It’s hard to argue against the fact that 2009 has been a rough year for corporate recruiters. Budgets have been slashed, training has been all but eliminated, and even with reduced recruiting activity, requisition loads are still onerous.

Not everyone celebrates Christmas, but as it falls at the end of the year, it is an opportune time to take a minute and to thank those who have helped you throughout the year. While executive recruiters used to get huge paychecks and bonuses, corporate recruiters in most organizations can only be classified as under-appreciated.

Hiring managers, often busy trying to meet end-of-year deadlines, rarely find the time to send out a well-written thank you or take you to lunch to express their gratitude for all the work that you’ve done on their behalf.

New hires are acclimating to their job, which more often than not isn’t exactly what they thought it would be, so thanks are not on the top of their minds.

Every year come December, I start to envision what it would be like in a perfect world where the efforts of corporate recruiters were recognized with a real thank you. Recruiters may not get as many “thank yous” as they deserve, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that recruiters have a profound impact on people’s work and private lives.

A “thank you note” from a grateful new hire…

I just wanted you to know that you are my hero!

The Christmas season is an ideal time for me as a new employee to say thanks to the people who helped me get this new job in this competitive job market. Specifically, I want to thank you, “my recruiter” for:

• My self-confidence: the way you treated me during the hiring process built up my confidence. My daily life is better because you helped to remind me of my many strengths and capabilities.

• My job: I have a great job and a paycheck during a time when many well-qualified individuals don’t. I owe you big time because you recognized my unique talents and guided me through the complicated hiring process. I am no longer under-appreciated by my former firm, or worse, unemployed. Both my family and I are happier and more secure, thanks to your hard work and trust in my ability. Our house will be secure and there will be lots under the Christmas tree because of you.

• You were the face of the company: applying for a job is a lonely task that is full of uncertainty, but you were my first and primary contact. Rather than being an adversary, you treated me like someone who was “special” (maybe you treat everyone that way, but honestly, I felt like I was the only applicant for the job). You were always there when I had a question, and you skillfully calmed me down so that I could perform at my best during the hiring process.

• Finding me: thank you for finding my name in the boundless confines that make up the Internet. Your ability to search out details about me and learn about my interests from dozens of sources was exceptional.

• You built a relationship: I got to know you through Facebook and Twitter, which made it easier for us to share the truth with each other. If it were not for that social network relationship and your strong convincing skills, I’m not sure I would have ever taken the time to apply for a job that seemed so different than what I was used to.

• Identifying my capabilities: even though you might have been faced with hundreds of resumes of people applying for my job, you kept mine at the top of the pile. I now realize that I should have spent more time improving my resume, so that my skills and experience came through more clearly, but your superior sorting skills found traits, experience, and potential that others might have overlooked.

• Coaching me: thanks for helping me through the hiring and interview process so that my strongest attributes came through for all to see. Even though my interview skills were a little rusty, you were my champion and coach.

• The candidate experience: I have certainly been through numerous other interview processes in my career, but none seem to be as closely tailored to my needs. I never felt like I was being grilled, and before every step of the process you explained exactly what I should expect. Even if I wouldn’t have gotten the job, I would’ve remembered the positive way that I was treated and I would’ve become an even more enthusiastic customer of your firm.

• Answering my concerns: you probably knew that I was nervous and uncertain after the final interview. Your honesty and openness convinced me that you did your best to ensure that the offer I received was highly competitive and fair.

• Helping me get acclimated: you could easily have moved on after I accepted your firm’s offer, but instead you remained available when I had questions. When you showed up and welcomed me on my first day and made sure that I got up to speed rapidly, you once again proved that you were more interested in my success than in just filling a job.

I also wanted you to know that because of your professionalism and the information you provided me about the firm, I now go out of my way to tell colleagues at other firms that this firm is a great place to work, in no small part because of you and the way you treat applicants and employees. I hope to make several employee referrals during the next year as a result of the information you provided and the way you treated me. Thanks again for all that you’ve done; I’m proud to be your coworker!

