As we take a look forward at what’s new and what’s next in recruiting and HR, it’s becoming increasingly clear that companies are putting more of an emphasis behind the business of people than ever before. HR is shifting from being seen as a largely burdensome administrative function into a critical core competency that’s becoming inexorably intertwined with big picture strategy and bottom line impact.
Now, more than ever, it’s essential for employers to take a step back and take stock of what’s working – and more importantly, what’s not – when it comes to building a best-in-class HR function.
The key to a cutting edge people function lies solely in whether or not HR can truly engage, enable and empower its employees. As a global HR leader, it’s imparative to create people focused processes and procedures designed with the end user in mind. In this case, those end users are the top talent that’s ultimately the critical differentiator when it comes to beating the competition today – and tomorrow.
Building The Workforce of Tomorrow: 5 Things Every HR and Recruiting Pro Should Know Today.
Already in 2016, we’ve seen some major talent trends emerge as HR professionals continue to evolve more staid, traditional practices to keep up with the breakneck speed of business.
Whether by intent or accident, organizations are starting to realize that in the new world of work, they can no longer rely on what’s always worked. In my most recent Recruiting Daily post, I took a closer look at the HR trends every talent professional should care about in 2016 (and beyond).
Having already identified the top 3 trends in HR practitioners should actually care about, I felt it apropos to turn my focus on exactly what those same leaders can do to make sure they’re ready to meet those key trends hands on over the months and years to come.
Here are 5 key considerations for building a successful people strategy that’s able to survive – and thrive – in today’s world of work.
5. Age Is Actually More Than A Number.
By now you’re probably well familiar with the shifting demographics of generations at work, but the fact is, this is one perpetual trending topic that’s actually worth believing the hype. Major changes to the composition of the workforce have already forced many employers to make some major changes in the way the HR function functions.
In many geographies, in markets all around the world, we’re already starting to see what’s been called a “silver tsunami” as the first waves of retiring Baby Boomers begin breaking, replaced by a veritable flood of younger workers, commonly referred to as “Gen Y” or “Millennial” workers.
While HR has spent years discussing (and dreading) the implications of this changing of the guard, the fact is, it’s already effectively happened. In fact, by 2020, fully half of the global workforce will be comprised of workers born between 1982-2000.
This is significant because this requires organizations to continually realign and redefine the way that they meet the expectations of candidates and employees alike. It’s important for employers to rethink their value propositions so that your mission, vision and values accurately align with (and positively impact) the changing face of your workforce.
In the proverbial war for talent, the battle lines for attracting and keeping the best and brightest have been clearly drawn. Winning the hearts and minds of the emerging workforce increasingly requires organizations to proactively invest in creating and shaping a culture that best provides this segment of the workforce with what they really want in a job.
Study after study suggests that this includes the license to ideate and innovate instead of stick to the same old script and the ability to operate with some level of autonomy while simultaneously building a career in organizations operate transparently and with a sense of purpose.
If your culture can’t cut it, it might be time to make some serious changes to ensure that you’re able to become the sort of career destination more employees of choice choose more than your competition, no matter what generation they happen to be a part of.
4, Think People, Not Process.
The enterprise of today will increasingly be tasked with delivering a highly personalized, highly individualized employment experience. The employee of the 21st century should be viewed, effectively, as a “workforce of one.” The days where the worker put the needs of the group before their own are long gone, and businesses that can’t successfully shift from meeting the needs of the collective to meeting those of the individual will collectively risk similar obsolescence.
That’s why it’s imparative the premise of unified design in HR must inherently put people first, not policies, programs, platforms or processes. It sounds obvious, but historically, many HR professionals have forgotten that we’re in the business of people. Therefore, it must be our business to deliver as much personalization to those people as possible.
Every organization must address the critical question as to whether or not it makes sense to abandon automation for personalization, a strategic shift that requires companies to give up often significant investments made in often archaic, increasingly obsolete legacy systems, which by design largely aimed to industrialize and standardize service delivery, with limited options to differentiate.
