AlignMark Recruiting and Selection Blog

Social Media Recruiting to find Generation Web - Tomorrow's Workforce

We've all heard about Gen X, Gen Y, Boomers, etc. and each of these generations have certain characteristics that "bond" them together with the most obvious one being age. Today a new generation has evolved that has nothing to do with age. We'll refer to the newest Generation as Generation Web or "Gen Web" as its members are bonded together by a single factor – Technology and Networking Groups.

Everyone talks of baby boomers retiring and the future shortage of qualified workers in the labor market. Well in almost all cases it's the new "Gen Webbers" that will fill this gap, regardless of their age. Given the current economic condition, workers from all generations that join Gen Web will be asked to fill tomorrow's jobs. Fortunately the time it takes to be part of Gen Web can be relatively short, as today the majority of jobs are becoming more and more dependent on technology. This trend will only continue, and in fact, accelerate faster in the near future. As a simple example for boomers - remember when you first used a computer, laptop or cell phone - for the younger generation, remember when you first began to text message or use MySpace. Technology weaves us all together, especially when it comes to recruiting and business.

• So what are the implications of this on your business?
• And have you tapped on the WebGen channel for the talent you want to hire?

The need for this new generation in the workplace will force businesses to change many of their HR practices, especially recruting and selection practices. The ways in which companies recruit, hire people, train and develop their employees, and manage them on the job will take on a very different look versus today (yes even today.) We're already seeing the rapid increase in the use of social networking to find new sources of candidates and passive job seekers. This trend will continue with new ways of hiring information, new ways of collecting performance data on workers, etc.

Traditional candidate marketing campaigns march on - day in, day out, week after week, every year; yet for all of the effort that goes into each, they have a finite existence. Leveraging the power of Social Media Marketing (SMM) HR organizations are making their hiring efforts and its existence infinite.

Social media marketing programs usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention, generates online conversations, and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. The message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself.

What CAN you achieve from Social Media in a recruitment context?

• Use Social Media to listen
• Use Social Media to ask questions
• Use Social Media interact virtually with your prospective employees
• Use Social Media to increase candidate pull
• Use Social Media to strengthen client contacts
• Use Social Media to pre-sell your services

More and more businesses are realizing just how this promotion method can benefit their businesses.  If done correctly, social media marketing can give your business a serious boost.  And thanks to a new service it takes much less time to see results than it has in the past.  Download AlignMark's newest whitepaper on Turning Social Media into a Powerful Recruiting Tool for additional information.

Push or Pull - How does your Organization Manage your Sales Talent

Do you pull your talent through leadership and work environment? Or do you push your organization to strive to achieve established goals set by management?

Great organizations excel in creating the philosophy that their people “can do” (possess the capability), “will do” (maintain their commitment), and “must do” (have the right alignment) that is required for success, now and into the future. To put it in different words, when talented people are trained and “nourished” to excel in their work, when they are provided a rich, engaging environment in which there is passion and excitement about doing great work and truly making a difference, and when they perceive a connection and alignment between their work and the realization of organizational goals and metrics—great things happen (e.g. individual and team excellence). We call this “Pull Magic”—where employees are passionate about being “pulled” in a direction of individual and organizational greatness.  This is the foundation for talent management practices that have a significant effect on the organization's bottom line.

Do Your Sales Managers and Your Organization:

• Understand expectations and goals?
• Understand actions need to meet expectations and accomplish goals?
• Possesses the abilities and personal qualities required to meet expectations
• Motivate employees to meet expectations; e.g. Do they personally value the perceived benefits of meeting expectations and achieving goals?
• Empower and enable employees to meet expectation; e.g. mitigate organizational and external obstacles; resources made available, etc.?

If the answer is no to more than 1 of these questions, perhaps your organization would benefit from shifting its leadership focus to Pull versus Push.

