Dr Lien's Talent Management Conundrum

I attended an interesting lecture last night at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. Their Associate Professor in Human Resources Management, Dr Lien Els, gave a great presentation debating what is 'talent', and how do you harness it.

One of her great points I thought was that you should not plan to keep talent. You can't keep or restrain talent. Talent moves on or leaves. You should plan how you intend to retain talent as long as possible and that all comes down to what you'll let them do whilst they're with your firm. To retain talent, she argued, the role should be wide open and not a tightly defined job description. Talent needs to feel as though they are constantly growing, or at least have the room to grow into at all times.

Another good observation in my opinion was that most HR professionals tend to think of talent management primarily as sourcing/recruitment, and as a result of that, it is easy to neglect the talent that may already exist within an organisation.

All quite heady stuff. If you want to know more about their research events then see the following link: http://www.uowdubai.ac.ae/research/

Job site Search Engines
Essential for those looking to quickly find jobseekers via the Net. However I have a small gripe this week with a couple of job sites who have overlooked the basic model of a search engine. You have to be able to find something using it!

Sounds simple, and it is for the majority. However a client asked us to integrate our recruiting technology this week to a new South African job site which has lots of IT jobs on it and is popular. Now if you visit the site and search 'all' vacancies, which I would think 2 out of 5 visitors would do when they reach the homepage, the search doesn't work. At best it retrieves a dozen jobs; when there are actually hundreds posted.

This isn't the only site who has not yet made a brilliant job of making job searching easy. I don't know whether in this case the site have put a restriction on the site because their servers can't handle retrieving hundreds of records at a time, but either way I think job sites should be audited by an independent body to make sure that employer advertising bucks are being spent in places that will actually yield candidates for them.

Chief Talent Sourcer?

I must admit I had been struggling to chose a topic to post about this week. Not that it hasn't been a busy period, just nothing inspirational to go on about here.

However, after several meetings with clients from all different sectors, I realised that hardly anybody gets the whole talent pooling/sourcing thing.

You may have read in an earlier post when I talked about receiving an email from Electronic Arts asking me to apply or refer games software engineers to them. The mail came from a lady in the US whose job title was Senior Talent Resourcer. I'll come back to that in a second.

In every single meeting I attended this week in Dubai, I heard the same cry - "we've just lost a key recruiting resource, and we can't find a replacement - do you know anyone?"

Well it's easy to say and hard to do, but it's too late because they've left already and now you're hurting. People leave firms, that can't be avoided entirely. But given that we know that to be true, it suprises me that no companies are identifying replacements before staff resign.

The point of developing a talent pool is to create a pipeline of qualified, interested, screened potential hires. All that recruiting technolgy has done is made that all far more possible.

I think Recruitment departments, especially in growing competitive markets/times should consider having a separate person or team, who doesn't hire against open vacancies, but rather develops pools of potential hires who can be interviewed and offered jobs within 3-5 days of a resignation.

Your Chief Talent Sourcer or Scouts should have their own marketing budget, and be able to make use of the corporate recruiting technology, they should perhaps have their own special area on the careers portal. They need to have some tools and skills to communicate individually and en-masse to groups of target hires. They need to predict where it will hurt the company most if people leave - and build relationships with potential replacements on a daily basis.

Think about it, okay you've still got notice periods and bedding-in periods, but the Talent Scout could save millions of dollars each year in lost revenue, speed up time to market from R&D, retained customers, etc.

The time to hire or gap between hires is extremely costly, but still companies only (manpower) plan and have strategies/suppliers in place to fill new hire roles.

The way the web is used to communicate and the tools available to find and meet qualified professionals out there on the Net - I think this key hiring role is going to become a must for major employers across the Middle East markets today.

If any of you are in a pre-emptive talent sourcing role then perhaps you could share a few tricks that you use with us here on my blog..

Ben.

Changes to my blog

Those of you who've tuned into my new blog before will have already noticed the new design - hope you approve and find it easier to use. I had been asked to play around with the html by a couple of people, so here you go..

Another change I'm looking into is having a few guest writers posting to my blog from time to time, so that we can get a broader view of eRecruitment technology and activities from around the region. Once I've worked out which way to go on this, and how to go about it, I'll let you know what to expect.

Ben,

What War for Talent?