The changing mindset of the changing workforce increasingly means considering changing systems, replacing rigid on-premise platforms with much more flexible SaaS solutions which allow a much greater degree of individual configuration and employee personalization than traditional HR technologies.
With more funding flooding this market than ever before, a significant number of early stage startups are emerging to finally meet some of the most critical capability gaps and fill some of the most gaping functional holes within the HR and recruiting functions. As new players emerge in the talent tech ecosystem, ones dedicated to building new functionalities and ways of working, it’s becoming clear that we’re seeing an unprecedented convergence.
What we’re seeing is the implementation and integration of new software, systems and strategies to deliver data driven insights that cut across disciplines as diverse as technology, marketing, sales, finance & cost management, psychology, sociology, anthropology and supplier or vendor management. It’s a pretty exciting time to be in the business of people, but it can often times seem like a scary one, too.
Companies across industries face the daunting task of balancing the need to modify their processes with the need to deliver real business results and real impact in real time, all the time. This firehose of data that the rapidly evolving landscape of HR Technology has enabled increasingly means it’s up to HR leaders to deliver much more informed, much more diligent decisions about delivering the best level of employee service possible by selecting the technologies and partners that can best fit both your company culture and people processes.
With more options than ever before, if you’re not rethinking your approach to technology, you’re in danger of losing out on the data you need to get the talent you want. And no one wants that.
3. HR Must Always Be On. Anytime, Anywhere.
Most employers now recognize the need to evolve their policies, processes and programs to align with business models that better resonate with employees and other stakeholders who live their lives (and livelihoods) in a largely digital world, one where interactions mostly happen online instead of in person and where there’s a premium placed on the immediate interaction over the interpersonal exchange. This mindset means that today’s talent technologies must reflect a user-centered design that delivers an immersive, intuitive experience that’s highly personalized and high touch.
These new technologies are changing the way HR works by changing the way the work gets done, allowing employees to access and interact with HR anytime, anywhere. Across the entirety of the employment lifecycle, we are starting to see the changes made by utilizing digital technologies to enhance awareness and shared understanding, alignment and adoption of core organizational values, behaviors or opportunities.
Digitizing the employee experience can also effectively capture, promote a culture and build an army of brand advocates around the shared internal values of proficiency, performance and passion – all while helping every worker work up to their true potential.
From digital onboarding to mobile learning content, from real time social performance and career management feedback to automated 360 assessments to fully integrated relationship management tools, the future of HR technology is happening right now.
2. Balance HR by Better Engaging, Enabling And Empowering People.
If you’re going to effectively build the kind of company culture you want, you’ve first got to make sure there’s alignment with the beliefs, intentions and actions that reflect your desired organizational culture. Delivering on the value proposition you promised to your people means building policies, processes and programs with the singular foundational principle that the Employee Always Comes First. This “Employee First” mentality is a critical first step in achieving a unified, cohesive company culture that’s actually meaningful to the people immersed in it each and every day.
To truly achieve an “Employee First” approach, organizations will need to shift their practices in the workplace from being led and influenced by executive management and senior leadership to one that’s driven by the employees themselves, a bottoms up approach that can be embraced, and adopted, at the top instead of the other way around.
This will require increased authenticity, flexibility and a willingness of senior leaders to engage in the open communication and dialogue that employees today want and need to succeed. Management must invert the proverbial pyramid so that leaders see their role as enablers, not inhibitors, and realize that their own success will increasingly be defined by the individual employee experience, instead of the collective or group outcome.
Here are a few areas of HR that are already feeling these fundamental changes as 2016 unfolds:
- Recruiting has evolved to be much more strategic, with talent acquisition being retooled, retrained and refocused to best capture the realities of a candidate driven market where new roles, new skills and new business requirements or responsibilities seem to be constantly emerging. Balancing the demand for talent with the increasingly finite supply is becoming one of the most critical skills for success when it comes to building and optimizing effective workforce operations.