PULL ADVANTAGES	PUSH DOWNSIDES
Employees & Managers are COMMITTED	Employees ARE OBSTACLES to achieving goals
Employees & Managers are PART OF PROBLEM SOLVING PROCESS	Employees DO NOT PERCEIVE PERSONAL BENEFIT
Employees and Managers UNDERSTAND NEED AND VALUE OF CHANGE	Employees DO NOT UNDERSTAND IMPACT OF ACTIVITIES OR ACTIONS NEEDED

 

Unfortunately many sales organizations, achieve the opposite because they haven’t created this type of environment. In the absence of pull strategies, they resort to “Push” strategies, where people perceive being “pushed” in a direction most likely to benefit the organization − not the individual. Where push strategies are the dominant approach to driving organizational results tend to experience greater employee dissatisfaction, higher turnover, shrinking talent recruitment pools, and higher employee disengagement. Sales people are quick to lose sight of the relationship between their efforts and the organization’s success. Push strategies facilitate the growth of organizational climates characterized by a division between management and sales people and they begin to feel disconnected. A kind of “outcome myopia” emerges where decisions about discretionary effort and levels of engagement are based on what individuals perceive as good for themselves personally, effectively disregarding what is good for organizational success overall. Push strategies can encourage sales people to perceive management as a primary obstacle to the successful execution of their jobs, and they foster the belief that their interests are in direct conflict with management’s.  They view their work environment as “Us v. Them”, with “us” being the sales people, and “them” being management (most often expressed as “senior” management due to the fact that responsibility for managerial decisions often bypasses regional sales management, as those managers develop working rapport with their teams by “siding” with their teams on unpleasant or unpopular senior leadership decisions). The greater the push, the more visible the distinction becomes. And it doesn’t stop there. Push strategies quickly become self-perpetuating cycles. Because push strategies create employee resistance, management finds itself in the unpleasant position of having to “push” harder and harder to drive organizational results.  And of course that leads to more resistance, which leads to more “push,” etc. Ultimately, that cycle has to be broken, and it can only be broken by the kind of intense commitment to improving talent leadership which will result in “pull” rather than “push.”

In summary, sales leaders must break a cycle of internal focus and move towards an organization that is committed and focused to achieve a world-class sales organization productivity. The quickest way to do this is by incorporating some of the “Pull” techniques described above.

Feel free to download our latest white paper on building a world class sales organization through assessment and selection.

Sales Assessment allows for use of leading (vs. lagging) indicators

Is your sales team run by leading indicators or lagging hindsight?  All it takes is a brief look within the talent management practices of the organization to answer this question.  According to McKinsey's War for Talent surveys (200 companies, 1200 respondents) the percentage of companies engaged in positive talent leadership action and execution is very small.Indeed, when it comes to talent leadership, most organizations are failing, and failure is easily traceable to a weak mindset and belief.  In fact, 72% of managers say that winning the war for talent is critical, yet only 9% are confident that their current actions will lead to a stronger talent pool in the next three years. In summary, the McKinsey survey lists the following as views of senior managers’ beliefs about their own organizations:

• Brings in talented people……….……19%
• Develops people effectively………….3%
• Retains top talent……………….…………8%
• Removes poor performers……........3%
• Knows the A, B, and C players…….16%

Where do you think your company falls? How can you improve your leading indicators?

Accurate information drives effective strategies.  This is good news for sales organizations, because, unlike many other functional areas, sales organizations already have great appreciation for accurate information. Operating metrics are a familiar form of sales information and receive intense attention in all sales organizations.  But operating metrics alone are not enough.  Sales leaders need to be passionately and diligently focused on the knowledge, skills, and abilities (i.e., the competencies) required in all their positions and they need to be likewise focused on the knowledge, skills, and abilities of their incumbents (individual contributors and leadership alike), internal candidates, and external candidates as well.  The sales organization with accurate information about their position requirements, and the corresponding level of human capital knowledge, skills, and abilities available to fill those positions, is in the best position to be more strategic and intelligent when making all human capital decisions (i.e., selection, promotion, training, succession planning, performance management, etc.). In this definition, “passionately and diligently” means an unwavering commitment to measure, measure, and measure again. Great sales organizations extend their measurements beyond operational metrics to include significant focus on key human capital metrics: skills, abilities, knowledge, engagement and retention levels, quality-of-hire, ROI, etc. These measures are examples of “leading indicators” that great sales organizations focus on and attend to as they know that such indicators do accurately predict ultimate operating metrics like revenue and profitability. All measurement should be directed at providing better information for improved decision-making.

