Strategic Hiring by Prof Armin Trost

 (51235) Building a Talent Acquisition Strategy - YouTube

Here is what Prof Armin Trost talks about Building a TA strategy..

My takes on YouTube can be see below in this post. 

Above in the grid we see on Y axis, the type of hiring challenge (Availability vs Strategic Relevance) and then on the X-axis we see the execution engines! The tactical interventions and under each of these tactical interventions, there will be need for bringing Critical Success Factors (CSF) and Measures of Success (MoS)!

I have not read the book of Prof Trost, where he has talked about the TA strategy but what I know from his posts and video is that his book (see below) talks about this TA strategy and models as you find above in pictures. 

Amazon India has this book available and can be ordered here- Amazon.in

Reference book by Prof Armin Trost-

HR's Metaverse roles: When Cognizant fell in love with the human resources function!

When Cognizant fell in love with the human resources function! Check this article by Cognizant: An Evolving Profession: 21 New HR Jobs to Watch For (cognizant.com)

Yeah, I call it a "function" after CEO coach and mentor Ram Charan asked us to keep the function while letting go of the "department"!

Have a look at these 21 jobs (or roles or tasks within those roles?)
It looks like Cognizant pulled out more pigeons than it could manage, and then searching holes for them appears to be a rehabilitative act!
Honestly speaking, HR needs introspection rather than acts of deception!
Our MEA S Jaishankar said, "Europe will have to come out of the mindset that Europe's problems are World's problems, while World's problems are not Europe's problems! "
Likewise, ladies and gentlemen of HR (and other adorable pronouns as HR wears), many HR's problems are not organizational problems!
Dave Ulrich invoked HR as a function of change makers, trend setters, culture curators, employee advocates, catalysts, Business Partners, etc. But soon, HR, after lots of demands of learning and knowing business first, chose to remove the business part from the HRBP and adopt the people-people-partner role! HR shall look within and ask if they are really ready for the 21 new #metaverse avatar roles that this time Cognizant is invoking. (You should check if Cognizant's own HR team picked these avatars in the first place.)
Having said that, Cognizant has highlighted the high touch points (in the name of jobs) that HR will care about. They are all real and need attention.

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(1) Using Human Capability Information to Upgrade Business Decisions | LinkedIn

Experience Management (EM) is CHRO's entry ticket to the elite club of CXOs for the coveted top table!-Thanks to Qualtrics and Perceptyx

 PC-Qualtrics Report! 

Perceptyx - Employee Surveys, Consultation & People Analytics

I have been an ardent advocate of the firms like Perceptyx and Qualtrics for their sheer abilities to be serious players in the EX, CX and WX areas. Their team of researchers are subject matter experts are Ph.Ds.' and hold other degrees in Data and Decision Science besides Business Psychology and other Psychology areas at play at workplaces. 

Strategy or Execution, the taste of the pudding is in employee performance. Employee performance draws its intrinsic motivation from how they experience organization, relationships, leadership and policies backing them. 

CX has been a consistent focus area for businesses, as customer listening and keeping customer feedback/experience (CX) closest to building and correcting business strategy has been a BAU proposition. 

The rise of EX and WX (Perceptyx prefers to call it Worker Experience at times) has been as a factor to keep attrition at the lowest, attract and retain the best talent and making their say count in improving operations or strategy or other key enabling factors to business outcomes.

This journey started with Employee Grievances management (Hygiene factors, not accelerators but barriers removal for sure) to Employee Engagement to EX/WX, employees have become key to business success as not just human resources but also as partners in business decision-making! Activation of EE from EX/WX insights are some very rich discoveries that firms like Perceptyx and Qualtrics have done in very close association with McKinsey and other management consulting firms, who gave shout out to the EX/Employee Listening. Factors like Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, Covid inflected remote /Hybrid work teams impacted how knowledge workers and places of high comraderies, collaboration and engagement, relationships and experiences worked earlier in a huddle vs now partly or fully virtually. DEIB too influenced the listening besides, how culturally companies in Singapore behaved vs Brazil and Japan and how and how much they learnt from the Employee Listening and what actions they activated on fronts of Business strategy, learning strategy, operations or simply culture realignments as nudged by the EX-insights. 

