Year End != Performance Management

Today I was catching up on some of my feeds and noticed many of the major HR technology related blogs I follow were discussing performance management, for example Jason, Meg, Justin and, it even gets a mention on Thomas’s blog. So I felt I would get in on the game.

So let’s start at the beginning, what is performance management?

an approach to help the individuals within the organisation focus on what needs to be done to help the organisation meet its overall goals

(Paraphrased from the Performance Management unit in the AHRI Professional Diploma)

There are lots of models and method for doing performance management but as Jason says in his post:

Performance management should be about making, supporting and visualizing decisions for all levels of management that drive corporate performance.  It should cater to every talent stakeholder and answer the question that are important to them such as…

  • Managers – How do I reward and penalize individuals and teams based on performance?
  • Directors – How do I analyze and compare the performance of my team against other departments and divisions within my company?
  • VPs – How can I model my group against other high-performing regions, geographies, roles and skills to drive my company’s performance?

It is not about giving a rank to an individual based on the last X number of months work. Taking this further Justin brings up four good summary point:

1.  We believe in the concept and vision of daily performance management. 

2.  We believe in a future-facing performance management environment.  

3.  We believe in open lines of communication between the manager and the employee. 

4.  We believe in customised and relevant content in the performance evaluation. 

I have to say I agree with what everyone has said, and that your technology enabling performance management needs to be more that just filling in an apprisal form online!

Even more so if we assume that a vast majority of workers are now knowledge workers. Knowledge works is by it’s very nature ambiguous, complex and tends to have long feedback cycles (you don’t press a button to see a result), where employees tend to work autonomously but require collaboration with others both internally and externally to get the job done. Add to this that the outcomes tend to be more important than the process followed. (I know there is a whole core competency discussion here as well.)

So really the performance management process needs to be about supporting or facilitating the performance ahead of time not looking back. This of course needs to be part of the broader succession, development, learning, and workforce planning process. And it is not just an end of year thing!

Once the right process is being used we can then add the technology!

Career websites and your brand

Wanting your employees to feel proud of working for your brand is one key part of retention, there are many others but today I am only talking about brand. You also need the best candidates to want to join your organisation, not just anyone who needs a job. The term “best candidate” does not only refer to the best skill fit it is also the best cultural fit between the candidate and your organisation. This is why employment branding is such a hot topic in attracting and retaining staff, even in tough economic times. Let’s not forget the employee value proposition and the organisation culture are important drivers of employee engagement. Which we know without organisations struggle to deliver customer value due to the strong relationship between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. 

Best in class practice indicates that during the recruitment process organisations should target, engage, inform and respect candidates (borrowed from CareerXRoads). In addition it is very unusual for a candidate not to spend a bit of time reviewing a company before attending an interview. 

It is through the career’s website, and it’s links, that candidates answer the above questions and gain an insight into how an organisation will treat them if they were employed.

So what should be included in a best in class career website?

  • Does the site match the overall brand of the organisation? Most marketing executives would never let a print media be in non-compliance with the corporate brand so why should the career’s website be any different?
  • Can candidates determine if you have the right type of roles for them?
  • Do you explain the recruitment process so they know what to expect?
  • Do you promote the benefits of working for your organisation?
  • Do real employees provide testimonials of what it is like to work for the organisation?
  • Does it match the culture of your workforce? No point having a hip web site to appeal to Generation Y, only for them to start work and find a old school organisation focused more on command and control than free expression.
  • Is the site easy to find from the main corporate web page?

I want to pick on AMP for a minute. For my international readers AMP is a funds management company employing just over 4,000 people looking after around A$117 billion of assets under management. While the content about careers on their main web site is nicely integrated into the overall brand, the same cannot be said for the job search and application process on http://careers.amp.com.au/. 

By clicking the links below you will see what I mean.

Main Careers Site

Main AMP Careers Site

Jobs Site

Jobs Site

This is worse than just a bad or few missing images and a bad stylesheet. Most of the links back to the main corporate site do not work following a recent re-launch of the main site! If someone’s first entry point to AMP is via this site they are going to have a VERY poor experience. Does it show AMP is engaging, informing or respecting candidates, not at all.

So what message does this send to a candidate, maybe something like “Our marketing machine is really good, but our administrative processes are badly designed and maintained”? What about internal employees? Even more so what about the marketing team, are they aware of such a bad image?