We have found repeatedly when critical, strategic decision-making is attempted without rigorous attention to the predictive data and metrics, wrong decisions are made which will lead to poor sales performance. If a sales leader can lead their managers and sales people to arrive at a point--mentally (through initial belief and eventual successes) where there is “passionate and diligent focus,” both on the targets that will drive its future success and the competencies needed to drive that success, much progress will have been made in building this core belief. Most great sales organizations share the following beliefs:

• Better Talent equals competitive advantage
• Talent Leadership “Mindset” is the catalyst for action
• Strengthening the talent pool is every leader’s job
• Talent “Gold Standard” has been established (be a role model)
• Leaders, especially senior leaders, must be held accountable for aggressively developing center talent
• Real money must be invested in Talent Leadership
• Talent Review processes are critical

Don’t lag behind without focus on leading indicators. Hindsight with poor results is a position your sales organization does not need to face.  Below are only a few of the differences between leading and lagging indicators.  Which do you measure?

Lagging Indicators	Leading Indicators
Quantity of hires	Quality of hires
End of year results	Gap Analysis of results weekly
Time to fill a position	Skills identification and gap analysis of incumbent sales force
Percent of quota attained	Leadership Involvement
Turnover	Identification of “at risk” incumbents
Objectives Made	Engagement Levels

For more information on these and other white papers on sales assessment click here.

Executive Assessments: A new dimension to Talent Management

 

"A mind is too valuable a thing to waste" -anonymous

Today's challenging business environment is a stark reminder to HR organizations of the need for better talent management. Appropriately deploying employees' skills and personalities to optimize performance is a critical and difficult task. Furthermore, identifying and developing executives who have leadership potential, is a demanding process that is both an art and a science. More than ever before, businesses today rise or fall on the strength of their people; the onus to build and nurture this strength is on HR.

To carry out this mission well is to fully appreciate the wide range of competencies necessary to have effective leadership teams that can withstand the test of time and market ups and downs. Operating excellence, technical competence, marketing savvy, passion, energy and drive are always important, but today's knowledge- and talent-intensive organizations also require the "soft" people skills that facilitate execution across functions, departments, regions, and operating units.

Understanding and Implementing Talent Strategies

Understanding the importance of all these skills is one thing; being able to put this understanding into practice is another. How many corporate leaders today can say with confidence that their management team has the complete package of skills to take the company forward? How many are certain that their executives are deployed where and when they can put their specific talents to the best and highest strategic use? And when a leadership need arises, how many can accurately discern whether it's time to promote an individual or if that executive needs further development? Until they gain strong insight into the talent in place within their organizations, senior managers are essentially handcuffed with what they can accomplish now and in trouble when it comes to succession planning for the future.

Compounding the difficulty is the sheer size and complexity of many contemporary business organizations, which make it no simple undertaking to gather the information that will enable senior leadership to craft a winning talent strategy. And without robust information and analysis, leaders have little basis for deciding when and who to develop internally.

A Strategic Tool

One information-gathering tool that many corporate leaders are finding useful is the executive assessment, which evaluates and measures an organization's management talent in three key dimensions: against the organization's current and future strategic needs; against the competition; and against the overall talent marketplace. Properly performed, such assessments can help form the foundation of a winning talent strategy. They can produce the information that corporate leaders need to put the right people in the right positions at the right time, and they invariably clarify the processes that monitor performance and develop capabilities. Corporations can use executive assessments to build a database to model the skills and competencies that their business strategies demand, and to help them determine whether they have talent in-house to match their needs and the level of professional development that may be needed. Assessments also allow companies to maximize the value of executive education programs, creating custom-fit learning strategies for their next generation of corporate leaders.

