Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, makes three remarkable statements in his introduction to the company’s report on the findings of its first World Poll, a hugely ambitious project to define “the great global dream.”
“Gallup is committed to conducting the World Poll for 100 years, but we may have already found the single most searing, clarifying, helpful, world-altering fact…What the whole world wants is a good job. That is one of the single biggest discoveries Gallup has ever made. It is as simple and straightforward an explanation of the data as we can give.
“Today’s explorers migrate to the cities that are the most likely to maximize innovation and entrepreneurial talents and skills. Wherever they can freely migrate is where the next economic empires will rise…When they choose your city, you attain the new Holy Grail of global leadership – brain gain.
“If you were to ask how to significantly increase your city’s [organization’s, state’s, country’s] GDP, we would say you need to find and develop 10 stars.”
These findings were all the more startling because they were so unexpected. As researchers they were trained, as we have been, not to expect such unambiguous results from so broad and complex a project. Research almost always follows the reverse pattern: the broader the scope of the inquiry, the greater the number of variables and the less definitive the conclusions.
If our 20th century education taught us anything, it was about diversity. In that century science, travel and technology transformed our vision of the planet from a collection of mysterious, isolated and exotic outposts to one enormous, incredibly complex, interdependent, interactive entity. We learned more and more about some of the great unities: how climate influences in one place affect everyone everywhere; how all humans, regardless of appearance, culture or language, are descended from a common ancestor and differ only in biologically insignificant ways; and how a bank default in New York can raise interest rates in Singapore and soybean prices in Brazil.
Yet despite this extraordinary knowledge awakening concerning our common humanity and connections, the daily news still overflows with conflicts grounded in all the old biases about appearance, culture, ethnicity, climate and financial markets. It’s as if all our amazing new knowledge didn’t exist.
The Link to Staffing
So what does any of this have to do with staffing leadership?
According to Gallup, progress is not about getting religion right or culture right, about correct political structures or sitting on rich natural resources or knowing the friendliest financier, it’s about matching workers to work. Doing this efficiently and effectively is the key to the prosperity of any organized group of humans, from the smallest organization to the largest nation state. The Gallup research put work and workers at the absolute center of the human equation. What great news for staffing professionals and staffing leaders, because:
Our profession is the one specifically charged with matching workers to work, and the one specifically charged with locating and attracting the stars who will create innovation and growth.
Like wealth, leadership fascinates us. Because so many aspire to it or want to become better at it, the literature is vast. If you tried to stack up all the imperatives, skill sets, bullet points, analyses, prescriptions, proposals and definitions currently available, the pile would topple over long before you reached the half way point. Unfortunately, as with that other sprawling management topic, technology, you can read diligently and end up so swamped with ideas and advice that you feel paralyzed.
Most of what’s out there deals with how to become or act like a leader, in other words, how to manage your career, develop your skills and competencies, create your personal style, and understand and motivate people. That’s a mighty list. We’ll cut it down by offering a job description.
Position Available
Wanted: Someone to lead the team that will find us the talent we need to grow, innovate, and keep our customers happy; and who will find ways to train and motivate that talent so that it consistently produces the highest quality, most creative work.
- We want to run the most efficient staffing operation possible, so please be familiar with and ready to implement all the metrics necessary to evaluate cost, time, structure, process, technology, sourcing and workload. Our minimum target is 20% less than the benchmarks for our industry, and our stretch target is 30%.
- We believe that candidate quality is the single most important benchmark of our company’s success. Be prepared to document that we are hiring the best candidates for each job and that they are performing as expected.
- Our executives rank talent management on a par with financial management. We will need dashboards to monitor that performance as consistently and accurately as we track sales, profits and market share.
- Because we allocate our capital carefully and also believe that all personnel decisions are ultimately financial decisions, we expect all staffing programs, initiatives and experiments to have an ROI that can be compared to opportunities offered by other departments.
- We want to have all the talent we need tomorrow as well as today, so we will need you to document all our critical skills and competencies, identify future supplies of same, and build programs for making them available as needed. This will include internal as well as external talent. We also want every critical position in the company to have at least one internal replacement ready to step in at a moment’s notice.
- We believe that retention and engagement are worthwhile barometers of company health. We expect these to be monitored and to appear on our management dashboard. Not only do we want you to maintain an exceptional queue of people wanting to work here, we also want you to monitor their enthusiasm for staying.
- We will require clear, literate and accurate written and oral presentations on a regular basis to the executive committee, our board of directors, and our investors. We would also like you to be our visible and accessible company representative to your professional peers.
- You will be our line of sight into international labor markets. We expect you to be able to regularly brief top management on conditions there and how they affect our future hiring plans.
- We know the job market is competitive. We want our employment brand to shine and want to track how it compares to those of our competitors. We are currently in the top ten but expect to rank in the top five within two years and preferably in the top two.
- You will sit on the executive committee and report to the COO.
The Future is Ours
As fast as staffing is changing, by no stretch of the imagination is it a buggy whip profession. Everything we see points to the world turning in our direction. There is an impressive body of research that confirms the direct correlation between:
- best practice HR policies and enterprise success
- employee loyalty and customer loyalty
- robust leadership development programs and enterprise success
- strong corporate culture and consumer brand awareness
- effective corporate branding and talent acquisition.
The number of C-suite executives who have read this research is growing. All the A-list business publications have reported on it to one extent or another. We can now report with confidence that Human Capital Management will be a critical element of corporate success in the 21st century. Companies that practice good HCM will prosper; those that don't will languish.
Staffing needs leaders right now, lots of them. We don't mean more thought leaders, association leaders, conference speakers, pundits and academics. They're in ample supply already and hard at work. We’re talking about leaders in thousands of HR departments across the country, the people at ground zero, in the trenches, making it happen.
We’re talking about you.
Source: 2010 Corporate Recruiting Report. Order today at pre-publication price $450 (reg. $550). Available soon!
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