* * * * * * * * * *

A “thank you note” from a grateful hiring manager …

I just wanted you to know how much you impacted my business success!

The end of the year is an ideal time for me to say thanks to the people who allowed both my team and I to be among the most productive and innovative within our organization. Specifically, I want to thank you, my recruiter, for all that you do to make me successful as a manager, including …

• Understanding the processes: in the past, I’ve been guilty of procrastinating when it comes to recruiting, mostly because I found the process to be confusing. However, I want to thank you for taking the time to help me understand the complex requisition, recruiting, and hiring processes. With your coaching and guidance I have successfully avoided hiring delays and legal issues without having to read endless recruiting policies and manuals. You help me understand why some of the steps that I thought were bureaucratic actually helped to contribute to a higher quality hire.

• Sourcing: thanks for consistently identifying so many top candidates. Without your advice, I would probably still be running newspaper want ads. Thanks for educating me about the new approaches to recruiting, including social networks, blogs, and direct sourcing using Boolean search strings. Without them, I would have missed most of the best and brightest candidates who you sourced. The percentage of qualified candidates that you presented to me was so high that I could have picked up a resume when blindfolded and still ended up with a superstar.

• Being so responsive: thanks for your responsiveness. Even though you have a huge requisition load and a dozen hiring managers to service, you consistently found a way to respond rapidly to my questions and calls.

• Tolerance: thanks for your tolerance and understanding during the many times when I let you down. That includes when I wasn’t available for interviews and for the countless times that I took forever to sort through the resumes you sent me. I now know that you can’t do your job effectively unless I as a hiring manager do my part.

• Position descriptions: thanks for your help in improving the position descriptions that I create. I realize that without your coaching and advice, many of these descriptions would be so dull and off the mark that I would have never attracted a single top candidate.

• Innovators and game-changers: my team is now one of the most innovative in the industry in no small part as a result of you. Many thanks for demonstrating to me the large business impact that innovators can have over average hires. Without the numerous tips on how to successfully hire these hard-to-understand innovators, I might have settled for average hires.

• Global capability: even though over 50% of my business came from overseas, I found myself lost when it came to recruiting talent from around the world. I never would have understood the complexities and the keys to success without your guidance and advice. My team now has broad global capabilities as a result of your hiring expertise.

• Follow-up: thanks for following up after my hires were completed, in order to ensure that the new employee started off at full speed. Your continuous coaching and help also resulted in lower new-hire turnover rates. You could have stopped helping immediately after they said yes to our offer, but fortunately for all, you didn’t.

• Curbing my enthusiasm: thanks for subtly, but effectively, pointing out the weaknesses in many of the candidates who I was enamored with. Sometimes I got so emotionally involved with a candidate that I couldn’t see their weaknesses without your help.

• Metrics: you have successfully demonstrated to me the cost of a bad hire and the tremendous value add of a great hire. As a result, I am now no longer willing to settle for the mediocre level of talent that I used to hire before you began helping me.

• Diversity: without your help, my team could never be as diverse and inclusive as it is today. The high degree of diversity among my team allows it to be more creative and to identify problems and opportunities from multiple perspectives. This diversity also helps my team understand the needs of our diverse customers, which further improves our products and services.

• Help with the generations: thanks for coaching me about the differences between the many different generations that candidates come from. You helped me understand their different needs and what was necessary in order to land and keep them on my team.

• Closing: thanks for your help in understanding what it takes to “sell” so many top candidates. Fortunately, with your coaching and guidance, we have been able to land so many exceptional candidates that I could never have sold on my own with my limited sales knowledge and abilities.

• Employment brand: I now realize that without the strong external image and employment brand that you and your colleagues have helped to build, few top candidates would seek out our firm. I just wanted you to know that I am continually approached at conferences and events by top talent whoare already excited about and sold on our firm. Our firm is a talent magnet as a result of your branding efforts, and as a result of your convincing, I now try to spread the word myself through my blog (which you helped me with) and my Facebook connections.