Most importantly, by partnering with a third-party expert to conduct executive assessments, senior managers can counteract the "in-house" bias that all too often leads to sub-optimal decision making. By approaching talent management in this manner, companies can better target retention, career development, and succession planning efforts on their stars of the future

Talent management takes on a new dimension in today's competitive market- place. It requires an understanding of corporate strategic goals and of the role that talent plays in reaching them. And it requires a nimble organization with the expertise and resources to identify talent needs and quickly decide whether to meet them from within or draw them from out- side. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the future belongs to businesses that can weave talent and strategy into a seamless whole, and in the process build an organization with not only optimized performance but also with a significant competitive advantage as well.

Does Web 2.0 mean anything for Recruiting, Selection, and HR

Of course it does! For HR leaders Web 2.0 is a phenomenal opportunity to engage with their employees and talent community and the community at large. In this blog I will share examples of how companies are leveraging these social computing technologies to gain competitive advantage in talent management.

So what is Web 2.0? It is the second phase of the revolution that started almost 15 years ago with the introduction of Netscape browser and changed how we access knowledge, communicate and collaborate with each other. Forrester Research identified a trend it called "Social Computing" where people are socially and professionally connecting with each other using on line tools and social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Plaxo to get information from each other rather than from centralized structured institutions. People buy from each other on EBay vs. going to a supermarket or store; people in cities throughout the world rent apartments from Craigslist vs. looking through the classified section in newspapers. A friend of mine just recently downloaded Open Office - a Microsoft Office competitor that is free and is being created by engineers working together across the world vs. a big company like Microsoft.

Businesses and HR are ambivalent about how to put its arm around this phenomenon as businesses are built on command and control and organized dissemination of information. This undermines that control and flow of information. This revolution has already transformed businesses, created new business models and how companies conduct business. Encyclopedia Britannica which was the fountain of knowledge cost a fortune to own and a room to store has been replaced by Wikipedia which is free, real time and takes no space. This revolution has been embraced in our personal lives. One out of seven urban couples married in 2007 met online; MySpace is the 11th largest country in the world; and now companies are engaging with candidates as much via SMS text messages as email.

Among the top trends Watson Wyatt has recently identified many companies are adopting advanced, "web 2.0" technology. With the rapid growth of consumer-oriented web 2.0 applications, organizations are considering increasingly interactive strategies and technologies. While many corporations are using web 2.0 elements such as blogs and wikis, organizations are just beginning to implement other elements of social networking. All of these systems could reduce the focus on traditional e-mail and make work communication a more dynamic experience for employees.

Let me first share few examples of how web 2.0 is changing the HR world.

Connecting with Talent

Employees and talent community are natural groups for such social network. They work for you or would like to work for you. Dow Chemical was one of the pioneering adopters of a corporate intranet and recognized the value of social computing especially to keep in touch with former and retired employees but understood the need for corporate governance and risk management that is imperative for a 50 billion dollar global company.

Dow launched a social network primarily aimed at is US workforce that allowed people to upload their profile and pictures that could be accessed by current employees and alumni. One month after launch, more than 3,000 users had posted profiles, including 2,624 current employees, 93 former employees and 374 retirees. Managers are effectively using the platform to hire people, obtain referrals or bring in retired employees for short tern projects. The cost savings of hiring using this platform over traditional methods paid for the cost of technology is a few hires.

Listening

Bell Canada like any large company has employees that have frustrations and complaints and they do not know what or how to channel them, and when they have a good idea do not know who to go to or how to move to forward.

Bell Canada came up with their version of a "suggestion box." Anyone can submit ideas, grievances and have employees vote on them. In 18 months over three thousand ideas were shared, 15,000 employees have visited the site and 6,000 have voted. 27 of the top ideas have been significantly reviewed and 12 have been implemented.