- Performance management has evolved to reflect both individual and collective contributions, with an equal consideration being given to both personal and group outcomes when measuring or managing employee performance. The ability to provide real time feedback, coaching and communications with individual employees now allows leaders to make performance management a continuous, rather than periodic, process that’s perceived to add value instead of being seen as simply an annual administrative burden.
- Career management will evolve along along with new technologies and work styles which put a premium on reskilling and retraining for better business alignment, particularly around the new roles and new skills that are constantly being created. This consistent shift in demand and supply will require more jobs to move to where talent is actually available, instead of requiring individuals relocate or move for jobs.
- Compensation looks set to finally increase after an extended period of wage stagnation; this increase will not only come in the form of increased salaries, but also total rewards packages that are variably linked with individual and collective performance. This rise in “pay for play” performance based outcomes should increasingly start to encroach on more traditional fixed salary models, with short and long term incentives alike better aligning with business needs and bottom line outcomes.
- Talent management has started to include both internal and external pipelines as part of the standard succession management process as more companies look to minimize the risks associated with turnover, particularly in mission critical positions. With deployment and development decisions being made in real time, all the time, we’re already starting to see such strategies as cross training and work sharing emerge as ways organizations are increasing internal capabilities and ensuring continuity irrespective of individual contributors.
1. Increase Insight Through Integrated Decision Support.
In today’s increasingly complex world of work, the HR professional will somehow have to find clarity amidst this new complexity to make better decisions based on data instead of simply relying on policies and precedents.
As delivering on the value proposition for today’s workforce becomes more challenging, organizations of every size, in all industries, and across all markets must turn to evidence based insight as the primary driver of people strategies.
This will require an investment in the ability of talent organizations to identify and report on key metrics, build out dashboards, model, manage and warehouse data, build business intelligence platforms and create actionable analytics that actually create business value.
That’s no small task.
Building a data driven HR organization requires rethinking roles, functions, people and platforms to maintain maximum organizational health. It also necessitates increasing the ability to forecast how future hires may succeed, optimizing internal mobility and calculating the ROI on new and existing employees alike.
The insights we get can help ensure that our efforts as HR leaders are positively impacting the employee experience and company culture, shifting HR from the prescriptive, reactive function of yesterday into the proactive, predictive partner of tomorrow.
Because, like it or not, the workforce of the future is here today.
About the Author: Prithvi Shergill is currently the Chief Human Resources Officer at HCL Technologies, one of the world’s largest IT and engineering services firms, where he is responsible for overseeing a global workforce of 103,000 employees in 32 countries across HCL Technologies’ multinational businesses.
Prior to his current role, Prithvi served as a Partner in the human capital group at Accenture for eight years, and his career in HR leadership extends over three decades.
Follow him on Twitter @ShergillPrithvi or connect with him on LinkedIn.
If your calendar looks even a little close to as crowded as mine, you probably already know that we’re officially into yet another “Conference Season.” And if you’re a recruiting or sourcing professional, there sure are a ton of options out there; so many, in fact, that there seems to be a seasonal shift as event planners ramp up into full recruitment mode.
I feel truly lucky to be slated for so many speaking opportunities, something that I’ll never take for granted. Of course, that would be pretty much impossible, considering that one of the questions I always get from people is “what do I need to do to start getting selected to speak?” The truth is, in about 90% of the conferences I’ve participated in, I’ve been directly approached by the organizers. In almost every one of these cases I did not submit a pitch nor speaking proposal; a lot of the times, these invitations were the first time I’d ever even heard of some of these shows.
Let’s start by addressing how to reach out to potential speakers. Under no circumstances, should you engage me (or any speaker) as if we are already friends, unless we actually are – and I mean in real life, for real. If you’re using Facebook Messenger typing in half sentences–well, doing so will not win you any brownie points, suffice to say.
Often, event planners have no idea how to connect speakers or get them actively involved or engaged with their event. That’s understandable – presenters are generally pretty busy people, which means that getting a speaker’s interest involves creating some sort of reason for why your event is better than all the other options out there, and all the things that make that one-of-a-kind conference of yours distinctly and totally unique.