• My business results: Thank you for the impact you’ve had on my business results, the recognition, bonuses, and the promotions that I have received as a direct result of your competencies in hiring. Your advice and occasional cajoling have resulted in enough great hires to almost guarantee the success of my team. The people who you have identified and helped me hire have such exceptional capabilities that I routinely exceed my business goals with embarrassingly little effort.

I also wanted to apologize for all the times during the last year that I might not have taken hiring as seriously as I should have. Thanks to your efforts, I now realize that in business, just like in sports, even a mediocre manager can succeed when they are provided with a recruiter and a hiring process that continually provides exceptional talent. I now confidently enter into new business and product areas knowing you will somehow find and land the exceptional talent I require in that field. Thanks again for making me look good.

Final Thoughts

During turbulent economic times, it’s easy to become disillusioned as a recruiter. Even though a few think of recruiters as little more than “requisition jockeys,” you and I know that the work we do makes a huge difference. If we get it right, we change people’s lives and our company’s results for the better.

However, if we get it wrong, we also realize that we can hurt not only candidates but also our organization’s shareholders. So, even if you don’t receive a single thank-you card like the ones illustrated above, take a step back as the year comes to a close and applaud yourself for a job well done.

Happy holidays and once again, thank you for making a difference!

Last week I introduced this series by talking about how general business changes have rendered what many might consider traditional strategy development in talent management more of a hindrance to organizations than a benefit.

I did not say that strategy is not important, or that delivering a strategic impact is not important, but rather implied that how most organizations are approaching talent strategy today is out of touch with the times.

As the general business environment has become more turbulent, and technology combined with consumer demand has driven significant shortening of most product lifecycles, the complexities of delivering really strategic impact through talent management have ballooned. While competency management systems, career path planning, and multi-year development cycles may have made sense decades ago, that simply is not the case today.

Organizational agility is something the majority of human resource functions are not designed to enable or support. In fact, most traditional HR systems, including those in talent acquisition, hinder agility by imposing rigid control structures with process cycles that take months and even years to execute.

You can’t hit a moving target that changes location unpredictably every six months using processes that take 18 months to execute!

In this installment, I expand beyond the six capabilities of agile talent management introduced in Part I by talking about the critical elements of such a strategy.

However, before launching into the elements, let’s first take a look at a few examples of agile talent management in action.

Examples of Agile Talent Management

A key characteristic of organizational agility is the ability to rapidly shift idle resources. Like most airlines, Southwest Airlines was affected significantly by the most recent downturn in the U.S. economy. While competitors were busy slashing payrolls, Southwest instead cut back on hiring and temporally redeployed idle recruiters (more than 80 of them) into other areas of the business where work needed to get done, in line with the recruiter’s abilities. The shift enabled Southwest to maintain access to the talent it would need when hiring demand ticked up and simultaneously enabled the organization to catch up on project work elsewhere that added value in the current economic state.

Along similar lines, Corning once used idle recruiters to manage the outplacement of surplus employees in place of a third-party vendor. The refocusing of resources again preserved access to a resource Corning would need months later as new opportunities emerged that required staffing increases.

While using idle recruiters to accomplish work elsewhere in the organization was a new trend this downturn, it by no means is a stellar example of organizational agility.

Enterprise-wide efforts that are emerging include:

• Temporary redeployment of top performers into development roles where the primary mandate is knowledge-sharing and collaborative solution development to emerging issues (Numerous companies)
• Creation of flexible talent pools that grant temporary project-based access to top talent by managers without budget or need for permanent hires (Coors)
• Business unit/team prioritization schemas that enable simultaneous investment/cost-containment efforts across the enterprise (HP)
• Counter-cyclical process execution, i.e. taking advantage of economic cycles by executing growth-mode processes during downturns and vice versa (Slide-College Hiring)
• Redefinition of labor needs to allow for extensive use of contingent and alternative labor types that aide real time increases/decreases in labor cost (Google)

The unifying themes in all of these different examples is that firms need a strategy that allows them to respond rapidly with a customized solution, whenever something in the business environment changes.