Here is a list of the Web 2.0 component technologies that can be used by HR as well.

Blog - A web site ("web log") where people or groups "post" their thoughts, videos, pictures comments, usually displayed in reverse chronological order. Readers of blogs add their own comments and thoughts. Blogs link with each other to create a blogosphere. It is a great platform for organization to understand what is happening in their company and reach out and connect with the talent community.

SNS (Social Network Sites) - Members of these sites maintain their profile, picture, videos and share with other members their mood, thoughts, ideas. MySpace and Facebook already have over tens of millions members and Facebook is adding over 1 million users per month. Social networks have emerged based on interest and geography. LinkedIn targets professionals. Orkut is popular in Brazil. Hi 5 and Bebo dominate Europe.

Podcast - A digital audio or video file distributed over the Internet for play back on media players and computers. Some are live and interactive. The word is derived from Apple's iPod and "broadcast."

Wiki - "What I Know Is." It is a web site where various people contribute to the content and take shared responsibility editing and maintain the truthiness of the content. According to Wikipedia (the largest wiki), the word comes from Honolulu's Wiki buses (wiki means "fast" in Hawaiian).

Here are the four factors that make adoption of Web2.0 into HR easy and inevitable.

1) Inexpensive -Most of the time the software is free.
2) Easy to implement - This is not your centralized deployment of ERP system. Web 2.0 thrives on amorphous adoption by people.
3) No training needed.
4) It is powered by human need to connect, hear and listen.

For more information contact AlignMark or feel free to browse our White Papers on Recruiting, Selection, and Assessment.

What is the Value of Experience in Recruiting and Selection?

During our 35 years experience in the Corporate employee selection and testing market, AlignMark has completed numerous analyses comparing results of behavioral skill assessments to measures of on-the-job performance and has likewise accumulated assessment results on literally millions of job applicants. One finding which has emerged across virtually every individual job studied, regardless of industry, centers on the value of experience and may somewhat surprise even seasoned HR professionals.

The finding across our different studies is that experience, defined as years of prior experience in a similar job, has little or no affect on neither skill assessment results nor job performance. In repeated studies of incumbents as well as applicants (sales, customer service, supervisors, etc.) whereby confidential measures of job performance were obtained along with personal demographics, job experience of individuals seldom correlated to overall job performance or their performance on behavioral skill assessments. Although easily viewed as a counter-intuitive, potential explanations include the following:

• Tenure and Experience are often different factors. Some individuals continually learn from their experiences and others do not - 5 years in B2B sales does not equate to 5 years of sales "experience."

• Tenure may produce a greater accumulation of knowledge that is not reflected in measures of "soft" skills. However, it also appears that such increased knowledge does not often translate into enhanced on-the-job performance for many individuals.

So what are the implications of such findings? For some companies they are unimportant. For example, in a study of 2,000 B2C sales professions results demonstrated no significant differences among experienced and inexperienced job applicants on selection assessments or subsequent sales results. Despite this finding, the company continues to focus the majority of its recruiting efforts on experienced sales professions and accords them preferred hiring status. (See earlier comments regarding failure to learn from experience.) For other companies, implications are embraced more positively and result in challenging existing experience requirements, etc.

Those things being said, I clearly do not advocate universally abandoning experience requirements. Indeed, some experience requirements may be useful for decreasing voluntary turnover associated with mismatched job expectations, etc. However, at the same time, I do advocate differentiating "time" from "experience".

Click here for more information or White Papers on these topics and other recruiting and selection practices.

Recruiting Practices: What it takes to hire the "Right Talent"

Despite thousands of applicants applying to organizations with job opportunities, businesses today are facing a long-term talent shortage unlike anything experienced over the past several decades. Leading editorials as diverse as The Economist and CNN Money have pointed out that the problem is the shrinkage in highly skilled work force, increasing worldwide demand for highly skilled knowledge workers and globalization of the economy will create difficulty for even the most creative and successful businesses in managing their talent pipeline.

