Second data point from marketing consultancy Yankelovich: 65% of respondents in this demographic preferred to

• find a place they wanted to live then look for a job there,
  as opposed to

• pick a job then settle for whatever location that entailed.

Combine the two data points and the recruiting implications are obvious. Locate your jobs in a downtown urban area if you want a head start in attracting this critical age group. Old news, you say? You’ve been using location to attract candidates for years? All your job ads mention “our airy new offices in the heart of downtown?” OK, but how is your recruitment marketing staff using the information?

Recruitment marketing staff?

Exploiting the geographic connection between work and workers has been a rising trend in talent acquisition for many years. We’ve see it reflected in outsourcing, offshoring, mobile workforces and remote workplaces, all of which employers have been steadily adapting to. However, they have mostly been doing so in an ad hoc way, without clear strategies and plans that systematically address trends in the job marketplace and what they mean to the relationship between work and workers. What has been lacking is marketing.

But first, a clarification: marketing and advertising are not the same thing. Advertising is the crafting and placement of messages that will collect the greatest number of eyes and ears. Marketing, on the other hand, is the research about customer wants, needs, attitudes and behaviors that supports those messages, gives them context, and makes them relevant and powerful. Marketing is the voice of the buyer; advertising is the voice of the seller.  All staffing departments advertise, very few market.

Demographics
Marketing looks at our urban-inclined 25-34 year olds, for example, as part of the larger issue of worker mobility, which is a subset of a still larger problem called worker availability, which in turn links to a variety of other things like demographics.

Marketing understands that for some companies the recession may have provided a respite from the issue of worker surpluses and shortages but those problems have not disappeared. Long term shortages remain real and persistent as we look to the future because demographics are immovable obstacles. We already know what the composition of the U.S. Workforce in going to be through 2032 because those people have already been born, and it suggests a prolonged and challenging period of increasing competition for diminished human capital resources.

 
In the U.S. we will be dealing mainly with:

a)    the shortage of replacement workers for retiring baby boomers
b)    a shortage of experienced, mid and upper level managers
c)    the mismatch between worker skills and work requirements
d)    restrictive immigration policies.

And we’re the lucky ones. Among our peers we are the highly developed country that will also be a growing labor market, with projected population growth over the next 40 years from roughly 300 million today to roughly 400 million by 2050. Europe and Japan will be facing all these problems plus falling birthrates and declining populations.

The developing countries on the other hand have a reverse problem, no place to absorb the labor surpluses among younger workers.

Mobility
That workers are migrating to where work is comes as no surprise. What may surprise, however, is the extent and character of the migration. Movement is occurring on an unprecedented scale and the primary driver is economic opportunity.

More than 190 million people today live and work outside their native country, roughly 3% of the world’s population. That population is growing at about 5.7 million per year. To put that in perspective, it’s equal to the sixth largest country in the world, larger than Russia (142 million) or Japan (127 million) and only slightly smaller than Brazil (193 million) or Indonesia (231 million).

Marketing would tell you it’s a mistake to assume that extensive migration is confined to unskilled workers desperate to escape poverty and limited prospects. The willingness to move is very much present at all levels of skill and experience. Note that the willingness to move actually increases as education increases (see chart). Data from Spencer Stuart, the headhunting firm, shows that 51% of their executive sample had worked abroad for more than 6 months, and 46% said that international experience and mindset were a key competency for leading today’s enterprises.

People move for many reasons, which tend to vary by skill level. Professionals and skilled technicians move for adventure, advancement, language, skill development, cultural exposure, and often for security and quality of life. Lower skilled workers tend to seek areas of economic growth, plentiful jobs and ready income.

In large enterprises, building and maintaining workable systems is hard work. Getting 2,000 or 20,000 or 200,000 people to handle something more or  less the same way takes time and requires rigor and discipline. There can’t be a thousand exemptions to the rules or else the system breaks down. The focus has to be on uniformity, consistency and low error rates. And there has to be a rap on the knuckle for anyone who breaks rank.

