10 Predictions for 2012: The Top Trends in Talent Management and Recruiting
The following 10 Predictions for 2012 article was written by Dr. John Sullivan and posted on the ERE Daily website.2012 Will Be “The Year of the Mobile Platform”
By the end of next year, even the skeptics will have to admit that the mobile platform will have become the dominant communications and interaction platform by early-adopting best-practice organizations. The capabilities afforded users of smartphones and tablet devices grows immensely day by day. Long before unified inboxes existed for the desktop, smart device users could see all incoming e-mail, social messaging, text messaging, and voice and video messaging in a single place. Tablets will become the virtual classroom, and an emerging class of tools will let employees manage almost every aspect of their professional life digitally. During the next year, talent management leaders need to invest heavily supporting execution of talent management initiatives across mobile.
The Additional Top Nine!
Intense hiring competition will return in selected areas — global economic issues will persist for years to come, but the global war for talent will continue spiking in key regions an industries. While growth has slowed somewhat in China, Australia and Southeast Asia — including India — continue to see dramatic demand for skilled talent. In the U.S. and Europe, demand is still largely limited to certain industries where skills shortages have been an issue for years. In high tech inclusive of medical technologies, 2012 will see a significant escalation in the war for top talent. As innovators and game changers step out of established tech firms like Facebook, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Zynga, a whole new breed to tech startups will be born each vying for the best of the best. While recruiting will move forward at a breathtaking pace, so too will “rapid” leadership development.
Retention issues will increase dramatically — almost every survey shows that despite high engagement scores, more than a majority of employees are willing to quit their current job as soon as a better opportunity comes along. I am predicting that turnover rates in high-demand occupations will increase by 25% during the next year and because most corporate retention programs have been so severely degraded, retention could turn out to be the highest-economic-impact area in all of talent management. Rather than the traditional “one-size-fits-all” retention strategy, a targeted personalized approach will be required if you expect to have a reasonable chance to retain your top talent.
Social media increases its impact by becoming more data-driven — most firms jumped on the social media bandwagon, but unfortunately the trial-and-error approach used by most has produced only mediocre results. Adapting social media tools from the business coupled with strong analytics will allow a more focused approach that harnesses and directs the effort of all employees on social media. Talent leaders will increasingly see the value of a combination of internal and external social media approaches for managing and developing talent.
Remote work changes everything in talent management — the continued growth of technology, social media, and easy communications now makes it possible for most knowledge work and team activities to occur remotely. Allowing top talent to work “wherever they want to work” improves retention and makes recruiting dramatically easier. Unfortunately, even though it is now possible for as much as 50% of a firm’s jobs to be done remotely, manager and HR resistance has limited the trend. Fortunately, managers and talent management leaders have begun to realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting, and best-practice sharing can now successfully be accomplished using remote methods. Firms like IBM and Cisco have led the way in reducing and eliminating barriers to remote work.
The need for speed shifts the balance between development and recruiting — historically, best practice within corporations has been to build and develop primarily from within. However, as the speed of change in business continues to increase and the number of firms that copy the “Apple model” (where firm is continually crossing industry boundaries) increases, talent managers will need to rethink the “develop internally first” approach. In many cases, recruiting becomes a more viable option because there simply isn’t time for current employees to develop completely new skills. As a result, the trend will be to continually shift the balance toward recruiting for immediate needs and the use of contingent labor for short-duration opportunities and problems.
Employee referrals are coupled with social media — the employeereferral program in many organizations is operated in isolation as are the organizations’ social media efforts, but talent managers are beginning to realize that the real strength of social media is relationship-building by your employees. With proper coordination, employee relationships can easily be turned into employee referrals. This realization will lead to a shift away from recruiters and toward relying on employees to build social media contacts and relationships. The net result will be that as many as 60% of all hires will come from the combined efforts. The strength of these relationships will lead to better assessment and the highest-quality hires from employee referrals.