The four key points listed above aren’t a whole lot to ask, particularly if your conference isn’t as well known or simply needs fresh speakers, different topics or new ideas. When pitching presenters impersonally, there’s a good chance the person you’re inviting to speak won’t think it’s all that much of an “honor” to be asked, no matter how you position your proposition. It’s like inviting someone to a house party and making them clean up their own mess before you let them leave – really? Uh, thanks, but I’m probably OK staying at home instead.
About the Author: Celinda Appleby is the Head of Global Employer Branding for Oracle’s Global Talent Acquisition organization. In this role, she leads Oracle’s recruitment marketing and employer branding strategy. She manages a recruitment branding team that oversees Oracle’s global digital footprint to position Oracle as a top employer. 
Anthony Awerbuch is a certified professional Body Language Trainer. He served in the South African Army College where he had his first encounter with body language in a military police interrogation. He traveled extensively in the Middle East as he worked in many varied vocations including security and construction.
Stephen O’Donnell is a lifelong recruiter, internet enthusiast, fadgadget and peripatetic writer. A fellow of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals (REC).
The three most stressful things you can do in life, in order, are getting married, buying a house and finding a new job. The last thing in the world any of us want in any of these situations is buyer’s remorse.
There’s some myth that this information is somehow inconsequential when looking for a job, that stating your salary may seal your fate by knocking you out of the process. There’s a damn good reason for that. And that’s because your current compensation is a direct consideration for whether or not a candidate is qualified. If they make too much, or too little, it’s too much for too many employers to overcome in any offer.
Reading through Ms. Ryan’s latest diatribe on “
With this in mind, here’s a quick crash course in compensation for all you “thought leaders” out there to start thinking about.
It’s easy to say people work because of passion, or are willing to take less for the right opportunity, but the fact is they call it work for a reason. We’re not recruiting volunteers here, and no matter how good at negotiation a recruiter might be, if they’re way out of range it’s not going to make a single damned difference.
About the Author: Derek Zeller draws from over 16 years in the recruiting industry. The last 11 years he has been involved with federal government recruiting specializing within the cleared Intel space under OFCCP compliance. Currently, he is a Senior Technical Recruiter for 
Back in the day, when I was first starting out in my career, I ended up taking a job as a “social media ninja” for Monster Worldwide, the parent company for Monster.com. That job title should have been my first warning sign.
Part of our poorly defined roles and responsibilities at Monster was running point on digital marketing campaigns and running the social messaging and engagement on any PR or brand marketing push.
That day, I watched the fog rolling in off the Charles River from my remote workstation in Monster’s Cambridge Office. I casually IMed Charney about scheduling tweets and what was upcoming on our ed cal; nothing out of the ordinary, just the standard social stuff that filled our first days as the first social media hires in the company.
In short, I figured out what was meant by “account targeting” in publicly facing collateral was actually just extending the scale of 
For recruiters or even casual end users like you and me, the expansion of LinkedIn’s new ABM offerings isn’t such a great thing. It means that there’s about to be a lot more 
Firstly I should point out that this is a bit of fun, and need not be taken too seriously. However, as with all good jokes, it works better if it’s real enough to be plausible. 
Stephen O’Donnell is a lifelong recruiter, internet enthusiast, fadgadget and peripatetic writer. A fellow of the Institute of Recruitment Professionals (REC).
“Ah! well a-day! what evil looks; Had I from old and young! Instead of the cross, the Albatross, About my neck was hung.”
So what, you ask, is the problem? I mean, sourcers are paid to find those needles in the talent haystack, after all; the hunt for the purple squirrel is their entire raison d’etre, and justification for the existence of this discipline as an independent function. To me, however, the problem of choosing chasing purple squirrels over better big picture outcomes becomes the primary cause of several common, yet critical, issues that often emerge downstream in the recruiting process.