Whether you’re building a system, revising a system, or simply trying to maintain one, the last thing you want is a plan that changes, anything that sends you back to the drawing board. Changes mean time lost, money wasted and confusion in the ranks. They also mean loss of continuity. It took a long time to build the castle we show here. Good thing they didn’t decide half way through to move the entrance 3 meters to the left.

But all systems, even the most meticulously maintained and productive ones, have a downside, which is obsolescence. Once that castle was well suited to its environment and made sense; today it’s a picturesque artifact. The faster environments change the faster this occurs.

Corporate staffing today is facing obsolescence problems. Like our castle its foundations were laid under different circumstances and those circumstances have changed. The scope of the problem is summarized in this illustration. The left hand side lists some of the change drivers affecting the staffing ecosystem. The right hand side lists their implications for staffing managers.

Dealing with so many challenges at once requires redefining failure. The link between managing evolution and failure is well established. Every change, no matter how deliberate, is an experiment, which makes it by definition a percentage game.  If you’re not courting failure to one degree or another, you’re not experimenting.

Many companies penalize failure. To them it’s both a corporate and professional liability.   Sponsoring something that fails is to be avoided at all costs. But if our lists say anything it’s that evolution in an staffing environment  that’s as dynamic and fast moving as ours will be impossible without experiments that fail. Companies that choke off failure by stigmatizing it will not evolve quickly enough to remain competitive. Their systems, like the castle, will become impractical artifacts.

Organizations have profiles based on their awareness and acceptance of change and appetite for risk. At one extreme are the first movers who support cultures of innovation. Failure is accepted, even welcomed, as a price of progress. At the other extreme are the conservatives who only change when they absolutely have to or when the maximum amount of risk has been removed.

Playing it safe may be a personal preference and politically astute but it’s not a good career move. The staffing ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly. Based on best practice adoption rates to date (10-15% of all employers) that evolution will accelerate for most people over the next ten years. Experimentation will have to be he norm not the exception.

Who flags obsolescence in your organization? Who challenges the status quo? Who shoulders risk? It’s pretty clear to us that tomorrow’s staffing leadership positions will require “me” as the answer to all three questions.

David, who has a long-standing research interest in corporate governance, recently decided to investigate these anomalies:

•  “While organizational leaders so often declare employees to be their most important asset, their boards rarely seem to include anyone with deep professional knowledge of people management practices and organizational development.
  
• Employee engagement is much spoken about, but it is striking how often organizational change has been managed in a way that undermines trust and employer reputations, and how many M&As and public sector reorganizations have destroyed value and failed to improve outputs.
  
• Financial analysts mostly display complete disinterest in HR, despite their need to discern the sources of lasting value.”

These anomalies are no secret. For years most of our own work has revolved around helping HR to make better arguments to management about the business impact of their work. David’s new contribution is to report on conversations with a group of successful companies in the US and UK where these anomalies appear to have been addressed and at least partially resolved.

What are good boards doing when they oversee human capital?
First, they use both supply and demand perspectives. The supply perspective looks at the company’s human capital from the inside, the key question being: “Is our human capital strong.” This is not just about the top 100 executives and their compensation but also about the factors influencing the performance, capability and reputation of the entire workforce, both today and tomorrow.

The demand perspective looks at human capital from the outside, the key questions being: “What are the objectives for the business and what are the human capital implications for those objectives? How does today’s workforce match up against those needs and what do we need to do about any mismatch?”

Boards that see these questions as critical to their company’s success and that seek to answer them thoroughly will find the commitment to be substantial, 25-35% of their time. Percentage wise, this is a substantial amount; hours wise it is not. To make their proper contribution, which is oversight not management, they will need information that covers:

• People strategy and organizational strategy
• People-related risks
• Succession plans
• Compensation
• Legal reporting, diversity and ethics
• Vision and values
• Internal and external employer reputation
• HR’s capability

According to David’s research, all boards have to learn how to obtain and process this information. Typically they begin by asking to review operational data, so the first challenge is figure out which data, in what amount and in what format. This will vary according to each company’s situation. If the data doesn’t lead to insight, active debate and discussion, it is inappropriate.