Over the next 10 years, the demand for talented people will far exceed the availability of skilled workers - at all levels, and in all industries. Before proceeding further, let’s put things into perspective. The recruitment and staffing department within each organization is responsible for recruiting the primary assets of the company – its workforce. For a company to make sure that their recruiting department is effective and efficient, proper performance metrics must be employed along with the aid of tools and techniques to source and screen talent.

How do I know I have a problem?

• I have fewer applicants than I’d like showing up at my door
• Resumes never give me the right picture
• I am spending too much time calling each candidate
• I am spending too much time talking to candidates that are not really qualified
• My applicant to hire ratio is very low
• Line organizations constantly differ with the candidates that are shortlisted

As we speak with staffing and talent acquisition executives from around the world, they all express frustration in creating a measurable means that drives one main objective – getting the right candidate for the job. In order to achieve this objective we must first look at how the recruiter of today is being measured and its implications on how he/she sources. We have noticed that organizations measuring their recruiters in traditional methods and processes are losing out in the war for talent.

According to us recruitment has 3 key areas to focus on that every recruiter and recruitment manager need to live by.

1. Attracting talent exhaustively
2. Screen talent systematically
3. Measuring talent for knowledge, skills, abilities, and other factors such as fit.

What am I doing wrong?

Recruiters today are being trained to “screen out” applicants, thus making their roles very transactional. Measuring the number of transactions a recruiter could perform in a specific amount of time led to the creation of the most commonly used metrics: Cost-Per-Hire. Many organizations continue to employ these same metrics on today’s recruiter with poor results and low “client” satisfaction.

Cost-Per-Hire, the most common measurement applied to recruiting, only looks at the initial cost and not the long-term cost associated with hiring the wrong candidate. Focusing purely on initial cost will drive recruiters to focus on making more hires as opposed to making better hires and loosing focus on the three elements of recruitment practices. This metric can inadvertently create conflicts between recruiting and hiring managers by driving the recruiter to ‘sell’ candidates internally that may not be appropriate but come at a low cost.

To summarize: “How recruiters are measured is having its impact on the quality of hires”. But smart recruiters and recruitment managers can change the way they hire and be accountable for quality of hires while continuing to make more hires through a very systematic approach. To achieve this recruiters should spend more time with pre-qualified candidates and leverage technology that simplifies processes and systematically follows the 3 key areas of focus; attract, screen, and measure.

How do I address that problem?

The smartest employers, who hire the best people, recruit a pre-qualified candidate pool of potential employees before they need to fill a job. The earlier you adopt these practices, the better your organization will do in the war for talent

For more detail on addressing this or other recruiting issues please contact us or download some of our recruiting white papers.

Contemplating the terms "Hiring" vs "Recruiting"

Seth Godin, the marketing “GURU” and author of the book The Purple Cow provides a succinct difference between the terms recruitment and selection.
“Hiring is what you do when you let the world know that you're accepting applications from people looking for a job. Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they're doing and come join you.”

• Hiring is easy and fast and is basically a retail operation.

• Recruiting is artful and slow and is essentially a direct marketing effort.

Recruiting raises the bar because it demands you have a job worth quitting for. The recruiter doesn't solve an urgent problem for the person being recruited, in fact, they create one. That person already has a job (hence no problem). The problem being created is that until they change over to your job, they'll be unhappy. That's a huge hurdle for a job to overcome, which leads to this key question:

Is your job opening so good you could recruit great people for it?”

While it is good to understand the difference between the processes of Recruitment and Selection, most Recruitment resources are under immense pressure to ensure that right candidates are identified for the job opening. Given today’s speed of business and volumes involved in recruitment, the entire process of hiring can be compared to a typical sales process where the focus is on numbers and not on quality of hire. It is important that Recruitment Managers and the Business heads conduct periodic reviews of the Pre Hire assessment of the candidate and compare the same with performance reviews and ratings. This would give the organization a broader understanding of the efficiency of the recruitment process in a qualitative manner, thereby providing the management a deeper understanding of why skill and competency gaps exist in the organization.

