Corporate Eye

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Archives for September 2009

The Global War for Talent

Take China, for example. The new hotels we are opening will create over 30,000 jobs there. The job market there is extremely fast-paced, and quality candidates have a range of opportunities. We are competing with major multi-national companies for qualified and experienced staff across different skill sets, including HR, finance, sales, marketing and engineering.

That quote is from a “Hot Topic” article on the InterContinental Hotels Group website, written by Tracy Robbins, Executive Vice President of Human Resources for IHG.   I think for some folks—and particularly for some Americans—there’s a moment of disorientation upon reading that paragraph.  For one thing, the downturn in hiring (to say nothing of the increase in downsizing) has dominated the news about employment for so long that it takes an active imagination to contemplate hot labor markets.  But according to Robbins, “the number of workers with transferable skills is steadily increasing and people are willing to change jobs more often.  In short, we’re in a seller’s market–a market where talent matters, and talent wins.”

Wow.  And double-wow for the people who got ahead of the global curve on this one.  It’s been a surprisingly fast trip from the Cultural Revolution to the Capitalist Revolution, and I think it would be fair to say the China boom wasn’t an obvious development, viewed from twenty or even ten years ago.  But now it’s now, and the playing field has changed dramatically.

For another thing . . . there’s a lot of rhetoric about the impact of globalization on employment.  But most of the public discussion is about the shift of relatively low-wage manufacturing and customer service jobs to countries where labor is cheaper.  Much less is said about either (a) the opportunities in Asia and other countries for American and European workers, or (b) the competition for local talent in quickly developing markets such as China.

The IHG website features a gorgeous video about China, and their Careers site is worth a visit—not only for a look at their Asia initiative, but also to see their strategies for increasing employee engagement.  With a farflung workforce, it’s especially important to create a feeling of “corporate community,” and IHG is pursuing that goal with a lot of features on their main site, and a special campaign called Room to Grow.

If your company isn’t doing business multi-nationally today, it may be soon.  What’s the plan for expanding the recruiting message beyond familiar borders?

Employees know URLs better than their CEOs name?

phone question44% of receptionists on the main switchboard of the FTSE 100 companies don’t know the name of their CEO?

I find the results of a recent survey of FTSE 100 companies carried out by MoneyPenny really quite astonishing (via Brand Strategy Guru).

Researchers went mystery shopping across the biggest companies in the country, calling the main UK switchboards of the FTSE 100 to ask each company 10 questions over 4 weeks. They evaluated time to answer, friendliness of answer, clarity of information, welcome received, whether it was a human or automated response, how knowledgeable the respondent was, and overall satisfaction with the call.

Now some of these criteria are quite subjective, but over the course of many calls, you’d soon be able to compare companies. And for the most part, the responses were fine; most companies came out as pretty average (the full results are available and an opportunity to compare your own business performance with the FTSE100). But some of the detail is very curious; the poor performance of the retail sector overall, for example – though a few individual companies put in an excellent performance.

I think it is particularly interesting that more people could provide the web address of the corporate site (87%) than could name the CEO (56%) or provide the postal address (86%).

It was peak holiday season, but surely it can’t be that the switchboards were all staffed by temps (and even if they were, the temps could have been given a crib sheet), or that there had been a mass upheaval in the personnel at the top of the organisation? Chief Executives don’t come and go that fast…

We’ve discussed employees as spokespeople before; these front-line staff really are brand ambassadors, and deserve to be given training and resources to provide the answers to some of the most likely questions that they’ll have to field.

We’ve also pointed out that the most common reason to visit the corporate website is to check contact details. Having a visitor-friendly, welcoming website with easy-to-find phone numbers is great, but if the welcome received when the visitor does make contact doesn’t match, then the difference will be starkly apparent.

And it is exactly this kind of mismatch that makes people see the corporate website as spin and marketing.

Speaking from Experience! Now, About Transformability…

In Hiring for Fast-growing Departments or Companies (an interesting article on ere.net), consultants Tony Kubica and Sara LaForest contend the two key issues for successful hiring in rapid-growth conditions are alignment and transformability.  In their words:

Alignment addresses the passion and skills the person brings to the organization, and their fit within the organization. Transformability is hiring the person not for the job as it exists today, but as it will exist tomorrow. Addressing the alignment issue without considering the transformability issue will likely result in hiring the wrong person.

I’ll guess that the concept of assessing alignment is already familiar.  More than just matching the skills to the job—it’s finding someone who’s a good fit for the culture and has an enthusiasm for the goals and challenges of the position.

Not that it’s always easy to achieve alignment in hiring (or to maintain it across the organization), but the concept is familiar HR terrain.  Transformability, on the other hand, may be terra incognita.  In evaluating this quality, you are basically asking “Can this candidate evolve with the job?”

Kubica and LaForest make the point that in hiring for a fast-growing entity, recruiters should be “looking for candidates who fit the future, not just the current, job requirements.”  But I would go a step further:

Today, some companies may be fast-growing, but many are fast-shrinking.  And most are engaged in some kind of change.  With the entire ground of business undergoing shifts, from small tremors to major quakes, transformability may be a vital key for hiring in the majority of organizations.