No matter how effective these operational reports eventually become, first hand field insights are also necessary. Spending time with senior management at social events and internal conferences is one way to accomplish that, but the best boards also advocate one-on-one meetings with top team members and project leads, as well as location visits that provide vertical views of the organization and verify the reports from senior management.

Processing all this new information requires adjusting agendas and possibly also board structure. Successful boards find that:

• People issues are relevant to the agendas of all board committees
• The CHRO becomes a key liaison in keeping individual committee discussions coherent
• The audit and risk committees need to perform their own assessments of human capital information
• Compensation needs to be addressed as more than a retention issue: is it driving healthy performance related behavior or behavior that increases risk?
• Whether primary oversight of human capital resides in the Compensation Committee or not, it is vital that these issues involve the entire board

The report continues with an examination of:

• The roles and capabilities of board chairmen, the CEO, board committee chairs and NEDs, senior independent directors and company secretaries
• The role of the CHRO in the Board’s support system
• The examination boards must undertake of their own internal talent issues

According to the research, there is no longer any question whether good boards take HR factors seriously. Many already do and drawing from David’s findings at top companies, a blueprint for excellence has taken shape. Among the findings is the change that occurs in the CHRO’s job. As they may be the only board resource with deep professional experience in human capital, they become a key link between the business and the board, between individual board members and committees, and between the board and top management.

We will be reviewing this and other leadership related research in our spring Leadership and Business Impact Report.

David Creelman’s research, which we recommend, is available at www.creelmanlambert.com.

Scenario:

Problem: How do they maintain that brand strength and hiring quality when so many of the staffing personnel are new, are not steeped in the company’s hiring culture, and the growth timetable precludes extensive training. In particular, how do they build accountability and performance into the interview process?

We suggested an idea borrowed from baseball: an interview scorecard.

Even in successful companies interviewing is a chronically inconsistent process and it becomes more so as they grow larger, more decentralized, and more culturally diverse.  Research has long confirmed that although most hiring managers consider themselves skilled interviewers and exceptionally good at spotting talent, most of them are not.

The idea is simple: keep score.

• Make a list of the interviewers for each office, geography or position.
• Set up whatever minimum number of interviews are appropriate to the job. (This client uses a minimum of 3 for lower level positions and 5-7 above that.)
• To whatever interview report forms you already use add one new checkbox. This is a simple, “thumbs up, thumbs down” grade. Would you hire this person or not. No equivocation. Yes or no. Do not use this answer to subvert any candidate grading methodology you already use. It’s there simply to create a new interviewer performance index.
• Track that checkbox against quality of hire.  (Our client already has that capability built into first year retention and performance benchmarks.) How many top ranked candidates (say 1 or 2 on a scale of 5) did Henry interview and recommend? How many for Darcy, how many for Carlos? If Henry recommended 10 people for hiring and 7 of them are doing well, he’s batting .700. If Carlos recommended 12 and 5 of them are doing well, he’s batting .417.
• Conversely, also keep stats on recommended candidates who turned out to be poor hires. Call these your “strike outs.” In baseball if someone was hitting .500 you wouldn’t care much what happened the rest of the time, but staffing is a bit different. Strikeouts are expensive relative to other non-hits because they increase short-term direct costs and decrease long-term employer brand equity.

What we want to know, even if we don’t know exactly why, is who makes the fewest mistakes in spotting talent. Knowing the “why” would be nice because then we might be able to institutionalize the insights, but in this situation that’s for another day. Interviewing excellence is a complicated topic. At least this simple scorecard will tell you who’s getting it right and wrong more of the time, allowing you to gently remove less talented interviewers from your network or, if you can’t do that, allowing you to focus your training where it’s most needed.

As successful as they have already been, this is a critical juncture for our client. Growth is tricky. Their brand, both in the product marketplace and the employment marketplace, is one of their strongest assets. If new recruits are of lower quality than in the rest of the company, the company will feel it, perhaps not right away, but eventually. It may show up first in the financials or it may show up in more subtle measurements of mood and perception. If they ever hear something like “this company used to be so…but now…” they’ll know the damage has been done.