In above picture Dr.Cecelia Herbert makes a few strikingly valid points, and they are filters that shall be built into all EX-programs (Listening, Merging, Insights building to Activation on all fronts). 

When she says, Employees are already speaking up, she means, survey or Glassdoor or Reddit, etc., feedback are not the universal platforms alone, rather we are closest to the real-time feedback if we listen and relate to what is being told in a certain context of work-life or business strategies. Deep listening is like the refined filter mechanism that does scientific listening as collecting high value data for further data warehousing and analytics. Code to EE and Business Outcomes emanate from what employees are speaking on and about. Review/community platforms like Glassdoor and Reddit are designed to capture EE in a certain format. Data there is of high quality and importance, and they must be captured to build a Big Data warehouse, before we do analysis and modeling and reporting and insights building or writing Call To Action (CTA)/Activation plans as discussed in below passages.  

In above picture we can see a culture element as we know Singapore is a compliance driven market and culturally, run by rules and partly leader centric organizations and so bit top-down! In contrast, Brazil is an emerging economy with political and business VUCA etc. so people are becoming important and are vocal. Another factor of culture as Brazil is a vocal society. Singapore was least affected by Covid, despite being closest to the epicenter!  

Above 6-point strategy is built to keep program of Experience Management/“Employee Voice,” focused to help the two parties: employees and Business. It involves various strategies and operations as factors to tie back EX. 

EM as a strategy is built to derive value through expertise and involvement into the data capture through programs, partnerships, systems led and outside of the firm data. Enlightening is the most crucial stage that is test of EM. Responding is a set of bold actions in the open after accepting the linkages of feedback to Strategy, Execution, Policies and relationships. Responding stage feeds plans into various functions of business and Disruption

Above 4 stages are commitments to ring sustaining value through EM initiatives. These are Activation engines enabling acceleration into the system, while curbing the barriers to EX and Business Outcomes. 

Employee Experience Models-Various experts and leading firms who treat EX as one key Business Metric

Take action on employee feedback:

Collecting employee feedback is meaningless without action. If people go through the trouble of filling out a survey, but nothing in the organization changes, they’re likely to get what Didier Elzinga, CEO of Culture Amp, calls “lack-of-action fatigue.”

After computer software non-profit Mozilla had to undergo a round of pandemic layoffs, the company’s HR team decided to run a pulse survey to check employee engagement. The results revealed employees were exhausted, frustrated, stressed, and (most curiously) less likely to believe Mozilla had career development opportunities for them.

Employee experience | Qualtrics

1. Employee Experience/ Definition of Employee Experience - Gartner Human Resources Glossary

Employee experience is the way in which employees internalize and interpret the interactions they have with their organization, as well as the context that underlies those interactions. 

According to Gartner research, only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experience.

2. Drive engagement and reduce unwanted attrition with Qualtrics/ Employee experience | Qualtrics

Qualtrics Employee Experience lets you measure employee engagement and sentiment across the entire life cycle — from recruitment to exit.

3. In an era of workplace upheaval, companies that create tailored, authentic experiences strengthen employee purpose, ignite energy, and elevate organization-wide performance. This time it’s personal: Shaping the ‘new possible’ through employee experience | McKinsey

‘Moments that matter’

Once EX designers, working closely with employees, create personas, they can then define “moments that matter.” These steps in an employee life cycle are inflection points that, if designed well, can create a disproportionate uplift in experience. They also map pain points that can then be addressed.

What is employee experience?

From the moment prospective employees look at your job opening, to the moment they leave your company, everything that the workers learn, do, see, and feel contributes to their employee experience. For your organisation to master employee experience management, you must listen to your people at each stage of the employee lifecycle, identify what matters most to them, and create personalised, bespoke experiences.