Over used around the world, the term 'war for talent' is mostly used to describe the situation when recruitment teams within a company start to find it difficult to recruit good people. Of course I would tell them to start using the tools available out there to hire smarter, and to leverage the Internet better; and more that below. However, the market in the Middle East
hasn't generally understood what a WAR for talent is really about. It is more competitive today in the region and it is hard to recruit good people; especially as the booming economy means that there are 10 competitors out there searching for the same CV's. But that isn't war, that's just making it harder and longer to find people to work for you.

War has been declared!
Well things have changed now. The front page of the Gulf News this week ran a story describing how a leading investment house in Dubai (Shuaa Capital) lost an entire team of 6 investment executives on the same day. Where they're headed is as yet unknown, but the cost to the company in terms of loss of business, loss of knowledge, and damaged reputation must be immense. All of that, added to the cost and time to replace those people, is serious indeed.

Shareholders, the CEO and the management team will be discussing this in great detail that's for sure. Recruiting at Shuaa is undoubtedly a strategic issue this week. It seems highly likely that the entire team will turn up at work as a new team for a direct competitor, and will start work on building wealth for a new employer.

This was a smart move in many ways, and the practice of team recruiting is not new to the world of finance and technology - it happens every couple of years in financial centres such as London and New York. It happened in the 1980's when Sony, IBM, Lucent and others all wanted smart engineers to design the next supercomputer. It is new though to the Middle East.

When you are competing for something and you really want to win, as in War, you have to have some aggressive strategies. You have to try to hurt your competition whilst helping yourself. Companies relying on old school recruiting strategies are now going to start really feeling the pain, as a few of their competitors have declared war on them.

A local example of note was when I heard that Qatar Airways and Gulf Air were both scheduling interviews within a couple of days of each other in the same city. When they turned up to hold the interviews the hotel staff told them that Emirates had been in two days previously and hired everybody already.
Somehow Emirates got hold of some information about a competitors recruiting plans, and they had the ability to respond very quickly to gain an advantage.

Corporate recruiting in the MENA markets has already got very tough in retail, financial, hospitality and construction sectors - basically anything with an element of service or knowledge. It is now hitting the very specialist roles as there are more opportunities out there for skilled professionals to consider.

So what other aggressive tactics can we expect to see?

Car park canvassing? - Don't be shocked if your competitors recruiters are approaching your staff wherever they hang out or work. If you have people who are in demand, then expect the opposition to approach them.

Blogs & Social Networking sites - the Internet offer so many ways to find and contact people, even if they don't want to be found. Many companies embracing the Internet to recruit staff now are realising just how much potential there is to cut out the third party sourcing agencies and their high placement fees.

Email/letter campaigns/viral networking - I received a chance email from the head of staffing for Electronic Arts (of EA Sports fame if you've ever played a 'Sony PlayStation') just a week ago asking if I wanted to work for them or could refer them any good software engineers. Now they got it wrong as I am not a software engineer, but I did refer them to two people in the games software market. Why, because I have a great feeling about EA as a company, and if I were an engineer I would like to work with them.

Star hiring - this is where a firm hire a key employee from a rival without necessarily having a vacant role for that person. They are worth hiring to add value to your talent pool and to hurt the competition.

Great place to work employer branding - All of my clients in the eRecruitment arena right now are working hard to improve their external careers brand and to attract higher volumes of qualified applicants to their careers portals. The portals we're being asked to design are having to offer high levels of interactivity with jobseekers, and create differentiation for the employer.

If you have any comments to add about aggressive tactics you have seen, or even better - are deploying yourselves, I'd be interested to see your thoughts on this topic.

Regards, Ben F.

Human Capital Conference @ JW Marriott Dubai

Just a quick note about the conference last week. Thank you to the hundred or so HR professionals that participated and made it such an enjoyable couple of days. If you missed it, we had great presentations from FedEx, GE, Microsoft, Motorola and others talking about strategies for success in Human Capital for the MENA region. There were also dozens of 1-on-1 solution provider meetings to see how we could add value in terms of eRecruitment technology, career portals and job-board posting.

Naseba did a great job of running the conference - so a big thank you to them.
If you weren't able to attend, but want to see any of the presentations from the conference then feel free to get in touch.

SAP Portal for MEA

Unlike many of my posts, this is a short blog update. Atos Origin Middle East have just launched the following careers portal to attract fresh SAP skills into the region.

http://careers.atosorigin-me.com/

The site is going to be advertising on worldwide IT job boards so should see a lot of traffic. Good luck with the initiative Atos!

