Under this component, HR uses research, benchmarking, and metrics to proactively identify and then rapidly spread the implementation of the most effective revenue improving “people management practices” to all managers throughout the organization.

Final Thoughts

If you are still skeptical about this strategy and approach, ask your CEO whether they would prefer that you hire great clerks versus great salespeople. Also ask them if they would prefer that HR excel at low hiring costs, hiring without fewer legal issues, or would they instead prefer you to hire innovators and individuals who can increase revenues by 10 to 20%?

Although the initial concept might seem daunting, a number of advanced HR departments have been using a piecemeal approach to increasing corporate revenue for years. If you’re HR department were to adopt “revenue impact” as a primary HR strategy, the net impact for even a medium-sized firm would literally be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. If you implemented the strategy, not only would you “have a seat at the table” but you would be listened to and respected because you successfully made the transformation from “overhead function” to a strategic contributor. Your work would be noted in the annual report, so even the shareholders would become aware of the major contribution that HR made.

And incidentally, if you like this strategy, you should also consider related HR strategies. Where instead of focusing on revenue, the strategy would focus on increasing quality, speed/agility, customer service or innovation throughout the organization as a result of HR actions.

And one final question … Did this article succeed in expanding your thinking?

We have traditionally operated a global employee referral system that captures employee’s quality referrals. Should they become hired, it automatically puts their name into the queue for a guaranteed cash reward. Similar to many corporations, different rewards giveaways have been offered over time as incentives: cars, boats, and home renovations.

In 2011 at Quintiles, however, an adventurous theme was implemented (one I hinted at a year ago).

In addition to the cash rewards, successful referrers would also be entered into a grand prize drawing for an exclusive trip of their choice with National Geographic Expeditions.

This adventurous approach heightened engagement. Employee referrals began to constantly rise. Three winners, in each of three regions, were randomly picked by Chairman Dr. Dennis Gillings at the close of the fourth quarter. The theme was well received and emphasizes our culture valuing adventure and experience, as well as encouraging world knowledge and culture sharing.

The employee referral program for 2012 holds more ambitious incentives. A mid-year winner will get to attend the 2012 Summer Olympics in London! This reinforces the concepts of value of competition, being the best, pushing the limits, global cultures all coming together for positive reasons, and valuing experiences and memories. We are looking for the world’s best talent — just like the Olympics attracts.

Two recruiters meet at a conference:

• Laura gets 30% of her hires from referrals, has used only one headhunter in the past six months, and has a 42-day average time to fill. She filled 11 jobs last month.
• Jerry gets 20% of his hires from referrals, uses headhunters regularly, and has a 65-day average time to fill. He filled eight jobs last month.

Is Laura better than Jerry? Does Jerry suck? 

Wait.

What if I told you Jerry has 300 more Twitter followers than Laura? Ha. Now who sucks, Laura!?

I love – love — to hear provocateurs speak at conferences. I love to hear opinionated people make a case for doing stuff better, pushing us to hire better, faster. But I get tired of the measuring sticks we use to decide if we’re nailing it.

I spent most of my career in corporate recruiting, as a recruiting director with Amazon and Expedia. And now as a consultant, I get to work with some great companies. As we work to help them with sourcing strategies, recruiting process and systems improvement, or even recruiter and hiring manager training, we learn a lot about how they do what they do. And what we find is that there are a bunch of recruiters out there that don’t suck, but who think they do suck. That’s a problem. People who think they suck don’t usually do great things. And we need as much “great” as we can get.

Our team gets asked, “How does our [time to fill, source of hires, recruiter productivity, employer brand, candidate experience] compare to other clients you work with?” And we can share averages and help them to see what they do better and not-as-well as others. I completely get why we all want to know this stuff. But can we really compare one company to another? One team of recruiters to another? Along some dimensions and some standards, sure, probably.

But as many before me have pointed out, comparing cost per hire, time to fill, recruiter productivity … it’s not silly to benchmark, but I’m not sure the results are really that helpful. Why?