“The employee experience is defined as the cumulative assessment of an employee’s interaction with your company and its people,” says Julian Lute, senior strategic advisor at Great Place To Work®.

“A positive employee experience is one where employees are trusted to do their jobs and have leaders who show them respect and are fair.” Julian explains the employee experience is important for organizations to weigh up, as it can determine how much effort employees give to the company, as well as how customers experience your products or services.

Employee Experience

With the right employee experience strategy, you can boost your ability to attract, engage and develop high-performing employees.

Gallup's Employee Experience Practice helps you align your employees' experiences with your company's purpose, brand and culture, so every interaction they have with you is authentic and sustainable -- inspiring employee commitment and improving your company's performance.

References:

1. This time it’s personal: Shaping the ‘new possible’ through employee experience | McKinsey

2. Definition of Employee Experience - Gartner Human Resources Glossary

3. What is Employee Experience (EX)? - Qualtrics

4. What Is Employee Experience? Definition & Proven Strategies | Great Place To Work®

5. Building Your Employee Experience Strategy - Gallup

6. Guide to improving employee experience | Culture Amp

PC: Qualtrics

Your EVP can’t be spin—it has to be distinctive, targeted, and real.

Employer branding, Recruitment Marketing, Employer Value Proposition (EVP) and how it helps attract the one and maybe repel many. 

Well, it all starts with the War for Talent! The term “war for talent” was coined by McKinsey’s Steven Hankin in 1997 and popularized by the book of that name in 2001.

“Failure to attract and retain top talent” was the number-one issue in the Conference Board’s 2016 survey of global CEOs. 

Next, the 2017 article by two McKinsey consultants: Attracting and retaining the right talent

asks some very simple yet very powerful questions to the leadership! 

Here is the question.:

The best workers do the best and the most work. But many companies do an awful job of finding and keeping them!

Why? (...I added this why!) 👈

Having said that, what does McKinsey prescribe? 

Why is talent important? 

Superior talent is up to eight times more productive! 

The late Steve Jobs of Apple summed up talent’s 

importance with this advice: “Go after the cream 

of the cream. A small team of A+ players can run 

circles around a giant team of B and C players.”

 

Management guru Jim Collins concurred: “… the 

single biggest constraint on the success of my 

organization is the ability to get and to hang on to 

enough of the right people.” 

Leaders know the term “employee value proposition,” or EVP: what employees get for what they give. “Gives” come in many flavors—time, effort, experience, ideas. “Gets” include tangible rewards, the experience of working in a company, the way its leadership helps employees, and the substance of the work.

If your EVP is truly stronger than the competition’s, you will attract and retain the best talent. But for three reasons, few companies have EVPs that meaningfully help them win this war

1. NOT DISTINCTIVE: Work for Google if you want to face complex challenges, for Virgin if Richard Branson’s leadership stirs you, or for Amgen if you aspire to “defeat death.”

2. NOT TARGETED'. What kind of skills and roles are you hiring as key talent. Your EVP shall target them as inspiring and meaningful proposition. Not what sells. 

3. NOT REAL: An attractive EVP cooked up by HR and pushed through PR used to help secure the best talent. In the long term, however, this was always a losing proposition, since great people would quickly become disillusioned if the reality didn’t measure up.

Sites such as Glassdoor or Job Advisor offer peer ratings and reviews of what it’s really like to work for a company. Your EVP can’t be spin—it has to be distinctive, targeted, and real. 

Leadership assessment tests Hogan, SHL, The Leadership Circle, Gallup Strengths

 Leadership assessment tests! How many have you taken and what are on your bucket list? 

I have taken, MBTI, SHL, DiSC and some from platforms like Aon, Wonderlic and Kenexa, etc. 

I would like to take the Leadership Circle 360 and also one by Korn Ferry (KF4D)

This list below is just an aggregation effort. You should explore on your own respective providers and read their claims to have a decent firsthand information. 