There are some other problems that arise when recruiters devolve into order takers. Too often, it results in our collective voice being too weak to effectively advocate for the best talent or become true business partners for our internal stakeholders. We’ve been largely silenced – and sometimes, too often, that means that we don’t get a say in how recruiting actually gets done. We’re only there as intermediaries, really, part of the process but not part of the decision making. This makes us every bit as interchangeable to our hiring managers as most of our candidates, no matter how skilled we happen to be.
OK, Houston. So recruiters and sourcers obviously have a problem, and a pretty endemic one at that. So what, exactly, are we supposed to do about it? Well, I suppose acknowledging that we have a problem is the first step towards recovery, right? The next step, I suppose, is to start proactively preventing and preempting these problematic process and people issues so that we can get ahead of the problem – and start working towards a solution.
About the Author: Mike Wolford has over 9 years of recruiting experience in staffing agency, contract and in house corporate environments. He has worked with such companies as Allstate, Capital One, and National Public Radio.
Human beings, as a rule, are pretty unique. We possess several key differentiators between our sentient selves and our seemingly omnipotent software driven counterparts increasingly intertwining with all aspects of modern life, personal and professional.
With the advent of the recent fanatical technological fervor in automation; we’re aiming to render certain processes, behaviors, and even jobs, adjustable, predictable, and measurable through software. As a sourcer, who tends to think he stays abreast of the latest trend and topics in the recruiting game, I see this permeating across the shark tank of 
As with any profession, there are good and bad practices, but my droogs, we’re learning that data driven insights, recommended “job matching engines,” culture fit or personality profile scores, and fancy visuals on a JD won’t 
The fact is, if you are a true sourcer, you don’t need to send spam en masse, and you don’t need a pre-qualified repository of web data for generating leads. You have the interwebs at your disposal, after all. Do your homework upfront and you’re resourceful enough to engage top talent through old school direct messaging and relevant conversation.
About the Author: Zach Choquette is a Boston based startup recruiter with experience in both agency and corporate settings, all within the high technology landscape.
They say there’s no silver bullet when it comes to recruiting, no one size fits all approach or magic cure-all for what ails the business of hiring. They’re wrong.
No matter how great an employer you are, without properly incentivizing your referral program to reward employees, then you’re already starting with a distinct handicap when it comes to building a world class referral program. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated what should be pretty obvious, at least on the surface – the more employee referrals are incentivized, the more quality referrals received. Makes sense.
Conversely, many employers have incredibly strict parameters around formalized employee referral programs, as well as tight eligibility and payout requirements attached to associated incentives. These policies can limit the efficacy and volume of employee referrals by adding unnecessary layers or added complexity to the process. preempting employee participation and overall effectiveness.
It’s important for your employees to feel a sense of ownership and engagement with your employee referral program to maximize its impact. Remember, without employees, you couldn’t have employee referrals, which is why it’s so important to provide them the tools it takes to successfully recruit their professional and personal network, instead of putting onerous policies or extraneous red tape in place.
It’s imperative when introducing a new employee referral program (or rolling out changes to an existing one) to keep as detailed a record as possible of the program’s performance and overall outcomes according to predefined benchmarks or baselines your recruiting team has agreed to ahead of time. That way, you’re able to monitor and measure success in a standardized, objective and somewhat simple way, making changes and optimizing accordingly.
Posting jobs 
About the Author: Widely considered to be the ‘mad scientist of online recruiting‘, Chris Russell has been connecting job seekers to employers through a variety of online tools since 1999 when he founded the local job board network AllCountyJobs.com, which he sold in 2012. When he’s not running CareerCloud, you can find him on his kayak or biking the local rail trails in Connecticut.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been lucky enough to be selected to serve on several “advisory boards” for startups in the talent acquisition space. I am as surprised by this fact as you are.
The major benefit I’ve found so far to advisory work isn’t monetary or even prestige, as I’d originally thought when offered several hundred thousand shares of SaaS company for my long term advice on retainer. Both would be great, but what makes the ambiguous, often completely improvised role of an advisor so meaningful is watching companies you care about scale, succeed and build a great product that help fix real problems really plaguing the industry you care about.