Geez, just start to make a list of all the things that may be different between two companies or two recruiting teams. Here are several:

The type of people hired

• Entry level customer service vs. software engineers vs. outside sales people

The number of recruiters

• This usually drives req loads/recruiter, which can almost dictate what a recruiter can/can’t realistically do

Access to scheduling and sourcing support

• Some of you have teams supporting you, and some of you are one-person, ass-kickers with a phone, Outlook, Google, a free LinkedIn license, and Excel for your ATS

The role of the HR generalist

• Friend or foe? Manager (or maybe they think they’re your manager ☺) or peer partner?

The engagement level of the hiring managers

• Are they sourcing? Do they drive quick, quality hiring decisions? Do they help close?

Your brand

• Do you have a strong consumer brand? A strong employer brand? Or, do you have to spend 10 minutes of your sourcing calls just to explain what your company does?

Your location

• Do people want to work where you have jobs? (In the late 1990s, before everyone knew who Amazon was, 50% of our sales pitch to software engineers was focused on Seattle, since we ended up needing to relocate the majority of our hires — much harder for my recruiters to source people from sunny California than companies who hired locally.)
• Are you in Europe, with practices and laws that slow down your process, even though you’re ready to move fast?

Your compensation packages

• Do you pay 50% of market? Or, 70% percent of market? Do you offer equity?

Tools!

• Do you have — and use — Linkedin Recruiter, Avature CRM, Job posting distributors … even an ATS?

Even the basics of how things are measured vary wildly. Take time to fill …

• Does your clock start when the position was budgeted, when the incumbent quit, when the req was approved, when the req was posted, or when you led the strategy kickoff meeting? I’ve seen it so many ways.

It’s almost never apples to apples. Req loads in retail and healthcare are typically much higher than in tech and corporate functions, so comparing results across industries is hard. And even within the same industry — take retail — you may have a model with a lot of centralized sourcing support, or one with field HR generalists who own recruitment, or one with only foundational field support (where hiring managers are largely on their own, with support from their district managers and a three-ring binder from HR).

And I find the same to be true when I’ve interviewed recruiters, trying to compare them to each other. I’ve probably interviewed 50 recruiters from Microsoft in the past 15 years, for example, and it’s even hard to compare Microsoft recruiters to each other!

My point is that very few of us will get a lot of value from comparing our performance to other companies. We’d likely get more from comparing ourselves to our internal targets, to goals that make sense in our resource model, and to goals that come from our unique business and talent needs.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t benchmark externally. That can be key to making business cases, key to executive influence, and key to getting your raise. And don’t get me wrong — I want more from the folks at the Corporate Executive Board, Staffing.org, CareerXroads (great, transparent Source of Hire reports), not less. It’s very helpful. You just need to … Put. It. All. In. Context.

I want you to hear it from me first. You don’t suck.

• I’d love comments from those of you who have worked in multiple environments, to share with everyone what kind of differences really help — or hurt — you.
• I’d love to hear people share how they gather external benchmark data that really helps them.
• And I’d love to get a halleluiah from people who are kickin’ ass despite the fact that they have little budget, little support, unrealistic req loads, and systems that make their job harder, not easier.

If you are among the many strategic leaders frustrated with your inability to anticipate and handle the volatility and the speed of change in the talent management environment, you should take a few minutes to understand VUCA. VUCA best describes the volatile and chaotic business, economic, and physical environment that we all now face. Unless you have had your head in the sand, you must have noticed the chaotic business and economic conditions under which we currently operate. In fact, the last decade was so chaotic that in its cover story, Time magazine labeled it “the decade from hell.”

Many in talent management have been hoping that this chaos is a short-term phenomenon, but it is a permanent condition that we must all learn how to manage under.

Because they were designed for more predictable times, almost all current HR, talent management, and workforce planning processes fail to perform in this chaotic environment. In a VUCA environment, there are more changes, a faster rate of change, and the size of the changes are so impactful that they must be labeled as “disruptive.” So the question for talent leadership becomes, “how do you effectively hire, develop, place, and retain individuals and leaders in the volatile environment where literally everything changes in months rather than years?”

V.U.C.A. (pronounced voo – ka) is an acronym for an environment that is dominated by:

Volatility – where things change fast but not in a predictable trend or repeatable pattern.

Uncertainty – where major “disruptive” changes occur frequently. In this environment, the past is not an accurate predictor of the future, and identifying and preparing for “what will come next” is extremely difficult.

Complexity — where there are numerous difficult-to-understand causes and mitigating factors involved in a problem.