1. Korn Ferry Leadership Assessment Guide & Practice - KFALP | KF4D (jobtestprep.com)

Korn Ferry Assessment of Leadership Potential (KFALP) | Korn Ferry Four-Dimensional (KF4D) | and Korn Ferry via Edge

Korn Ferry Assessment of Leadership Potential - KFALP

Personality motivators, self-awareness, leadership traits and skills, problem-solving skills, the propensity to avoid project derailment, and more. contains 23 questions within a 40-minute time limit.

Korn Ferry Four-Dimensional (KF4D) Executive Assessment

The KF4D allows companies to evaluate candidates based on the skills and traits they deem most important for each role

Developed in the 1920s by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, the MBTI is primarily a personality test. The MBTI test generates discussion which quickly degenerates to a 4-letter abbreviation rather than an understanding of leadership behaviors

Based on the 1928 work of psychologist William Moulton Marston, the DISC tool is designed to predict job performance, not leadership skill. 

The Velocity Leadership Checkpoint from Developing Leaders

highlight your strongest and weakest 3 leadership behaviors for development.

The Velocity Leadership Checkpoint considers 25 behavioral leadership traits, focused in 5 distinct leadership capabilities: Achievement, Alignment, Awareness, Altitude, and Adaptability.

Gallups Strength Finder (formerly Cliftons StrengthFinder)

Compare CliftonStrengths Assessment Options | EN - Gallup

Leadership Circle Profile™ 360° Assessment

What is a 360° Leadership Assessment?

Unlike a typical leadership assessment, a 360° leadership assessment gathers feedback from all levels a leader needs to be competent – bosses, associates, and peers, and direct reports to evaluate a leader’s leadership skills, attitudes, influence, overall effectiveness, and other key leadership competencies. Leadership Circle Profile is unique because it is the only 360° assessment that measures Creative Competencies and Reactive Tendencies, combining leadership’s inner and outer attributes. This 360-degree assessment feedback gives the leader greater insight into how they are perceived, including strengths and current limitations in their leadership effectiveness.

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Home - Saville Assessment

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Best Leadership Assessment Tools for 2023 (leadershipsuccess.co)

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Hogan Assessments | Personality Tests That Predict Performance

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11 Assessments Every Executive Should Take (forbes.com)

New age HR tech companies from Josh Bersin

Watch what Textio website says and it's quite moving..

Hire and retain a diverse team
What’s stopping you from building a diverse, high-performing team? From job posts to performance reviews, Textio removes the bias that turns your best people away.

 

 Josh Bersin's list of the top 15 HR products you must check!

My favorites after I spent time learning about them are:
1. Textio: All-time favorite
2. Paradox
3. Sana Labs
4. HiBob
5. Eightfold: Their talent acquisition product is their flagship product that has unmatched matching capabilities built-in through AI. I saw they have 14 positions in tech/engineering on LinkedIn, and most of them use the EasyApply button! They have 20 jobs posted on LinkedIn by different recruiters for Bangalore, Washington, Santa Clara, etc.
There is no consistent way of writing JD and providing information.
Director Engineering and Senior Director Engineering Delivery job posts for Bangalore look similar, but, while posted by different recruiters, have very different sets of information and formats.
US-based jobs ask for specific education (BS or MS), while Indian jobs don't ask for it. US jobs mention the range of base pay; India doesn't.
Some job posts mention Eightfold's total funding and valuation numbers, while many don't provide the same information. Indian jobs provide LinkedIn profile links for founders Varun Kacholia and Ashutosh Garg and press release links (unfortunately, LinkedIn Job post doesn't support any hyperlinks and job posting recruiters are not oblivious, right?).
I am not sure; if processes are not consistent, what greater good would AI do? In a lighter vein, AI also loves to work with smarter users :)
I am sure we recruiters will meet their minimum requirement to be consistent, compliant, and disciplined! I see a great future for Eightfold!

HR Tech 2023: It was the Josh Bersin show again (thank goodness) | TLNT