Month: November 2018

Let’s assume that your organisation is ready for growth. Bringing on board the right talent at the right time is critical to maintaining consistent development of your brand, however there are a number of contributing factors to making this process a success. More often than not, we subconsciously spend our time stood beneath the funnel instead of understanding how to build, maintain and improve it to manufacture consistent success.

This mini-series will look at how the modern HR function is evolving faster than ever at an enterprise level, but how smaller business can equally benefit from technological and service advancements – but with a fraction of the overall investment.

Priority 1 – The Checklist

The points below show my basic checklist for the necessary ingredients to build a successful talent management programme for a growing brand. The pros and cons to each of these will be explained in more detail throughout the series. Be honest – if you can’t confidently tick off the majority of these then you are likely to face recurring issues within the growth process.

• Do you have an internal talent management system to profile all new and historical candidates into your own internal talent community?
• Do you segment your candidate pool into role specific / skillset specific / salary specific verticals?
• Do you communicate regularly with your Talent Community? If yes – how is this delivered? (feedback / progress)
• Is your department creating a range of talent or culture specific content to be released via social media channels?
• How do you plan for succession?
• Are you collecting feedback from new starters and analysing workforce trends?

These are the basics. You can always optimise these elements, however in my experience, too many small to medium enterprises believe an integrated talent management programme to be costly, lacking in value and time consuming in comparison to other perceived “business critical” HR services.

Priority 2 – Piecing the puzzle

The basic systems required to run an effective talent programme exist in a number of forms and no longer require a majority of the company’s budget to implement.
Talent management software, ATS platforms (applicant tracking systems) and HCM systems (Human Capital Management) are so numerous in today’s world that there is literally a solution to any common business challenge.

The question is, what solution is a best-fit to enable growth, retention and an efficient talent strategy?

Whether your company employs a standalone internal recruitment team, or whether this is an added responsibility for a generic HR function, too many businesses prioritise a ‘CV vs role’ approach and don’t think about the bigger picture.

How is the business perceived within our own vertical? Is our content encouraging a higher quality, potentially passive candidate to engage with us directly? If a key staff member suddenly left the business, do we have the resources to make an immediate replacement?
More often than not, a business will spend a small fortune across a range of advertising mediums, agency searches and assessment centres.

The alternative however is a more efficient solution generating higher brand visibility at a lower cost!

Integrating a cloud based ATS platform at a cost per user basis will not only control cost but also allow greater visibility into the talent community your business creates. Working in tandem with internal marketing teams.

Priority 3 – deployment and execution

The relationship between People, System and Process is critical to ensure everything runs according to plan.

The aim of any talent function should be to drive company growth through the attraction of high performing individuals who share the same cultural goals as their organisation.

Every step of the journey should be reviewed, especially in the early days to make sure a solution really is a ‘best-fit’ for the end-goal. Whether implementation is carried out in-house our outsourced, the value is in the data!

What trends can we identify? Are there any common themes we can pick out on the back of previous successful hires? How does out talent community react to our engagement, and what steps to we need to implement on the back of this?

Our next article will cover the do’s and don’ts of candidate attraction and how to optimise engagement from a new target talent community.

Congratulations, you’ve just secured an offer for the role you have spent the best part of a month interviewing for – not to mention the month before you’ve been psyching yourself up to make the leap.

The overriding feeling is excitement around this new opportunity and every you have ahead of you, but there are still some hurdles to navigate before you can get there.

This next phase of the interview process is critical, as you have to balance maintaining credibility with not only your prospective manager but also to your current employer. Leaving a business is difficult in any scenario, especially when you are hopefully a valued employee with a strong track record of over-performance.

It’s at this point the doubts can naturally set in.

How am I going to break the news to my manager? What if they counter me? What if they’re furious? Am I making the right move? What would my partner think?

Everyone who has ever changed jobs has had to deal with these conundrums. Take a minute to breathe and reflect.

What were the real reasons for looking in the first place all those weeks ago?

Now, think about the following:

1. This career move should be designed to improve your quality of life – weigh up both options with this objective in mind.
2. Your current manager wasn’t born into the business, and so any suggestion that the grass is never greener is completely false – you are not a tree, don’t be scared to move.
3. Expect a counter offer, however more money may not mean make you happier – if you have squeezed every ounce of professional development from your current role, a new challenge is probably still the best call.
4. Use your partner as a vital sounding board from the earliest point in the process. Don’t wait until the kids have finally gone to sleep, creep back downstairs and drop an offer letter for a new career onto the table in front of them and expect everything to run smoothly.
5. Self belief meant you felt you deserved more than your current position, and you were strong enough to secure an offer of employment from the leadership team of your prospective employer – use this to give you the confidence that you’ll be strong enough to succeed in your new role and the next phase of your career.

As a final note, sometimes ‘failure’ can still happen – there’s no golden bullet for making the right decision. The silver lining in all of this is that no successful business professional or entrepreneur has ever reached the lofty heights they are today without experiencing adversity or failure – we learn from every experience and we’ve got to build on our professional journey without regrets.

I genuinely believe that the right career move has the power to transform lives! Now go out there and get the job you deserve.

This story was inspired, as so many are, by a journey.

Following a successful meeting out of town, we had some important decisions make about the future of our business and as ever, news of a new professional partnership often comes with operational considerations.

Usually this oft-travelled journey would’ve been a flurry of activity, with the mood swaying wildly between excitement and apprehension at the task ahead. However thanks to the now expected issues that come with train travel in the UK, the usual distractions for a celebratory journey home – beer, sandwiches and complimentary WiFi – were denied us.

Our plans were scuppered, but the carriage was unusually calm.

This lack of distraction pulled me onto a reflective track. My mind was overtaken with thoughts on, not only the journey I had taken to reach this point I began to consider the personal journey I had taken to get to this point, but the people who had helped me along the way.

We are all under pressure from different elements of our lives, and I believe it’s critical to find a professional outlet outside of your organisation to be able to bounce ideas off and air your thoughts. The outcome of this will be the self-enablement of growth from a skills, personality and goal setting perspective. Identify people within your network who you respect, perceive as achieving professional success and most of all, who are on your wavelength personally.

Too often we can not see the wood for the trees, too often we work with a blinkered approach for the wrong reasons. I have fallen into this trap many times in the past as I’m sure we all have at one point or another.

The remedy? Don’t be afraid to be under pressure, just be aware that you don’t have to go it alone, there are people within your network who will actively enjoy adding value to your growth and sharing best practice actually give them a break from their own daily routines.

I wouldn’t be here today without the help of people I respected within my network and the advice they bring. Be open, be inquisitive, be ambitious, and let others in to help you on your journey.