Successful talent strategies

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sears, David, 1947–
Successful talent strategies : achieving superior business results
through market-focused staffing / David Sears.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8144-0746-3 (hardcover)
1. Employees—Recruiting. 2. Employee selection. 3. Employee
retention. 4. Strategic planning. 5. Personnel management. I. Title.
HF5549.5.R44 S43 2003
658.3Ј11—dc21 2002007239
᭧ 2003 David Sears
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
This publication may not be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in whole or in part,
in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of AMACOM,
a division of American Management Association,
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.
Printing number
10987654321
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For Mary and Jennie
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ᮄ
C
ONTENTS
P
ART
IT
ALENT
S
TRATEGIES
A
RE
B
USINESS
S
TRATEGIES
1: I
NTRODUCTION
:T
HE
C
HANGING
M
ARKET FOR
T
ALENT
3
When Talent Was King
HR’s Strategic Opportunities
Opportunities Ahead
Plan of the Book
Why Talent?
2: ‘‘G
ETTING
’’ B
USINESS
S
TRATEGY
27
Business Strategy Barriers
The Role and Scope of Business Strategies
Business Strategy Models
New Business Strategy Landscape
3: V
ALUING
T
ALENT
58
Working For/Belonging To
The History of Talent
Valuing Talent: Four Realities
P
ART
II B
UILDING
,D
ELIVERING
,
AND
M
EASURING
T
ALENT
S
TRATEGIES
4: T
ALENT
S
TRATEGIES
:S
CANNING
87
Talent Strategies Management Cycle
Business Strategies
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viii
C
ONTENTS
5: T
ALENT
S
TRATEGY
B
UILDING
114
Talent Strategy Components
6: T
ALENT
F
LOW
S
TRATEGIES
142
Signature Talent Strategy Successes
Talent Flow
7: T
ALENT
E
NGAGEMENT
S
TRATEGIES
182
More Than ‘‘Being There’’
Talent Engagement Processes
8: M
EASURING AND
I
MPROVING
T
ALENT
S
TRATEGIES
208
Measuring Value Creation
Measurement Perspectives: Types, Stages, and Balanced Measures
Talent Process Measures
E
pilogue: Who Owns Talent Strategies?
233
The Case for HR
I
ndex
241
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PART I
Talent Strategies Are
Business Strategies
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®

C
HAPTER
1
ᮄ
I
NTRODUCTION
:T
HE
C
HANGING
M
ARKET FOR
T
ALENT
W
HEN SPEAKING TO AN ANNUAL
conference of human resources
professionals in 2000, Gary Hamel—consultant, academic, and
author of Competing for the Future—disparaged the cliche
´
d claims of
most if not all companies that ‘‘people are our most important asset.’’
Instead, Hamel asserted unequivocally to his audience, ‘‘People are all
there is to an organization.’’ Although Hamel may have been preaching
to the choir considering the setting, few business leaders or human re-
sources (HR) practitioners—and especially recruiting professionals—
would have challenged this claim during the past five years. Or rather,
they wouldn’t have done so until the NASDAQ and dot-com busts of
mid-2000; the technology, telecommunications, and overall employment
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4
T
ALENT
S
TRATEGIES
A
RE
B
USINESS
S
TRATEGIES
swoons that soon followed; and the economy-wide disruption touched
off by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
When talent was king
From the mid- to late 1990s talent was king. In 1999, for example, when
the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), an Arling-
ton, Virginia–based industry association, polled its eleven thousand in-
formation technology (IT) member companies to get a sense of their
hiring needs for 2000, some astounding numbers came back. For a na-
tional IT workforce base of 10.4 million, ITAA member companies pro-
jected needs for an additional 1.6 million workers. And, apprehensively,
they expected that nine hundred thousand of these positions would go
begging because of a lack of sufficiently skilled applicants.
In other words, in one year the IT workforce—or at least a big ap-
proximation of it—could swell an additional 15 percent, yet end up
nearly a million workers shy of its collective employment plans.
1
And
these were not McJobs—poorly paid positions with no career future.
These were high-paying, skill-rich, benefit-wielding career opportuni-
ties.
2
These numbers got a lot of press and the ITAA members’ cumula-
tive workforce plight became a sort of recruiting poster for what had
come to be termed the War for Talent:
3
the struggles of employers to
land ‘‘up skill’’ employees in a cutthroat free-agent employment market.
Suddenly and pervasively, tremendous business and revenue opportu-
nities seemed to be hostage to a huge talent gap.
Of course, although the business information technology industry
most visibly quantified the dilemma of recruitment and employment in
the late 1990s, its story was hardly the only one told. Publications and
news sources as varied as Fortune,
4
Law Practice Management,
5
Investor’s
Business Daily,
6
The North Carolina State Government News Service,
7
and the Colorado Springs Independent
8
headlined stories about crises in
recruiting, paying, and keeping MBA graduates, college professors, law-
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I
NTRODUCTION
:T
HE
C
HANGING
M
ARKET FOR
T
ALENT
5
yers, business consultants, drug research scientists, public school teach-
ers, and even landscaping professionals.
Across a wide swath of industries and professions talent seemed to
have all the cards. The unifying theme in all these different circum-
stances seemed to be the direct link between getting (and keeping) peo-
ple and business success—and conversely, the threat to business if the
right people could not be landed (or left the company). Trying to find,
hire, and keep key talent was everybody’s business, especially for HR.
It was at least temporarily self-evident that talent was primarily an asset,
not a cost.
But then, late in 2000, business conditions changed, and as quickly
and dramatically as the IT talent shortage came, it seemed to evaporate.
The Y2K crisis had come and gone. The lights went out for good at
many dot-coms. In this technology employment-rich business segment,
139,643 employees at 927 companies were pink-slipped by summer’s
end in 2001.
9
In the broader technology business sector, legions of for-
merly successful high-tech companies watched their value-added prod-
ucts and services become margin-busting market commodities. And
with this cumulative change in economic climate came radical down-
ward adjustments to IT employment demand. The 2000 ITAA study,
which was not released until April 2001, showed demand plunging 44
percent to 900,000 workers. Projected hiring shortfalls plunged even
faster, down 53 percent to 425,000. All this occurred, of course, before
the steamroller effects of 2001’s economy-wide disruptions and layoffs.
And these effects, once they came were enough to make your head
spin. It was as if the help-wanted pages—and the business pages—had
turned into the obituary pages. In the first half of 2001, U.S. companies
outlined plans to eliminate some 777,362 jobs, compared with 613,960 in
all of 2000.
10
And it proved to be only the opening act to the cuts and
threats of cuts that followed. Since the tragedies of September 11, 2001,
companies—predominantly in telecommunications, but also in comput-
ers, electronics, industrial goods, and transportation—made a total of
624,411 additional job cuts. This roughly three-month total exceeded the
twelve-month totals from each year from 1993 through 1997.
11
Novem-
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