Fortunately they know this and are going to use the checkbox.

Convince your sales managers that you can help them report good results and you will have successfully aligned yourself with two of your organizations main objectives, growth and profitability, and some of its most influential players.

Selling your services begins with data.  Do you know your company’s…

1. Sales figures for the last week/month/quarter?
2. What they are quarter over quarter and year over year?
3. Which geographies are sizzling and which are tepid?
4. Which product lines are carrying the company and which are fizzling?
5. Which market segments are targeted for growth?
6. Which competitors are gaining ground?

We find that staffing departments vary enormously in their access to this type information and in the depth of their knowledge. Some departments work in companies where it’s easily obtained while others work in companies with restrictive, need-to-know-based policies.

Assuming you can obtain what you need, you next need to figure out where specific pain points are. Even in successful companies there are always pain points. No sales departments ever have 100 percent of their territories performing at 100% of quota. Some of the problems may be outside staffing’s control: a competitor’s superior products, poor sales training, cheaper overseas products, or a market slump. But you can be certain of one that won’t be, the lowest performing quartile of salespeople. You probably already know some of the under-performers because you originally recruited them.

There are two information sources for filling a job: the listing of qualifications, experiences and skills attached to the requisition or a more general knowledge of the job’s context. The sales information above that you’ve gathered is all about context: understanding the issues faced by the sales department and beginning a dialogue with sales on their turf about their problems, not about how difficult the job market is, how rare good candidates are, how competitor X is paying more, or how much time the hire is going to require. These are not sales’ problem, they’re staffing’s problems. Sales’ problem is getting their quota numbers up and they will appreciate—and perhaps even be surprised to learn—that you see things from that perspective.

When staffing begins hiring with an eye toward performance in the field and begins measuring success on those terms, the relationship to sales—and to the organization as a whole—changes significantly. When the “how are sales this…(week, month, quarter)?” questions are asked, you’re no longer an incidental factor in the answers, you’re now a full partner.

About measuring success. Whenever you set out to answer a C-level question, everyone at the table expects to see a cause and effect proof of performance – i.e. this was the problem, this was our solution and this is how it worked out. Even your powerful partners in sales will wilt under the gaze of the CEO if they can’t demonstrate some concrete return on their partnership with you. Without hard measures of success there is only faith, and the currency of the C-suite is most assuredly not faith.

Which brings us to metrics. Success in sales is usually straightforward and doesn’t require any fancy mathematics. Once you’ve identified sales’ problems and defined how you can use your staffing expertise to help; the next step is to ask “OK, if we do this, how would you like to measure success?” Let sales tell you. Believe me, they absolutely know how their success will be defined and how they’ll earn their bonus.

Here are some of the common measurements:

• Overall revenue improvement (the most common measurement)
• Expansion of a key target market (a variant on the above)
• Unit sales (another variant on the above)
• Retention of key accounts
• Lower personnel turnover (high turnover can be very costly for a sales department, particularly if they sell complex, big-ticket items that require long sales cycles)
• Better client service scores
• More people making quota, or bonus, or President’s Club, etc
• Higher average per person sales
• Higher per store sales
• Big ticket contract sales

Ordinary recruiters fill seats, exceptional recruiters solve problems. When you solve problems that answer questions asked at high level meetings you gain influence. The bigger the problem solved the greater the influence. Sales is a good place to begin solving consequential problems because there is always a need and the payoff for superior staffing is relatively straightforward and clear. Based on running sales departments for more than a decade, I can tell you that sales will welcome your interest. And if you do succeed in solving their problems, you’ll have a powerful and useful ally in the corridors of power.

Corporate staffing began its technology driven paradigm shift in the late ‘90s when the Internet gave birth to the first job boards. From the start it was a well-publicized event, which would lead one to suppose that by now it would be well advanced, perhaps nearly old business. But that’s not the case. Like other paradigm shifts before it, this one is taking place gradually, restrained by a variety of entrenched and hard to dislodge beliefs.