Levels of Recruitment

Organizations are built like the proverbial pyramid and 80% of annual recruitment numbers correspond to entry level resources. To ensure that demand does not overshoot the supply of such skilled resources, many organizations today follow various processes to hire employees. They can include strategies such as job fairs, campus recruiting, and finding people currently working with experience.

Assessments and Interviews

There are various assessments that can be employed to ensure that you are recruiting the right candidate. This could range from aptitude and skill based assessments to full blown assessment centers along with psychometric tests. Structured interviews should be an integral part of any recruitment process and the rigor associated with the same, ensure highly comparable and objective measurement of a candidates skills and abilities.

The Challenge

Most organizations today are faced with the problem of dearth of specific skills and competencies across a specific Business Unit or Management level. While competency mapping and performance reviews help identify existing skills and abilities of employees, they still do not address the immediate and real problem of having someone with the required skills to ensure the business if not affected. Most organizations today respond to such situations by creating a Job Requisition and ensuring that someone with suitable skills is found to bridge the gap.

What organizations and Recruitment functions fail to see is that after a certain period, which may vary from business to business, another competency gap will be created and the entire cycle will be repeated from scratch. It is important that businesses evaluate employees on a periodic basis, but it is even more important that the same be compared with the employee’s pre hire evaluation. This would provide the business and HR with vital data on how much off tangent were they in evaluating the candidate and could help them take suitable steps to mitigate the risk in future.

Integrated HR systems which captures information right from initial  assessments and interview feedback till the time an employee exits the organization, provides the HR team with actionable and reliable information that can be used to better the process of recruitment, as well as employee performance, thereby ensuring that the recurring cost associated with continuous recruitment can be reduced.

For a better understanding or more information on this topic please don't hesitate to Ask Us about Recruiting or download our latest worksheet to determine what recruiting is costing your organization.

 

Using Technology to Improve Assessment Center Accuracy and Efficiency

The assessment center process has a long and well documented history as a highly valid process for obtaining accurate information about individual's skills and abilities - be it for development, hiring, promotional, career-pathing and/or succession management purposes. Unfortunately, ever shrinking headcount and the mandate to do-more-with-less-resources which have pervaded most organizations for the last decade make the process a more tenuous undertaking for more and more organizations.

Applying its more than 30 years of consulting experience with the assessment center process as a foundation for change, AlignMark recently redesigned a corporation's assessment center process used to annually assess 200+ managers for promotional and developmental purposes. The redesign effort significantly reduced time and expense of the process, while also enhancing the measurement soundness of the process, and is summarized in an AlignMark White Paper.

Click HERE to download the whitepaper.

Real Talent Management Leadership Requires Action!

Caution is the watchword in today's market. Companies are afraid to act. Sales surveys indicate that sales cycles are lengthening due to uncertainty and misdirection. Outsourcing is happening in smaller steps now.

This is the context within which most organizations are choosing to operate. Many of our clients, however, are making savvy decisions where they see the current economic climate as the perfect time to get their talent management systems in order. They understand that improving their talent screening and selection systems, upgrading their leadership talent, and improving workforce productivity-- are the only keys to making their workforce more capable, committed, and aligned to drive even greater operating success. Some of our clients recognize the absolute predictive nature of their human capital assets and systems as "leading indicators" to cost reduction and gaining competitiveness. We encourage all our clients and the many prospects we aspire to work with in the near future-- to work hard on the fundamentals now. Diagnose the strengths and weaknesses in your talent management processes and take action on closing gaps-- optimize both your talent assets and systems now-- so you are prepared to compete when the economy recovers (which is NOW).

AlignMark research and white papers are availble to find out more.