This brings me to the fact that there have been many people trying to get into the advisory business of late, and many of them ask me how I did it. The honest answer is, “I don’t know.” I’m often asked to help get them spots. The answer to that is honestly, “you just kind of get asked.” The way never to get advisory work, from my observation, is to sell it actively as some sort of standard service offering. Those “gurus” almost always fail. I don’t try, and it works wonders.
The one thing I don’t do is give feedback that’s done with an RFP or specific case use in mind, which is the trap that so many products fall into. They get into the late stages with some big customer, put all their resources into checking the box on some bullshit requirement, and boom.
We invited Pete Radloff to join our Blab today based on an article he wrote for RecruitingDaily, 
About our Guest: Pete Radloff has 15 years of recruiting experience in both agency and corporate environments, and has worked with such companies as Comscore, exaqueo, National Public Radio and Living Social.
I’ve worked for a staffing agency for the last fourteen years, so I suppose you could consider me something of a lifer in this business. One of the things that keeps me in recruiting is the fact that the last 11 years of my career, I’ve managed to work remotely.
That’s not saying serendipity never happened in those 11 years of remote recruiting, but I’ll save those stories for later. But a few weeks ago, I truly proved, once and for all, that the existentialists were right. Because what’s happened ever since that day a couple weeks back has been like experiencing existence as the protagonist in a Camus novel, candidly. It was in the middle of one of those slow times in the staffing season, where you just don’t have all that many jobs. Idle hands and agency recruiting just don’t mix. But I had a little more time than normal, which I used to try to make the most of the relatively few calls on my calendar.
Which brings me back to recruiting, since it’s recruiting that ultimately brought me to here. All roads lead to recruiting, right? Or at least, all liberal arts degrees or professional Plan Bs, in my experience. Now, I’ve read the posts, the comments and the blogs in an attempt to introduce myself to you with this, my first post, and man. You all are one tough crowd. One “pundit” in particular – I won’t name names, but you know who you are – tends to leave a lot of comments that are a little pissy.
No matter if you’re working to place a software engineer who’s just putting his foot in the water to a welder who’s been out of work three months because of plummeting fuel prices, or if you’re placing entry level cake decorators and giving jobs to people who desperately need them, maybe you should stop and take a step back. Maybe, just maybe, go a little bit deeper and truly realize what it is we do as recruiters. It’s pretty incredible, actually.
About the Author: Bahar Studdard has been an agency recruiter for over 14 years, working in the transportation, manufacturing and logistics fields in staffing. She works remotely, supporting 12 offices in 4 states (Colorado, Albuquerque, Oklahoma & Wyoming).
I hate to kick someone when they’re already down. In fact, I’m surprised I can, all things considered. Seriously.
If you’ve ever spent any time at all on LinkedIn – and if you’re 98.8% of the recruiting industry, that means you – you’re already familiar with the concept of the LinkedIn L.I.O.N.
There are a few recruiters out there who remember when LinkedIn used to clamp down on sending too many unsolicited profiles, or using, say, a cartoon or avatar for your profile picture instead of a real headshot. In fact, they’d put you in “LinkedIn Jail,” and basically suspended your account until you begged that you’d never do it again (until the next time). But that’s a distant memory, at least since the company went public and stopped caring about privacy.
Look, if you want to treat your network like a carcass that’s ready to be plundered by a pack of hungry carnivores, then by all means let the LIONs loose. Of course, you’re everything that’s wrong with both recruiting and social media, and I’m going to bet that you’re likely compensating for a shockingly undersized phallus, but, you know, do your thing. But before you open the networking floodgates, realize that your actions have repercussions not only for you, but everyone else who’s vouched for you as “someone they trust.” Liars.
About the Author: Pete Radloff has 15 years of recruiting experience in both agency and corporate environments, and has worked with such companies as Comscore, exaqueo, National Public Radio and Living Social.
