Strategic HR?

I am going to use my proverbial 15 minutes to discuss a roadmap for HR to “get strategic.” It’s a huge subject, with lots of territory to discover.

2005 at Talentism was spent discussing the big and small topics around talent. More specifically, I wanted to develop a foundation for the idea that in business today, talent is more valuable than capital. In 2006, I want to spend more time at Talentism talking about the broader HR function and how it can be better used to make an organization more competitive. The theme is still the same: Talentism. Capitalism is the primacy of capital. Talentism is the primacy of talent. I hope that enough groundwork has been laid to start to broaden the tactical scope of the engagement. And it starts today.

HR as a strategic business partner has been the erstwhile hobby-horse of the three-piece-suit set for some time. The idea developed traction in the 80’s, because a lot of domestic manufacturers were losing ground to the Japanese.

Japans superior HR practices were seen as one of the reasons they were winning, so along with the quality movement HR as a strategic business partner started to take hold as an idea.

HR put up its defenses and weathered that storm. But then in the late nineties came the Internet bubble, and people started focusing on talent. Specifically, everyone wanted to know how to get more talent than their competition. You saw companies (most of whom went bankrupt) develop a Chief Talent Officer position. This was supposed to telegraph to potential employees and present shareholders that the company took talent seriously. In most cases that I am aware of it was nothing more than a fancier title for the same old function. For instance, I remember when the Chief Talent Officer of the now-dead Scient talked about their culture being exemplified by the fire extinguishers that hung on the walls, since it showed just how hot the company was. It seemed to be the deepest wisdom he had at his disposal.

HR wasn’t any more strategic than before, but because everyone acknowledged that capital was cheap and talent was expensive, the “people-people” got more play. And then the bubble burst and HR went back to cost and risk control, and thousands of HR people everywhere breathed a sigh of relief.

Then came “The Table.” Since the dot bomb debacle there has been a lot of advice proffered around how HR can “get to the table.” The table is the mystical place where heady decisions are made and where real power is wielded. It is the fantasy land that many HR people dream about, mainly because so few of them have ever been there. In this dream “being strategic” is fulfilled by attending the right meetings and making the right presentations to the right people. Its baloney of course, but when you have been shoveling at the back end of the elephant for so long, feeding peanuts to the front-end feels like a big step up.

The advice on how to get to the table usually takes one of several forms:

- Do the same thing, but sell yourself better.

- Increase line manager satisfaction.

- Focus on hiring better people and / or reducing turnover.

None of these has any direct correlation to being strategic or creating investor value. Of course hiring better people would be a key strategic objective is anybody really understood what "better" means. But since goodness is defined by the temporary happiness of the hiring manager, hiring better people rarely translates into sustainable value creation. Beyond that, the three points form the collective wisdom of the strategy sales firms, but they are really bad advice. It is killing the HR function, throwing out the baby that could be strategic (talent operations) with the bathwater that is either regulatory or pointless. Hopefully I can use the framework of Talentism to develop some new methods for achieving this vaunted goal.

The first post will be tomorrow (it’s already complete, so I feel pretty confident I can keep this promise).

Comments

[Double Dubs]

Jeff:

Great history on "being strategic" and what many people think strategy is/is not.

The stars have aligned and I am also posting a series on HR strategy starting Monday. I'm looking forward to comparing notes. I'm guessing this should make for an interesting discussion.

[Jeff Hunter]

Dubs -

Great to hear! I look forward to reading your stuff. I agree that it should be an interesting conversation.

Jeff

[Steven Rothberg, CollegeRecruiter.com]

I'm also looking forward to your discussion. Far too many folks in recruiting take a re-active approach to recruiting and retention. In many cases, they're forced to do so by dictates from upper management or circumstances. But in some cases they actually choose to be re-active.

The example that always sticks in my mind was an HR Manager who purchased a job posting package on our site, CollegeRecruiter.com. She told me that she had just posted to another site and received 200 resumes for the position. I asked her why was she posting to our site if she had received so many resumes from the other site. I was expecting her to tell me that the quality was low so she was going to try using a niche site rather than a big, general site. Instead she told me that she deleted them all without looking at them because she didn't have time to go through 200 resumes. I didn't say it to her, but she was obviously making a terrible mistake by spending more time to generate more resumes rather than just spending that time going through the resumes that she had already received. It was also just so wrong on so many other levels, including her failure to reply to the candidates to acknowledge her receipt of their resumes, her failure to do any networking to try to fill the position, her failure to go back to the other board to see what they could do to try to increase the quality and lower the quantity, etc.

I've heard from many people that they're not afraid to give away nickels to business partners because they know that those nickels have a way of turning into dimes. For 2006, let's all resolve to give away hours being proactive because they'll end up turning into days of additional time not far into the future.

Steven Rothberg, President and Founder
CollegeRecruiter.com job board
http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com

[Sean Rehder]

A request/challenge for '06....

Besides recruiting new talent, I would love to get your input and views on managing known external talent. Meaning... how large sized companies work with independent consultants/contractors and perhaps small firms (2-5 people) on an "as needed" and periodic basis. Like a DH in baseball (I know how you like sports analogies). They usually come in either in clutch situations or when specific knowledge (which is above and beyond or not currently available with their current staff) is needed to complete a project. Since they are not your employees and you are one of many of their customers, you truly must establish a “relationship” with these consultants in order to be on their priority list as time goes on.

In a previous life during the dot com era, I managed 1099 compliance for many of the big dogs in Silicon Valley. I got to see how these companies worked with talent that was so good...they went out on their own and truly worked as a business entity. A true business vs. someone who would just tell a company, "if you want to hire me, pay me more hourly as a 1099 instead of a W2." The easiest way to spot the smartest and most effective consultants? They get paid on deliverables.

Oracle was easily the best at developing this source of external talent for their business strategy. Adobe was probably right behind them. When I reviewed their work agreements, they were by far more expensive (based on time spent) than hiring someone to do the job as an employee. But their end results were way more effective for the business if you measured the overall workforce strategy’s effectiveness against company deliverables when time and cost were imperative. You could tell by the “repeaters” that would come in and do a project/deliverable…go away for awhile… and then come back for another.

Anyways…most companies do manage this in their own unique way. But you don’t see too many people talking about it out on the web. There is the talk of “just in time hiring” but…you can have the best time management/hiring software out there. If you don’t have the solid relationships with the hard to find/hard to hire people out there, forget about them showing up at 8am on Monday morning as the project plan requires….they’re deleting your emails and not returning your calls.

Good luck and good fortune in ’06. Cheers.

[Gautam]

Damn...!

I missed this conversation when it started...but I might as well put up a post about it now Jeff !

regards
Gautam