Critical Elements of an Agile Talent Management Strategy

Some individuals think that an agile talent management strategy is little more than a focus on using contingent labor whenever and wherever possible, but that is much too narrow of a view. An agile talent management strategy is really more about making a bevy of talent management solutions available to the enterprise that enables organizational flexibility in a timeframe consistent with evolving business lifecycles.

An agile talent management strategy differs from a traditional talent management strategy in many ways:

• A broader range of more specific goals, including:
  — To increase the overall labor productivity and ROI
  — To increase the capacity of the workforce
  — To increase the capability of the workforce
  — To improve rates of innovation and adaptation
  — To provide a competitive advantage through labor deployment
• An acceptance of a need for alternative paths: an agile strategy must predict a possible range of paths possible and offer relevant solutions regardless of whatever path environmental conditions dictate taking.
• Core business strategy integration: to ensure that talent management solutions are truly relative versus reactive, talent management planning must become a component of core business strategy development versus being cascaded from it.
• Data-driven decision making: one of the most difficult elements to enable is diverging from past practice. In an agile talent management strategy, decisions are made much more quickly using all available data and facts, and then reevaluated frequently rather than following a path dictated by tradition.
• Intra-enterprise prioritization: to maximize labor ROI, an agile talent management strategy focuses resources on the highest impact business units, jobs, regions, individuals, and critical skills. This is a direct contrast to most strategies that advocate equal treatment across the enterprise and make customization or delivery of one-size-fits-one solutions nearly impossible.
• Holistic focus: unlike the majority of talent-management strategies that focus solely on permanent employees, an agile strategy looks at coordinating talent management activities across all segments of the labor force, including numerous alternative labor types such as part-time workers, seasonal workers, outsource service providers, contract labor, strategic partner labor, and project-based deployment of retirees/interns/alumni/customers.
• Aggressive perspective: An agile talent management strategy doesn’t aim at enabling organizational survival, it aims at total domination of the industry by employing talent management tools and approaches that provide the organization significant influence over the talent marketplace.
• Consistently revised business case: as a result of a dynamns/business environment, the business case for talent management activities must be consistently revised. However, due to better alignment of deliverables with business need that proves a consistent positive impact, many agile strategies seek multi-cycle funding to enable greater resource usage flexibility.
• Extensive use of existing proven business tools/approaches: another major break from traditional talent management strategy is an increased focus on using non-HR tools and approaches to support talent management activities. Agile strategies borrow concepts often related to inventory management, quality control, adaptive manufacturing, CRM, and supply chain management. It is from these models that we get talent management terms such as “talent pipeline” and “talent inventory.”
• Comprehensive planning: delivering organizational agility requires that every activity that influences the organization’s ability to execute business strategy, including every talent management activity, incorporate a need for enabling agility into tactical and operational planning. To ensure that roadblocks to agility to do not occur, all plans should be analyzed using if/then scenarios prior to approval.

While not elements of the strategy itself, executing an agile talent management strategy requires two management practices that are not found in many organizations. Those practices include:

• Extensive use of recognition and rewards for delivering agility
• An organizational preference for agile individuals

Without management practices that focus on these two things, executing an agile strategy is nearly impossible.

Factors Influencing Talent Management Strategy Shifts

Many factors affect an organization’s ability to be successful, but when it comes to talent management the five key factors that should trigger a possible change in strategy include:

• Changing internal business needs: need to cut labor costs, need to rapidly add talent or to change skills, need to meet expanding business goals, need to accelerate product development, or a need to increase the rate of innovation.
• Changes in external economic factors: when external economic factors like the unemployment rate, interest rates, or labor quality change.
• Changes in the relative “power” of talent: changes in the supply and demand of labor. As talent becomes more powerful, organizations must become more talent-centric.
• As talent interests change: whenever what talent expects or demands in a job or work environment changes, so must the talent management approach change.
• Changes in a competitor’s talent management strategy: unlike most traditional talent management strategies, an agile strategy must monitor and react to the talent-management-related actions of organizations you compete with for talent.

