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New Study: Would This Keep You From Getting Hired Today?
“What has continually surprised me is how much I know and how much managers are willing to underrate me. It is very, very frustrating. They say, ‘We want somebody cheaper, not somebody who knows more.’” – unemployed 63-year-old policy analyst.
As the economy continues to improve, the job market is better, but anyone over 50 should take important lessons from the recent recession about their own long term employability. Here are five things I’ve learned from almost 50 in-depth interviews and a survey of over 1,200 U.S, residents age 55+ who are working or looking for work. For more details, see our study “Buddy, Can You Spare a Job? The New Realities of the Job Market for Aging Baby Boomers” at the link below this article.
My New Video Now Available.....
Many of you have seen me speak in keynote addresses or workshops. I have just posted on my website: www.LostKnowledge.com a new video showing excerpts from recent talks to the American Organization of Nurse Executives, a Rockwell-Collins Leadership Group, and the National Conference on the Creative Economy. Please feel free to share this video link with colleagues and friends who might be interested in better understanding my message and the kinds of issues I address.
Of course, the content of my talks is continually evolving as I conduct dozens of interviews with senior leaders for the new book I am co-authoring with the working title: An Executive’s Guide to High-Impact Talent Management. Our book, which is being published by McGraw-Hill, gives chief executives and senior line managers practical advice on how to:
- Turn the changing dynamics of the workforce into a business opportunity. That means prospering in spite of aging boomers, enigmatic Gen-Ys, increasingly thin leadership pipelines, and serious skill shortages.
- Assess the real risks of a changing workforce needed to implement a specific business strategy.
- Evaluate HR’s proposals for talent management and workforce planning initiatives.
- Assess the performance of your workforce development staff.
- Actively sponsor high-impact talent strategies by setting clear direction, creating urgency, and measuring results.
Defining New Talent Management Challenges
Is Your Talent Management Strategy Killing Your Business?
One hospital COO recently told us that “talent management” had been in the organization’s strategic plan for years, but now he planned to “take it up a notch” and broaden the hospital’s focus on this issue. Executives often talk to us about the increased importance of managing talent, but here are four mistakes leaders consistently make when it comes to recruiting, developing, and retaining the leaders and key staff needed to achieve their strategic objectives.
1. Allowing broken talent management processes to go unfixed. A major international law firm set improved profitability as a primary strategic objective. But top management overlooked the fact that turnover among the firm’s junior associates had been climbing steadily in recent years. Every young attorney who left cost the firm hundreds of thousands of dollars in training and replacement costs, even if they didn’t join a competitor. Problems can develop with any part of the process – recruiting, hiring, onboarding, development, performance management, or retention of high performers.
Have you done a performance audit recently on all of the critical elements of your talent strategy? Is someone on your staff monitoring reliable data on how these subprocesses are performing? Does top management understand how these processes are connected to business strategy? Eventually, leaders in the law firm realized that to maximize profitable growth they had to overhaul their processes for recruiting, developing, and managing young talent.
2. Wasting investments in talent management. A large high tech firm planned to bring in hundreds of new engineers over a short period of time as part of a major shift in business strategy. Top management asked human resources to develop a new onboarding program for the engineers, but provided no direction or oversight with the request. As a result, HR produced a generic, standard new company orientation for the new hires. This vanilla onboarding program not only cost the company a lot of money, but it also meant the new talent resources would take much longer to become fully productive. One thing top management should have been asking was how this onboarding program would help the engineers understand their new roles as this manufacturer shifted from hardware to software solutions.
3. Underinvesting in talent that directly undermines business strategy. For some industries and functions the availability of top talent has a direct impact on the ability to grow and sustain revenues. Leaders in a large engineering firm didn’t recognize this connection. As a result, they failed to develop the compelling story and do the aggressive recruiting of veteran engineers needed to sell new projects. As a result, profits fell by more than 30 percent. Not every business can say that top tier talent directly drives profits, but in those organizations where this is true, the risks of under investment in this area can be catastrophic for performance. In the case of the engineering firm, the next chief executive spent a huge percentage of his time recruiting and developing a new leadership team that could attract new business.
4. Failing to communicate to high performers their role in the strategic “big picture.” Research shows that one of the keys to retaining top talent is giving them a clear picture of how they fit into the firm’s future. When a well-known Fortune 500 company acquired a small firm with a reputation for developing high-end printers, the parent firm left the new acquisition alone, providing little direct management. This meant skilled technical talent in the printer company had no idea about their future role in the corporation’s business strategy. As a result, 20 percent of the small firm’s employees quit, and many of those who stayed were demoralized, convinced that the influence of the new corporate parent could only be bad.
An essential part of recruiting and retention of high performing employees is clearly explaining the business strategy and what key roles they can play in the organization’s future. As the competition for highly-skilled employees heats up, you can’t afford to undervalue good retention practices.
Concerns about talent management have definitely moved higher on the agendas of many chief executives. But we continue to see a lack of awareness about how to make headway in this area. If top managers are to get traction on the leadership and staffing issues that directly impact their business strategy, they must start by addressing the four challenges outlined above.
Lost Knowledge Stories
(This Shouldn’t Happen to You)
Failure to identify and preempt threats of knowledge loss costs organizations millions of dollar’s each year. And the problem has no doubt gotten worse due layoffs during the recent recession. Unfortunately, this problem remains largely invisible to leaders and is not discussed at the Board level. This section contains stories, which we continually collect, that illustrate the real costs of this problem for organizations – and individuals. These examples can help sensitize you to emerging risks in your own organization. Stories like these are an essential part of building a business case for investing in preemptive solutions.
- The chief purchasing executive for a major chemical company retired with detailed knowledge of supply sources, negotiation histories, contact details, and relationships with key suppliers. His successor lacked the market knowledge to counter 10 percent price increases immediately levied by suppliers.
- Last year, citing a budget shortfall, Governor Schwarzenegger of California fired about 10,000 temps and part time workers and ordered the salaries of 170,000 State employees to be cut to the Federal minimum wage until the legislature passed his proposed budget. But because California's payroll systems are written in antiquated COBOL code, the State Controller said it would take six months to implement the change and nine months to restore salaries later. That's if they had the COBOL programmers to do the job, which we didn’t, because the governor had just fired them.
- In a major U.S. city, a senior industrial hygienist unexpectedly left his government job in the Office of Environmental Health & Safety, giving his colleagues only three days to transfer knowledge about his work. He had files and records of all industrial hygiene work done in his unit for the last seven years. But in many cases the paper records had been lost and the electronic files were unorganized, so only the departing employee knew where they were. Inability to access this documentation only exacerbated the already high costs of worker’s compensation claims for the city administration.
- When a couple in Manchester, Massachusetts bought an $850,000 house few years ago, there was no official documentation to tell them that their investment was built on the old town dump. When they went to sell the house last year, rumors about the dump led to soil tests that showed high levels of lead, arsenic and other toxic chemicals. Now the state Department of Environmental Protection is insisting that the lot be cleaned up. With a new baby, the family is now stuck with a house they are afraid to live in and can’t sell. And officials in the town of Manchester, which has only “spotty” records about the dump, worry that they are going to be left with a major bill for the cleanup.
For more information on diagnosing the costs of lost knowledge, see our report: Diagnosing the Costs of Lost Knowledge on Organizational Performance