Employer branding returns — Employer branding and building talent communities are the only long-term strategies in recruiting. True branding is rarely practiced (hint: it’s not recruitment marketing) especially in the cash-strapped function of today, but years of layoffs, cuts in compensation, and generally bad press for business in general may force firms to invest in true branding. The increased use of social media and frequent visits to employee criticism sites (like Glassdoor.com), make not managing employer brand perception a risky proposition. While corporations will never control their employer brand, they can monitor and influence in a direction that isn’t catastrophic to recruiting and retention.
The candidate experience is finally getting the attention it deserves — Organizations have never treated candidates as well as they did their customers, but the high jobless rate has allowed corporations to essentially abuse some applicants. As competition for talent increases and as more applicants visit employer criticism sites like Glassdoor.com, talent leaders will be forced to modify their approach. At the very least, firms will more closely monitor candidate experience metrics as they realize that treating applicants poorly can not only drive away other high-quality applicants but it can also lose them sales and customers.
Forward-looking metrics begin to dominate — Almost all current talent management and recruiting metrics are backward looking, in that they tell you what happened in the past. Other business functions like supply chain, production, and finance have long championed the use of “forward-looking” or predictive metrics and the time is finally coming when talent management leaders will shift their metrics emphasis. Forward-looking metrics can not only improve decision-making but they can also help to prevent or mitigate future talent problems.
For the full article, please visit ERE Daily.
1099 or W2?
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
Use the Federal 20 Factor Test and Common Law to determine independent contractor or employee status in Virginia:
- Is the worker required to comply with instructions about when, where and how the work is done?
- Is the worker provided training that would enable him/her to perform a job in a particular method or manner?
- Are the services provided by the worker an integral part of the business’ operations?
- Must the services be rendered personally?
- Does the business hire, supervise, or pay assistants to help the worker on the job?
- Is there a continuing relationship between the worker and the person for whom the services are performed?
- Does the recipient of the services set the work schedule?
- Is the worker required to devote his/her full time to the person he/she performs services for?
- Is the work performed at the place of business of the company or at specific places set by the company?
- Does the recipient of the services direct the sequence in which the work must be done?
- Are regular oral or written reports required to be submitted by the worker?
- Is the method of payment hourly, weekly, monthly?
- Are business and/or traveling expenses reimbursed?
- Does the company furnish tools and materials used by the worker?
- Has the worker failed to invest in equipment or facilities used to provide the services?
- Does the arrangement put the person in a position or realizing either a profit or loss on the work?
- Does the worker perform services exclusively for the company rather than working for a number of companies at the same time?
- Does the worker in fact make his/her services regularly available to the general public?
- Is the worker subject to dismissal for reasons other than non-performance of the contract specifications?
- Can the worker terminate his/her relationship without incurring a liability for failure to complete the job?
In honor of our Veterans
- The American Freedom Foundation Festival and job fair is this Saturday, November 12, at the Patriot Center in Fairfax! Please stop by the Chamber booth to pick up our available positions from 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m! We look forward to seeing you there.
- Helios is also partnering with Easter Seals Veterans Employment Program to provide Interviewing Skills, Resume Writing workshops and Employer Panel discussions to discuss current openings. The first workshop will be in Silver Spring, MD on December 15th. Please check back for more information soon.
- A united Senate emphatically approved legislation Thursday intended to help unemployed veterans and companies doing business with the government, endorsing a measure that includes the first small slice of President Barack Obama’s jobs plan that is likely to become law. Read more from BenefitsPro.
Top 5 Open Positions!
Our clients have come to rely on our expertise in helping them find their top talent, and if you follow our blog, we have a feeling that you must be pretty smart. Therefore, we invite you to search and apply to our top five current openings:
- Executive Director
- Federal Sales Client Executive
- Sr. Instructional Designer
- Courseware Development
- Human Resources Business Partner
Are You Ready Today To Hire For Tomorrow?
The October Edition of “The Chariot” (Issue 46) was released earlier this month featuring an article: Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow! about how to avoid making a pressured hiring mistake. The article focuses on the recruiting practice commonly referred to as “Pipelining” and provides easy to follow step-by-step instructions on how to get started. We want to hear from you! Share your thoughts on these questions below, or feel free to ask your own.
Do you use the practice referred to as “Pipelining” now? Have you had any success or challenges? Do you have any questions about “Pipelining”?