Within individual companies some of the restraints have been practical, having to do with budgets and upgrade cycles. At the enterprise level, staffing technology is complex and expensive. It’s also a moving target. No matter how quickly individual companies might wish to exploit technology for competitive advantage, they simply can’t move faster than available funds and infrastructure permit.

However, these practical obstacles are diminishing. Each generation of software—and they have been arriving with increasing frequency—is more user friendly, more functional and better integrated that its predecessor. Suites from single vendors are replacing hard to manage application libraries. And the most recent advance, cloud based services, makes advanced technology available to even the smallest employers. From a technical perspective then, staffing’s paradigm shift appears to be well under way and progressing nicely.

But from another perspective it’s not. Remember that paradigm shifts, as originally defined by Kuhn, are about mental changes, changes in thought, in the way we view the world. Without those additional changes the shifts can be snail-paced. Old ways of doing things remain entrenched, impervious to facts, often for astonishing lengths of time. It took generations, for example, before Copernicus’ new view of the universe finally laid Ptolemy’s old view to rest.

In researching our new report on staffing technology we have discovered that the paradigm shift from the 20th century corporate staffing model to the 21st century model is far less advanced psychologically than physically. Employers’ attitudes about staffing’s role and responsibilities have not evolved as far as their purchases of technology would suggest, which means that not only is much of the investment wasted but that the true paradigm shift is only in its earliest stages. The tools have improved but the ways we use them have not.

Harmonizing the physical and psychological parts of staffing’s paradigm shift to maximize investment and business impact is the subject of our upcoming Technology Report. As we explain, two old attitudes need our attention: the first being staffing’s reluctance to become the owners of the tools that increasingly control their efficiency, effectiveness and business impact; and the second being corporate management’s reluctance to see the staffing department as more than a place to dump requisitions.

Click here for more information about our upcoming Technology Report.

The analyses and recommendations, while not developed specifically for corporate talent acquisition and management leaders, speak directly to the problems of credibility, relevance and impact faced by so many of those leaders when trying to to position their departments as indispensable corporate partners.

Some Organizations are Indeed Different
Every business organization is analytically minded to some extent, but the range of sophistication is very broad. IBM’s collaborative study with MIT/Sloan Management Review documents this range in a number of ways:

• 57% — The increase from 2010 to 2011 in number of organizations using analytics to create competitive advantage.
• 2X — Organizations using sophisticated analytics are more than twice as likely to substantially outperform their peers than those who aren’t.
• 5X — The critical first steps in data analytics best practice are agreeing on data definitions and standards, persuading data owners to share the data they control, or to trust the data they don’t. Sophisticated organizations are 5 times more likely to have taken these steps.
• 4X — Sophisticated organizations share data vertically down to front line employees 4 times more frequently than unsophisticated ones.
• 2X — The ultimate goal of fact-based organizations is their openness to the new ideas and new ways of doing things they suggest. Sophisticated organizations are almost twice as likely to have reached that goal.

What kinds of analytics are involved? The more advanced an organization is, the more kinds of data have meaning—about competitors, supply chains, regulatory burdens, customers, technology, natural disasters, market trends—in short, about any system, process, event, activity or risk that might significantly affect business performance.

Focus on Growth and Risk
Growth and risk management are two major preoccupations of most boards. To execute those plans they turn to HR for efficient, effective talent acquisition and talent management. HR in turn contacts its customers in the marketplace—the people who will “buy” the jobs it offers—through it’s own equivalent of marketing (sourcing) and sales (recruiting).

But this work is conducted differently from similar work in other customer-facing departments. Non-HR marketing and sales are highly analytical professions.  Customer needs, marketplace dynamics, production variables, competitors’ products, and target early adopters are routinely and rigorously analyzed. New product launches are meticulously planned and orchestrated. Marketing and advertising are carefully calibrated through testing and retesting.