Talent Management Functions That Must Be Agile

As mentioned previously, all talent management activities need to allow for agility, but those most likely to shift as a result of a change in the factors highlighted above include:

sourcing/recruiting approaches
emphasis on development/training
rate of internal movement and redeployment
use of rewards and motivators
scope of retention/blocking strategies
contingent labor utilization ratios
emphasis on innovation
leverage of external resources for ideation/innovation
change in skill/competency profiles
release of surplus/poor performers
employment branding
candidate experience
new-hire/transfer onboarding

Benchmark Firms

Firms that have adopted some aspects of the agile talent management include:

Capital One

The U.S. military

Valero Energy

Microsoft

Southwest Airlines

City of Sunnyvale, CA

Google Slide

Final Thoughts

Like it or not, many of the old stalwarts of business strategy such as long-term forecasting, continuous improvement, long-range planning, and best practice benchmarking may already be on their way to becoming obsolete in this new, dynamns/environment.

Even if the world of business were to slowdown, you would still have to ask yourself, “is it ever a bad thing to be too agile and nimble?” In fact, it may be that agility, along with continuous learning, might turn out to be the two primary competencies for both successful individuals and thriving businesses in the future.

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy has gone to hell.

It’s been up and down like a yo-yo for the last decade, a fact that led Time to declare the first decade of the new century “the decade from hell” in a recent cover story. If you work in talent management or HR, this yo-yo pattern certainly isn’t news to you. Surprisingly enough, it’s times like these that present the best opportunity to become more strategic as more managers open their minds to alternative solutions to improve productivity, save money, and move their organizations forward.

This article is intended to get you to rethink your current talent management strategy and to change it so that it better fits turbulent economic conditions and trends that are most likely to stick around for awhile.

Times Change; Strategy Isn’t What it Used to Be

As a professor of management in a college of business, I must remain knowledgeable on economic trends and the strategies organizations can leverage to survive and, in many cases, thrive during various economic situations. While some might argue that a PhD is needed to understand the complexities of the global economy, it doesn’t take a great deal of education to realize that for as long as man has recorded details on trade, there have been oscillating cycles of growth and decline.

If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember the recessions of 1970, 1975, and 1983, followed by growth spurts in 1977 and 1984. Despite blips here and there, the U.S. economy and Western economies in general have grown at a relatively stable rate for some time.

However, if you look at the deviations in growth, you would note that since 1983, the cycles of economic growth and decline have become much shorter and for the most part less severe.

The economy of today is turbulent, and will continue to be for sometime as more and more feedback becomes available in real-time enabling organizations (including governments and corporations) to adjust their economic activities more quickly. Instead of investing in growth for three years and containing costs for four, organizations will more likely find themselves growing for one quarter, contracting for two, growing for three, contracting for one, etc.

Prior to 1983, developing an effective HR strategy wasn’t easy, but economic conditions did allow for making plans three, five, and in some really rare cases 10 years out. There was no need to change the HR or talent management strategy. All you needed was a strategy with three modes: a growth mode, a “freeze” mode, and a layoff mode to match the three corresponding economic cycles. Organizations were much less complex decades ago, often operating in narrowly defined regions and businesses with similar cycles. When economic decline occurred, it hit the entire organization uniformly, meaning that if pay cuts were called for, everyone was impacted. Economic trends have changed, organizations have changed, and how organizations develop talent management strategy must change too.

Thriving on Chaos

Economists prefer to label this new turbulent economic environment as a “dynamic economy,” but the old Tom Peters catchphrase, “thriving on chaos,” might be a better description.

No matter what you call it, leaders are beginning to realize that the speed of change is increasing at a breathtaking rate. Products that used to have a lifecycle of five years might now only be viable for a few months. New ideas, products, or benchmark business processes that in the past could be protected for decades, are now copied, stolen, and possibly even rendered obsolete within weeks.