Goldmine Recruitment & Creating jobs for women in Saudi

A couple of weeks back from the week in Saudi, and I'm sat in the airport on the way to Kuwait to run some eRecruitment strategy workshops with a couple of banks. I spent much of this week with an HR leader who has worked with Saudi Aramco (60,000 employee oil major based in the Eastern Province of Saudi). He has spent the last 20 years in human resources with Aramco so knows a thing or two. It was a little suprising to hear just how difficult even this company find it to hire the right experienced hires and to attract national graduates. Aramco is a company that 5 years ago or more, forced all their suppliers to be 'Internet ready' and where possible to make orders, provide documentation and respond to tenders all via the Net. Alarming then that Job Descriptions were not common practice until very recently.

So, what happened at the HR Conference we ran in Riyadh then..? I promised to write about the event so here we go..The attendance and response was pleasing, with around 50 HR Directors gathered in the Sheraton conferecne centre to listen to a great speaker who flew in from Abu Dhabi. Omar is an HR Veteran and shared thoughts and experiences on 360 degree reviews, and tapped his experience of having done this in a company in Abu Dhabi that controls 10% of the worlds oil reserves. It was a 3 year project but the results were impressive and 10 years on it is still clear to see how it continues to improve the business performance and attitudes of employees.

Speaker aside, the rest of the event was about networking and discussing today's hot recruiting topics in Saudi Arabia with dozens of the guys responsible for their companies people management issues. I spoke with a CEO of a mining company who employ over 5,000 people; and after 4 years in the job he was explaining how they still can't get recruitment right. For skilled workforce it takes them an average 18 weeks to recruit, and even then they have to compromise on quality. We discussed the need for his company to have a complete recruiting 'make over' and to create an attractive employment brand. They've played with the hiring process already, but haven't tried anything radically different to attract people differently, or to interact with them in a different way once they've applied. Employer branding is key for them as they are a really interesting career choice and have so much to offer, but nobody knows about it and just thinks of them as a heavy industry minerals producer. True enough, but they're massively profitable, invest heavily in staff, have a massive supply chain and can offer a diversity of experience few companies can match. Here's some of the specifics the CEO liked the sound of and decided to try out at his firm:

Uni Reach out campaign - also known as a 'milk-round', they'll basically go to UNiversities in target locations and schools related to their industry, and have an Exceutive talk to the student body about the company and the kinds of career paths they offer. Success here would be measured by an increase in graduate applications and by the company hiring a better quality of graduate than before.

Interview skills - They're going to reduce the number of people who hold interviews, and train them in how to communicate the company values properly to jobseekers. The company has a high turnover rate, and there's a likelihood that the wrong people are being hired in the first place and that they don't really understand the company before they join - therefore it isn't that shocking that a portion of new hires leave within 6 months.

Induction/Orientation - Linked to the above, we discussed introducing some simple things such as assigning a work colleague to each new hire to help them settle into the company and tackle their concerns. They're also planning to introduce better induction materials to people along with offer letters, so that they can know what to expect. The CEO then suggested that they could create a 1 page "First 30 days" fact sheet which will be given to all new hires once they've signed their offer letters. These files are all going to be made available over the Internet so that overseas candidates can get access to the materials very quickly.

Image Gallery - To let potential hires 'feel' the work environment we discussed that it'd be a great idea to have some web pages describing the work culture, and images to show their offices and manufacturing locations. I can see how a diamond field, a lab technician at work, or a picture of an engineer placing explosives into a hole to blow open a pit wall; could really show jobseekers the opoortunities.

Another interesting topic that sticks in my mind was that of creating work opportunities for females in Saudi Arabia. Jeddah (Western Province of Saudi) has taken the lead in this regard but there is still a long way to go. I still find it strange hosting a conference or presentation in Saudi; where the attendance is great but there is not a single female in the audience. Don't forget this was in the Sheraton hotel, and all the staff helping run the conference, receive guests, run the restaurant - everybody, every conference delegate or hotel employee was male.
I discussed this with an HR Director from a Government authority involved in developing the national labour force for employment. He explained that efforts are being made, and many businesswomen are frustrated with the obstacles they face regarding investments or jobs. Transportation is an obvious problem as women aren't allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia - so getting to work is often prohibitive to applying for a job even if the job was open to female applicants. The Human Resource Development Fund and the National System for Joint Training Program are working hard to remove the barriers, and I'll write about equal opportunities and any major ground made on this topic as and when I hear about significant progress.