But HR uses these techniques or processes in very limited ways, if at all, and as a result is rarely able to explain precisely to senior management and their board overseers why their performance excels or lags in helping drive the strategic plan. It mostly posts, prays, and when that doesn’t work assigns individual recruiters, sourcers or contractors to beat the bushes and flush out prospects. These methods do provide anecdotal information, but anecdotal doesn’t have much authority when boards are trying to make game-changing strategic decisions. “We think” or “we believe” are weak opening statements compared to “the data shows.”

Talent issues are affected by competition, the economy, the strength of the corporate brand, the efficiency of various recruiting channels, comp and benefits packages, candidate relationship management, interview skills, and most likely some combination of all these things. Without good data and good analysis there is little ability to accurately diagnose problems and find ways to solve them.

Senior executives want business that run on data-driven decisions. They want scenarios and simulations that provide immediate guidance on the best actions to take when disruptions occur…These expectations can be met, but with a caveat. For analytics-driven insights to be consumed — that is, to trigger new actions across the organization — they must be closely linked to business strategy, easy for end users to understand, and embedded into organizational processes to enable action at the right time. That’s no small task.

Data, analysis and executive communication are critical parts of the 21st century corporate staffing model. The IBM report effectively deals with all three, both as a best practices guide and as a call to action.

Upcoming Reports
Data gathering, analysis and management reporting will be covered in two of our upcoming reports: Technology (due in January) and Leadership (due in March/ April).

The legacy issue of ownership—how IT and HR share control—remained largely unresolved. New generations of software continued to raise the ante on system integration and data sharing (only 15% of clients can multi-source data). And change management—coming to terms with social media (29% growth), cloud services (50% growth) and mobile platforms—challenged everyone.

Change management dominated the conversation and probably will again in 2012. ”Don’t miss the boat; don’t be left behind” is the favored message of vendors seeking market traction, of news outlets crafting headlines and of pundits punditing, but it’s not the critical issue.

In most organizations a wall still separates IT providers and IT users. As we explain in our upcoming technology report, that wall was built for sensible reasons but one unforeseen consequence was that users’ knowledge of the working tools they relied on steadily diminished. Relinquishing responsibility meant gradually relinquishing expertise.

Recently a group of senior HR executives was challenged to complete an inventory of their staffing technology assets: what software they were using, what its approximate version or age was, whether an upgrade was available and, if so, what it would offer and when they were due to receive it. A half hour was allowed to consult documents or call the office.  Even with a time extension, all 18 eventually conceded defeat and had to acknowledge that they no longer owned the technology that controlled their efficiency, effectiveness and business relevance.

Evidence of powerlessness is widespread. It’s rare to talk with a staffing manager who is delighted with his technology tools. More frequently we hear a litany of complaints:

• We’re not budgeted for upgrades
• We’re not a corporate priority
• We don’t control IT decision-making
• No one really understands our problems
• We don’t know what “up to date” means
• What does regaining ownership entail?

At the very least it means learning an arcane language, taking inventory, analyzing processes and systems, clarifying problems, following new developments, planning upgrades and documenting ROI. This is foreign territory for most staffing managers, which means that ownership is a daunting proposition. Acknowledging this, the more relevant questions become, “Can’t I just finesse the problem? Is ownership necessary? Is it worth the trouble?”

Ignoring the problem is now a ticket to staffing mediocrity. Over the past 20 years, technology has thoroughly infiltrated talent acquisition and management. Almost every part of finding, attracting, hiring, developing, retaining and managing the corporate workforce now depends on hardware and software. Best practice is now impossible without updated tools.

Ownership is necessary. If Staffing doesn’t master its technology, someone else will, most probably the IT department, or increasingly a cloud vendor. If either of them does, then they will make decisions based on what is easiest and most practical for them, or where the most money is, or which senior manager pulls the most weight in the executive suite. Individual staffing clients may or may not receive what they want or need.

These days the ownership decision is increasing worth the risk and bother. Staffing technology has never been perfect and installations can still disappoint, but vendors increasingly sell solutions that have been market tested and deliver as advertised. Core solutions have matured through multiple versions and point solutions are rapidly coalescing into suites. If clients prepare properly (explained in our report) good results are available for both large and small employers.