Ambiguity – where the causes and the “who, what, where, when, how, and why” behind the things that are happening are unclear and hard to ascertain.

Talent Management Has Been Lagging in VUCA Preparation

The concept of operating in a chaotic environment is not new. Tom Peters has been talking about managing under chaos for years, and “decision-making under uncertainty” is a well-established academic field. What is new is that most economic, business, and political leaders have realized that the VUCA environment is a permanent condition.

Business executives have been preparing for the VUCA environment for years. Although most of the initial work was done by the military and in counterterrorism, VUCA planning has been part of business processes like supply chain and risk management for years. A few firms like GE, Unilever, and McDonald’s have even begun changing their leadership development model to fit the VUCA environment. But unfortunately, no one in recruiting, retention, skill development, compensation, performance management, onboarding, etc. has paid more than lip surface attention to this strategic problem. As a result, the time has come to face the fact that you can’t be strategic in talent management, HR, or recruiting unless you can manage and thrive in a VUCA environment.

Why Talent Managers and Workforce Planners Must Prepare for VUCA

Under the established 20th-century talent management model, the future was relatively predictable. As a result, firms hired, trained employees, and developed leaders in order to prepare for the “predictable” upcoming business environment. Most firms prepared their employees for the single-most likely future scenario (i.e. scenario A), which was usually a 5%-10% extrapolation from the current situation.

The more advanced firms prepared for not just the single-most-likely scenario but also for one or two alternative predictable scenarios (i.e. scenario A and B, C). But unfortunately, in a world of continuous disruption and VUCA, using this traditional model usually means that you end up hiring, training, and developing for business and talent management scenarios that will literally never occur. Planning, forecasting, and training simply cannot work if the environment that you are preparing for never appears!

A Quick Example to Illustrate Complexity and Volatility

For example, recruiting routinely plans for three distinct scenarios: no hiring, moderate hiring, and large-scale hiring. However, in a VUCA environment, talent acquisition must plan for each of those scenarios, but in addition, it must also plan for periods where the firm will do rapid hiring in some business units and regions, while simultaneously having a hiring freeze or even layoffs in other business units.

What Is Needed Is an Agile Talent Management Model

The 21st-century VUCA model that I am advocating requires talent management to have plans for handling numerous “disruptive events” that traditional narrow workforce planning simply can’t handle. Some of those disruptive events might include generational shifts that occur every six years, social media changing the way we communicate, and simultaneous talent surpluses and shortages.

One possible conclusion for talent management leaders could be that you should stop any planning process that never accurately forecasts the future. But that would be a major mistake. Instead, in a VUCA environment, talent management needs to develop an “agile model” that prepares for a wider range of options (i.e. scenario A-Z) but more importantly, it must also develop Talent Management processes/systems that can actually shift and handle any unpredicted upcoming event “just-in-time.” It might seem counterintuitive at first, but the military has proven that you make people more agile and successfully prepare them for handling unpredicted events that literally no one thought of in advance.

Things That Talent Management Must Start Doing to Meet the VUCA Environment

Talent management leaders must prepare for disruptive problems and opportunities that cannot be predicted. Some of the action steps that you should take to prepare for complete surprises and the VUCA environment include:

• Agile employees — Develop as a primary goal a focus on the hiring, training, and retaining of employees and managers who are agile, who thrive in a VUCA environment, and those who have the capability of acting effectively in unforeseen and unpredicted situations.
• Agile processes – Require agility, flexibility, and a rapid change capability as an essential component in all current and new talent management processes and programs.
• Self-obsolescence of processes — Require all talent management programs and processes to include a component that continually “self-obsoletes” its own current practices and replaces them with updated ones.
• Training to solve unanticipated problems — training and development must create the capability to prepare employees and managers to identify and effectively handle previously unknown problems. A high volume of scenario training and simulations can make an employee more comfortable and confident when they encounter a completely new situation. With repetition, employees can eventually develop skills and their own processes for handling “brand-new” volatile and complex situations that are full of uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Focus on innovation — Prioritize talent management so that it focuses on innovators, game-changers, and pioneers who are essential for success in a VUCA environment.
• Rapid learning — Develop systems to increase the speed of individual and organizational learning.
• More internal movement — Develop process to proactively speed up the movement of employees internally to where they can have a greater impact.
• Contingent labor — Use contingent labor as a significant percentage of the workforce, in order to increase your capability to meet sudden upturns, downturns, and new skill needs.
• Rapid increase in talent — Develop the capability for rapid hiring for sudden needs through poaching, with pre-identifying talent pools and by building professional communities.
• Rapid release of talent — Develop the capability for rapidly releasing surplus and inappropriately skilled workers.
• Fluid job descriptions — Develop continually evolving job descriptions and hiring standards that reflect the continually changing work.
• Outsourcing for flexibility — Use outsourcing to fill sudden needs and overflow work.
• Competitive advantage — Develop talent management processes and programs that provide a continual competitive advantage over other talent competitors.