Some potential costs to AMP of this poor integration:

  • What the abandonment rate is from the front page careers.amp.com.au site? How many people get to the site and go “Oh my what a mess” or “Am I in the right spot”? 
  • I’m not a legal eagle but are there not regulatory issues some of those broken links?
  • Some of the images on http://careers.amp.com.au/ seem to be referencing previous corporate branding approaches, does that not de-value the new approach?
  • Does the lack of integration reflect on AMP care with their investors money, I doubt it but you never know.
  • Missing out on the great candidate who abandons the application process part way through due to the branding mistake.
Any others?

Halo HP’s Telepresence Solution

Yesterday I attended a media event, as a blogger, for the Australian launch of HP’s Halo Telepresence product. The event was simultaneously held at HP’s office in Sydney and Melbourne using HP’s Halo product and included a Halo hook up to the US and audio hook up to HP’s PR company.

Down to the product:

  • It is telepresence, nothing really new here
  • HP has built a nice control panel to make using the service very user friendly
  • Halo allows both laptop sharing and a tabletop camera for the sharing of physical objects
  • It allows you to include non Halo endpoints from suppliers such as TANDBERG and Polycom
  • They have a gateway to also include endpoints that support ITU H.323, H.320 and SIP
  • A majority of the devices in each room have IP addresses assigned which means they can be maintained remotely
  • All Halo rooms have access to Halo’s 7×24 Concierge service for support.

Where the product is a little different from other systems is in the installation. HP have built Halo to be a fully managed solution, from installation to deployment and operations. All Halo rooms are connected to each other via the Halo Video Exchange Network (HVEN) a specialised fibre optic network run by HP just for Halo, HP install a 45Mbit (also called a DS3/T3) link into your premise. This enables several benefits such as reliability, bandwidth availability and cross company collaboration.

Like many I have experienced old school video conferencing before with all the issues of latency, crappy images, and crap audio. Halo, like all telepresence solutions, is none of that. The Halo meeting rooms is purpose built panelled in light brown fabric (to enhance audio), with half the room taken up with a board room table. In front were three 42″+ HD screens, at table level, with a fourth screen above for control.

On the three table height screens were the other meeting participants, almost life size and disturbingly really. The audio quality was fantastic, you heard all of the subtle noises from the other rooms, just as if the people were in the same room as you.

HP Halo

HP’s sales approach is, to reduce travel, increase productivity and support the environment, in fact the theme for yesterday’s launch was the environment with several presentations covering all the things HP is doing to be green.

My thoughts?

This is not for small business with the basic solutions starting well over A$100K not including the monthly managed service charges.  Having said that for large enterprises any product that improves productivity or reduces costs is a bonus, especially in these tough times. HP claim to be cutting up to 20,000 trips during 2008 just due to having Halo installed globally and that ROI is achieved by most customers within 12 months.

The almost real life nature of telepresence allows for significantly more interactive meetings then are possible over pure audio or older style video link ups. However given the price tag maybe virtual worlds are a better choice for many organisations who want collaboration?

Brands and Social Media

I am pulling together a bit of research into which brands are doing what with social media in Australia during the process I uncovered some interesting statistics which I will share. The list of companies I started with was the BRW Top 200 and added a couple of well known brands for the companies when required (eg Big Pond for Telstra).

  • Lots of people a squatting on accounts using the names of the top 15 companies in Australia across a wide range of social media sites.
  • The sites with the highest number (17 occurrences) of accounts (real or squatting):
    • Blogger
    • eBay
    • GMail
    • Live Journal
    • Yahoo
    • You Tube
  • The sites with the next highest number (16 occurrences) of accounts (real or squatting):
    • Twitter
    • MySpace
  • Most of the companies seem to have their brand being hijacked on at least one site, some have higher rates than others due to their brand also being general name, eg Shell.
  • The companies with the non general brands with the highest number of accounts (real or squatting):
    • AMP (33 times)
    • NAB (29 times)
    • Coles (29 times)
    • Qantas (19 times)

This work is completely unscientific at this stage but still enlightening, might do some further work on it.

Update: I’m calling this practice “social media squatting”

New content and products

Over the last week I have released a few new items on the Inspecht site.

  1. Short introduction on how to use Google to find candidates
  2. Quick overview of some key social media and Web 2.0 terms
  3. Email marketing campaign tool

The first two probably make sense to most readers but the third might surprise a few of you.