Ownership needs to begin now. New cloud platforms, while not the perfect solution yet, are making it easier by allowing companies that have lagged to skip years of intermediate steps. Many of the trends shaping the corporate staffing ecosystem are slow moving, so the short term risks of ignoring them are small. Technology is a notable exception, evolving so quickly that everyone is hard pressed to even absorb what is happening, much less respond.

If technology were peripheral to acquiring and managing talent, ownership would not be critical. But it’s the foundation of the 21st century staffing model, providing functionality and data that allows HR to become a full partner in enterprise success. To fully utilize those benefits HR must change its status from passive user to active owner, making the mastery of technology a core competency along with metrics, marketing and non-HR business expertise. Ownership is a game changer.

Two takeaways from this year’s event:

1) HR has finally entered the Promised Land
2) Technical fluency is HR’s number one competency challenge

Two presentations crystalized these points: Laurie Bassi’s discussion of her new book Good Company, Business Success in the Worthiness Era; and Lexy Martin’s review of the 2011-12 CedarCrestone HR systems survey.

Bassi writes about the new criteria for durable business success. According to her research, Nobel Lauriate economist Milton Freedman’s argument that the only social responsibility of business is to maximize profits is outdated. To succeed in today’s fluid, globalized, hypercompetitive, increasingly socially conscious business environment companies must adopt a broader set of responsibilities that embraces all stakeholders, including customers, employees and communities, not merely owners.

The argument that virtuous companies that care about the environment, give back to their communities, tell the truth, delight customers and treat employees as valued corporate assets, perform better over time is not new. Listings like the 100 Best Companies to Work For are well publicized and applauded, then mostly ignored by stockbrokers and investors who remain fixated on their limited set of traditional metrics.

Bassi’s big gun is stock price, which her firm tracks in conjunction with a Worthiness Index. Top rankings in worthiness do not correlate perfectly with stock performance. Apple, for example, a widely admired company whose stock has sizzled lately, earns only a B- on the Index. Only two companies out of 100 receive “A’s,” FedEx and Disney.

There is a powerful message here for corporate talent managers. Woven throughout the book, in example after example, is the theme that businesses are people-driven. A grumpy Starbucks barista, a scripted Virgin flight attendant, or a sloppy Disneyworld sweeper is a quantifiable business liability.

This makes recruiting absolutely central to business performance. Get recruiting right and you have a chance to excel; get it wrong and you not only face longer odds but your success will be more tenuous.

Bassi’s research is the gateway to the Promised Land, where good business and good HR intersect and become inseparable, but no one responsible for talent acquisition and management will ever pass through without mastering the data in Lexy Martin’s survey, which reports on HR technology adoption, deployment trends, vendor evolution, expenditures and application impact (example above).

Technology ownership, which begins with literacy, is the Achilles heel of most HR departments. They depend on it and they use it, but they don’t understand how it works, what’s it’s capable of, or how it’s evolving. Nor to they really care to. Technology is the IT department’s job. This is as wrongheaded as thinking you can understand an investment by just studying a spreadsheet.

As the annual HRTech Conference in general, and Ms. Martin’s presentation in particular, makes abundantly clear, the HR technology landscape is devilishly complicated. It would be hard to master if it were standing still, which it’s not. It’s evolving quickly. Ownership requires not only making the best use of what’s already available, but also making accurate guesses about what’s to come. At the very least, realistic tech planning for 2012 needs to factor in what trends suggest will happen 2013 and 2014. Mobil technology, social media and data integration are three key issues.

Some will continue to say that you don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car; you just need to know how to drive. That might be true if your only task is a daily jaunt to the local grocery store. But business is more like a race. Your car is an important competitive tool and if you don’t know how to optimize its performance other drivers will walk away with the freshest doughnuts.