My own experience connects up here because I’ve worked as a contractor/freelancer/consultant for most of my career.  Flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity (!) are qualities I’ve cultivated, and they have always been viewed as an advantage by the organizations I’ve worked for.  But I’ve noticed that those same organizations, when hiring full-time employees, look for a tight fit with the specific job requirements—and often end up with a workforce that doesn’t respond to change very well.

In transformational projects, change management is always a huge challenge.  Not just on the practical level, but on the cultural level.  So maybe, since the times they are a-changin’ faster and faster, transformability (“the ability to be transformed”) ought to be in the forefront of consideration for all hiring at all companies.

But.  Based on what I’m seeing in the market right now, the trend may actually be in the opposite direction.  With budgets tight, only the most necessary positions are being filled, and there’s a view that every hire has to be a slam dunk.  That means extra emphasis on “fit,” and less consideration for the kinds of strategic qualities that could seem like a luxury.

Thought experiment:  What if every job had two descriptions?  A “now” version, and a “maybe” version.  Now the job is selling widgets, but maybe it will soon be marketing the art of widgetry.  The best candidate might be the one who can imagine making that transition.

Amazon on Track to Take Over the Retail World

amazon_boxAmazon opened its online doors as a book, DVD and CD retailer just 15 years ago.  Today, the site sells more books, DVDs and CDs than any other retailer, and large book sellers such as Borders are struggling in Amazon’s wake.

But media products isn’t the only slice of retail market share that Amazon has stolen.  2009 marked the first year that sales of other merchandise on Amazon surpassed book, DVD and CD sales on the site.  If business continues the way it’s been going in 2009, worldwide sales of other merchandise on Amazon will surpass worldwide book, DVD, and CD sales before the year ends.

There is no doubt that Amazon has changed the retail landscape.  As the New York Times cites, remember neighborhood bookstores, record shops and video stores?  Few remain in 2009 with more and more consumers preferring the convenience, wide selection and free shipping from Amazon.  Even mass retailers like Walmart are feeling the Amazon pinch.

But retailers aren’t the only ones feeling threatened by Amazon.  Even auction sites like eBay are seeing buyers shift to Amazon since Amazon now allows third parties to sell products through its site (Amazon takes 15% from those sales).  Both Walmart and Sears are doing or planning to do the same thing on their Web sites.  Other companies such as Target and Toys ‘r Us which partnered with Amazon to sell their products in the past are ending those partnership agreements and striking out on their own.

So was Amazon in the right place at the right time during its early days?  One could argue that, but Amazon succeeded in the early days when other online retailers did not.  Today, the brand represents online shopping.  It’s the go-to place to purchase just about anything — or at the least, it’s the site people begin their shopping research.

Amazon created a new online business model that competitors are only starting to copy.  Does Amazon have enough of a foothold in its market to disregard that competition?  So far, it certainly doesn’t appear that another company can replicate what Amazon has built over the past 15 years.

What do you think?  Can anyone threaten Amazon?

This sounds like a job for Google.

Image: Flickr

Speaking from Experience! About Applications and . . .

something called “Transformability.”  Two separate topics, but I’ve had reason to think about both lately—so here are a few comments:

First.  I had to fill out a job application online.  Only sort of a “job” application, really, because I was responding to a project opening advertised on a fairly specialized niche board, and it was not a full-time employee position, but rather a part-time, virtual “opportunity.”  In short, the sort of thing that is usually handled by submitting a CV, samples, cover, etc.  However the entity involved is an educational institution, and they wanted an application, so by golly, I jumped into the process.

NOT a good experience!

There were two problems.  (A) The application was a complete misfit for the opportunity, asking questions that not only didn’t apply, but really couldn’t be answered by most people who would be responding.  But (B) even if I had been seeking the kind of position the application was designed for, the process of filling it out would have been very frustrating.  It went on for MANY pages/screens, with no indication of where I was in the process, or when (if ever) it might end.  When I started the application I had no hint of what would be involved—and once I began, the only connection to the application form was the Continue button.  The path  of no choice just led deeper into the maze, and since the MANY questions in the application had no groupings and no discernible order, it wasn’t even possible to make an educated guess about how far along I might be.

The questions on each page were in a complete vacuum (i.e., no context, no way of referencing previous questions)—and I began to notice that new questions were similar to ones I’d already encountered.  I wondered how question 36 differed from the very similar 23.  No way to compare.  So was the similarity a psychological test of consistency?  Why else ask twice in different ways?  Was it nuanced, or just careless?!

And there’s always a slim chance the whole thing was intended to discourage applicants, or test their tolerance for frustration.  But more likely, I’d guess that different stakeholders wanted to have their questions included on the application in their very own words, so the form became kind of a collage, with similar questions that might be redundant–or might merit completely different answers if the applicant had any context to go by.  Who knows?

Very likely, someone just took the paper application and made it clickable, so all the problems of the original became that much worse.  As for my experience–with no way to stop and save the work I’d already put in, I slogged on to the end, but was pretty cranky by the time I put N/A into the last blank.  One thing I was sure of:  the completed application did not provide very much that would be useful for evaluating me as a candidate.

I see that my rant has used up all of today’s post, so Transformability will have to be covered next time.  Meanwhile, some suggested takeaways:

  • See how upsetting a bad application form can be?
  • Web-based application forms need to be web-user-friendly.  Putting a paper application online is bad.
  • Different types of opportunities require different types of applications—or at least enough flexibility for the form to be used in different ways by different applicants.  One-size-fits-all is bad!