Things That Talent Management Must Stop Doing to Meet the VUCA Environment

Leaders must dramatically modify or stop doing the following things to prepare for a VUCA environment.

• Stop seeking permanent solutions in talent management and HR
• Stop relying on the past and trends as an accurate predictor of the future
• Stop benchmarking best practices and solutions to most current problems
• Stop assuming that long-term employee retention is possible or even desirable
• Stop assuming that “one-size-fits-all” is a good approach to managing employees
• Eliminate “fit” as a desirable criterion in hiring and retention
• Stop assuming that the corporate culture and even corporate values should automatically remain fixed

You Must Also Prepare for Disruptive Changes That Can Be Predicted

Although these listed problems will likely appear unexpectedly, these dramatic changes in talent management can be anticipated, so they must be planned for.

• A continually changing set of required employee skills and job duties and a huge gap between the needed and the available skill sets
• A completely new set of leadership skills that will focus on agility, flexibility, and in developing a “just-in-time” solutions capability within the team
• Dramatic fluctuations in employee turnover
• Continually changing candidate expectations
• Dramatic shifts in the volume and quality of applications
• Frequent changes in offer acceptance rates
• Continuous development of new communications and learning tools
• Generational changes that occurs every 6 years instead of 20

Final Thoughts

The new talent management model that I am recommending is based on the assumption that for the foreseeable future, most problems and opportunities will simply not be predictable. The model however does take advantage of the fact that the skill and capability of handling completely new unforeseen situations can be developed. My challenge and question to talent management leaders is “What are you doing to ensure that every talent management process and employee can produce optimal results in a VUCA environment? The time is come to put together a planning session devoted to making the shift toward the new agile talent management model.

I was watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this weekend with my kids — I love that movie and not just because I have a crush on Johnny Depp! It is a fun movie — just lighthearted enough to keep the kids interested with just enough “life lessons” to allow my kids to watch it over and over again.

One of the parts I love about this movie is the scene where the squirrels can identify a good nut from a bad one. I was struck by how nice it would be if we, as HR professionals, could simply knock someone on the head and, depending on what we hear, know whether they were a good fit or not.

But alas, we don’t have that luxury; we have to ascertain whether a candidate is a good fit based on the information we have at the time. And, as most decisions go, the result is only as good as the data leading up to it.

Herein lies the foundation for the upcoming pre-conference workshop for the ERE Expo in San Diego. Recruiting Beyond the Job Description is a pre-conference workshop designed to help you take the data you have about a job, combined with the commitment you have as professionals, and build a recruitment and selection process that greatly increases the chances for a good organization and job fit.

So many of us have become complacent when it comes to recruiting and filling our vacancies. Employee “churn” has become a part of our lives and we think nothing of it when a new employee leaves before the honeymoon period is over! I have even heard some recruiters claim this churn is “job security” for them! Egads!

Recruiting Beyond the Job Description will help you understand that you don’t have to be limited by the inherent flaws of traditional job descriptions. During this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to extract “hidden data” about a job to identify what competencies you should be searching for and testing against to ensure the selected candidate is a great match.

I will walk you through a practical and effective job analysis process to identify both technical and behavioral competencies needed for success in the job. You are free to bring job descriptions you are currently working from or you can use the ones I provide. Either way, you will leave the workshop armed with knowledge and motivation to Recruit Beyond the Job Description and increase you chances of making a selection that will stick! It is certainly not as cute as trained squirrels, but I promise you the process is just as magical.