Owning technology doesn’t require a degree in computer science or programming expertise but it does require a substantial commitment of time and effort. The questions you need to be able to answer are in our upcoming technology report. If you run a small department, you’ll need to allocate time for study. You would also be wise to engage a knowledgeable advisor. If your CFO balks at the cost, give him or her the report. You can start with a simple inventory of what you’re using and what the upgrade options are. If you run a big department and don’t have a tech specialist on staff, it’s time to hire one.

Bassi’s presentation linked people performance to business performance; Martin’s links technology to people performance. You can’t have one without the other.

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Two takeaways from this year’s event:

1) HR has finally entered the Promised Land
2) Technical fluency is HR’s number one competency challenge

Two presentations crystalized these points: Laurie Bassi’s discussion of her new book Good Company, Business Success in the Worthiness Era; and Lexy Martin’s review of the 2011-12 CedarCrestone HR systems survey.

Bassi writes about the new criteria for durable business success. According to her research, Nobel Lauriate economist Milton Freedman’s argument that the only social responsibility of business is to maximize profits is outdated. To succeed in today’s fluid, globalized, hypercompetitive, increasingly socially conscious business environment companies must adopt a broader set of responsibilities that embraces all stakeholders, including customers, employees and communities, not merely owners.

The argument that virtuous companies that care about the environment, give back to their communities, tell the truth, delight customers and treat employees as valued corporate assets, perform better over time is not new. Listings like the 100 Best Companies to Work For are well publicized and applauded, then mostly ignored by stockbrokers and investors who remain fixated on their limited set of traditional metrics.

Bassi’s big gun is stock price, which her firm tracks in conjunction with a Worthiness Index. Top rankings in worthiness do not correlate perfectly with stock performance. Apple, for example, a widely admired company whose stock has sizzled lately, earns only a B- on the Index. Only two companies out of 100 receive “A’s,” FedEx and Disney.

There is a powerful message here for corporate talent managers. Woven throughout the book, in example after example, is the theme that businesses are people-driven. A grumpy Starbucks barista, a scripted Virgin flight attendant, or a sloppy Disneyworld sweeper is a quantifiable business liability.

This makes recruiting absolutely central to business performance. Get recruiting right and you have a chance to excel; get it wrong and you not only face longer odds but your success will be more tenuous.

Bassi’s research is the gateway to the Promised Land, where good business and good HR intersect and become inseparable, but no one responsible for talent acquisition and management will ever pass through without mastering the data in Lexy Martin’s survey, which reports on HR technology adoption, deployment trends, vendor evolution, expenditures and application impact (example above).

Technology ownership, which begins with literacy, is the Achilles heel of most HR departments. They depend on it and they use it, but they don’t understand how it works, what’s it’s capable of, or how it’s evolving. Nor to they really care to. Technology is the IT department’s job. This is as wrongheaded as thinking you can understand an investment by just studying a spreadsheet.

As the annual HRTech Conference in general, and Ms. Martin’s presentation in particular, makes abundantly clear, the HR technology landscape is devilishly complicated. It would be hard to master if it were standing still, which it’s not. It’s evolving quickly. Ownership requires not only making the best use of what’s already available, but also making accurate guesses about what’s to come. At the very least, realistic tech planning for 2012 needs to factor in what trends suggest will happen 2013 and 2014. Mobil technology, social media and data integration are three key issues.

Some will continue to say that you don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car; you just need to know how to drive. That might be true if your only task is a daily jaunt to the local grocery store. But business is more like a race. Your car is an important competitive tool and if you don’t know how to optimize its performance other drivers will walk away with the freshest doughnuts.

Owning technology doesn’t require a degree in computer science or programming expertise but it does require a substantial commitment of time and effort. The questions you need to be able to answer are in our upcoming technology report. If you run a small department, you’ll need to allocate time for study. You would also be wise to engage a knowledgeable advisor. If your CFO balks at the cost, give him or her the report. You can start with a simple inventory of what you’re using and what the upgrade options are. If you run a big department and don’t have a tech specialist on staff, it’s time to hire one.

Bassi’s presentation linked people performance to business performance; Martin’s links technology to people performance. You can’t have one without the other.

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