Workers who used to be loyal and want to work at a company for life have been replaced with a new generation that might consider three years at a single firm to be the equivalent of a lifetime commitment.

Some areas of knowledge are doubling in a year, rendering many skilled workers struggling to remain relevant or become obsolete within years of being educated. It may not sound like reality, but if you step back and take all the change around you, you would realize very quickly that the old way of doing talent management no longer fits.

Characteristics of a Chaotic Business and Economic Environment

This dynamic business and economic environment has four defining characteristics:

• A blinding speed of change: everything changes so fast that the things that worked well last year will not work at all next year.
• Dynamic of almost-impossible-to-predict change: rather than things evolving in a predictable way, so many options are now available in nearly every aspect of being that the direction of change has become irregular and almost impossible to predict. Plans or forecasts that deal with cycles greater than 18 months have no chance of being accurate.
• Inconsistent/non-uniform change: rather than things changing in the same way at the same time across the entire organization, some parts of the business and some regions are going up while others are going down.
• Obsolescence demands complete replacement: while in the past we could often refine or update existing products and processes to keep them viable, the new environment requires that most be shelved and completely replaced with a different approach. Routinely making obsolete your own products requires a level of innovation and speed that that must be classified as several levels above the historical continuous improvement model. Can you imagine one of your teenage children even considering using a perfectly operational reconditioned mobile phone that is two years old? In this new world, we don’t fix things. We replace them with the latest model.

Six Capabilities of Any Agile Strategy or Approach

Whenever you’re faced with a situation where the speed of change makes accurate forecasting and planning virtually impossible, there is only one feasible approach that can guarantee success. That approach is known as agility. Agility is a term that has been used by CEOs for years, but it’s now time that we embrace it in talent management and HR.

Agility calls for six major capabilities, including:

1. Moving fast: reacting almost immediately to problems and opportunities.
2. Accurate movement: moving fast isn’t enough; you also have to routinely hit your target while moving fast.
3. Simultaneous movement: rather than waiting for one action to be completed before starting another, many actions must occur simultaneously (multitasking).
4. Many directions: rather than moving in a single direction, agility means moving in many directions, probably at the same time.
5. This and that: traditionally if you aimed for one goal (i.e. low costs) you would assume that another “counter goal” (i.e. high quality) would have to be sacrificed. When you are agile, you expect to reach both goals, even though they might be on opposite ends of what was traditionally considered to be possible.
6. No new resources: traditionally, in order to do more, you needed more resources, but agility calls for using your resources more effectively with less waste and idle time.

In fact, much like playing the carnival game “whack-a-mole,” being agile means more than just moving fast. It means in order to be successful, you must move fast, hit hard, and accurately but also while dealing with lots of uncertainty!

The Definition of an Agile Talent Management Strategy

An agile talent management strategy is a strategy that is designed to increase the overall productivity and capabilities of the workforce by rapidly shifting, in a coordinated manner, talent management approaches, tools, and resources in response to the dynamic economy, a changing talent marketplace, and the changing needs of your major business units.

It abandons an emphasis on the one-size-fits-all model in use by many organizations in favor of a one-size-fits-one model. It generally requires a significant increase in the use of contingent workers and alternative labor types. In executing an agile talent management strategy, organizations will need to be prepared to rapidly shift resources between talent management processes including recruiting, retention, development, redeployment and releasing “surplus” talent, as business needs fluctuate.

Up Next Week

Next week’s installment will include an example of agile talent management, a list of common elements that comprise an agile talent management strategy, and further discussion of the factors forcing organizations to embrace a more agile approach.

Free Webcast: Crafting an Agile Talent Management Strategy in the Age of Talent

Taleo has graciously sponsored a free webinar featuring Dr. John Sullivan discussing a number of factors related to crafting an agile talent management strategy in an age when talent is gaining power. If interested, check out upcoming air dates and register to attend here.