Email marketing

While blogs and RSS are where the digital natives hang out, many people have not moved away from email as a major communication method. There are two variations of the service, first is designed for internal recruiters and the other for agency recruiters. For internal recruiters the tool can be used to create newsletters to stay engaged with their talent pool, advertise specific career fairs to a specific audience and promote specific jobs to the talent pool. For agency recruiters the focus is on specific jobs to their mail list.

Why is this tool different from regular email?

  • Preview the email as you build it
  • Custom templates to match your corporate guidelines for jobs, newsletters, graduate events, what ever; you are in control
  • Control over sender information
  • Scheduled delivery options
  • Track who forwards your email and how many times
  • Detailed reporting covering who opened your emails, who clicked on which links, and who unsubscribed
If you are interested in this brand new product drop me an email and we can talk further.

Writing an eBook

I have been reviewing many of my posts from the last 18 months and decided to try and turn some of them into an eBook, estimated about 40-50 pages. At this stage the book will cover the impact of web 2.0/social media on recruitment, exact title unknown. While a majority of the content is available on the blog the eBook will for purchase and available by download. As part of the book development I hope to weave together many of the thoughts and ideas from the blog into a bit of a road map, providing tips, hints and links for the reader.

Some of the topics I will be covering are:

  • Key trends in recruitment
  • Where candidates can be hiding
  • How to engage with candidates and get them to want to work for your organisation
  • How to use free tools to identify potential applicants
  • To which aspects of social media you should be paying attention

Availability, soon I hope.

The price will be around US$25 I think, is that too high or too low?

Meet Australian Oracle Recruiter David Talamelli

When it comes to corporates’ who blog the typical names mentioned have been Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, and IBM. One company who has been quietly working away at their social media strategy is Oracle. Globally they have hundreds of blogs, a customer focused wiki, employees on Twitter and in general tackling social media on all fronts.

In Australia Oracle has been working hard to engage with bloggers and social media, with several employees having blogs, such as The Red Room, interacting on Twitter and Facebook. What interests me more is Oracle Australia has one of the very few internal recruiters in Australia, David Talamelli, who blog. I have caught up with David for coffee, interacted on Twitter and on our blogs and very impressed with the things he is doing so I felt it would be good to sit down with him and learn a bit more. 

Without anymore introduction below is my short interview with David, I hope you enjoy it.

How long have you been a recruiter?

I have been in IT Recruitment since 1999 my initial focus has been on recruiting in Australia over the past few years this has expanded to the APAC region.

Tell us about your work experience?

My first role was working in an Agency Environment with a company called GAP IT, this was a very sales focused role and I was responsible for meeting my monthly sales targets, I was in this role from 1999-2002. In 2002 I moved into an onsite role at Hewlett Packard where I was responsible for sourcing and managing HP’s Contract Workforce. The recruitment at HP was a combination of high volume recruitment and sourcing for specialist roles. In early 2006 I joined Oracle’s growing APAC Recruitment Team as it expanded its presence in the region. I am coming up to 3 years in Oracle and am quite proud of some of the successes we have been able to achieve.

How about your education, formal, informal?

I graduated from Laurentian University (Canada) in 1996 with a Bachelor Degree (honours) in Psychology. Since that time I have also completed a Graduate Degree in HR Management at Monash University. I have attended many Recruitment Training Events and Seminars – the two presenters who I have found most beneficial/influential are 1) David Carman from CarmanWhite Training and 2) Shally Steckerl who is a Web 2.0 Recruiting Specialist from the US. I also enjoyed hearing from Kevin Wheeler when he was in AU recently.

How long have you been blogging?

I set up http://oraclerecruiter.blogspot.com in January this year and had posted a few posts here and there, but I really started blogging regularly about 6 months ago.

Who or what was your inspiration to start blogging?

I am always open to new ideas to recruit/identify people and actually tried blogging in 2007 to help me in filling a role I had to recruit for. At the time I did not get the response I was looking for via the blog, but it did get me thinking about blogging for my role. I set up this blog in January this year and after talking to my management a few months later they really sparked an interest in me in getting this going. At first it was hard to see the return or value in blogging but I am now seeing it become an important part of our sourcing strategy.

What approvals did you have to go through internally to Oracle before starting the blog?

Oracle has a Blogging Policy that all employees must abide by. I had to ensure that I worked within these guidelines. My management has been very supportive and helpful with regards to my blog.

Given Oracle is a large publically listed company did they provide you media training before starting the blog?

No, I have not had any media training, however our PR/Marketing Team are always there for assistance when I need to run something past them or make sure that my commentary is correct.

Does Oracle have guidelines on what you can or cannot blog about?

Yes we do, there are a number of items that we are not able to disclose information about.

Do you feel blogging has helped with your role at Oracle?

At first, I was not sure if blogging was assisting me in my role, as the viewers and subscribers was relatively low (I was thinking is anyone actually reading this?). However over the past 6 months I have seen my daily blog viewers and subscribers increase dramatically. I find blogging a great forum to reach out to and connect to people and give them an overview of some of the interesting things that we are doing. I think people reading my blog get value in the blog entries I write but it also gives people the opportunity and avenue to explore roles with us that they otherwise may not be aware of.

What would be your one greatest success story from your blogging?

I get people from around the world contacting me to comment on my blog, or send me their resume, or just getting touch with me from my blog. I think the biggest success is that this gives me an opportunity to reach a large audience and share with them my thoughts, ideas which people are enjoying. From a recruitment perspective – I recently advertised and searched for a number of developers in Australia for a project I was recruiting for. The blog address was listed on our advertising and as candidates clicked on the blog link there was a story about the roles and the project in full detail. This gave candidates a full overview of what was expected and helped streamline the process for me as when I connected with these candidates they already had a good idea of what we were doing. I think this separated and differentiated us from the rest of the companies advertising.

What do you feel is the biggest challenge about writing a blog?

At first I thought I would not have enough to talk about, however after 6 months I have found that this is not the case at all. Blogging also took up a considerable amount of my time in the initial stages as I was getting the layout correct, the coding right, still getting my creative thoughts flowing, etc…. However now that it is up and running it has become a much more time-effective tool.

If someone was thinking about starting a recruitment related blog, what advice would you want to give them?

If someone is going to start a recruitment blog, I would recommend that they do it for the right reasons, I think a blog is a means to help you interact with your audience not to sell to them. Recruiters can tend to focus only on filling the role(s) they are recruiting for, however a blog is a long term investment and it is not necessarily just there to collect resumes. Use it as a means to talk to people and be honest in your communication – you should treat your online relationships with people the same way you treat people in person.

What other blogs do you read and why do you recommend them?

Most of the blogs I read are either Recruitment or Oracle focused. I have 9 Blogs listed on my Blog they are: ERE.net, IT Brief, iTNews Australia, The Red Room, Michael Specht – discussions on HR, enterprise …, PR 2.0 (Brian Solis Blog), Shally Steckerl’s Blog, Six Figures Blog

What other social media tools do you use?

I am listed on many of the social media tools available however there are so many social media tools/websites available I mainly use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and my Blog.

Any final comments or words of wisdom?

I think with blogging just like anything else, you only get out of blogging what you put in. It is a lot of work to set up and get running and to maintain but it is also very rewarding as well.

Second Life Business Teleconferencing

Today Second Life & Red River announced a new service called “Immersive Workspaces” providing an special area on the Second Life grid to allow business meetings to take place. 

Some of the interesting features of the system:

Organizations then have the option of a completely exclusive and secure experience, with no connectivity to the Second Life mainland, or a connected experience that enables employees to traverse the two domains without having to log on or off.

 A set of tightly integrated web-based applications and the ability to seamlessly upload and integrate real world content – e.g., PowerPoint – brings enterprise-level efficiency and flexibility into a virtual world.

But I have to agree with Silicon Alley Insider *yawn*, even the YouTube video demo is fairly meaningless the interaction did not need this new immersive workspace to finalise a presentation.

Now at least the annoucement by Nortel (disclosure I use to work there) in August of their web.alive project had some useful features.

“People are no longer satisfied with existing collaboration tools or with static web sites supported only by a telephone contact center as the main point of interaction. They want to discuss potential purchases with others, exchange ideas, make business proposals, and fluidly interact with others in real-time,” said Arn Hyndman, web.alive chief architect. “Additionally, web.alive will offer security not available with other virtual environments today because it is integrated with corporate enterprise systems and software.”

The intergration with enterprise security systems is key for using these virtual worlds for business transactions. Why? Because this integration the provides the identity foundation that trust and repuation can be built.

But will these virtual world applications revolutionise corporate collaboration, not in their current state.

10 Recruiting trends for 2009

As the world economies seems to be collapsing around us what will be the best practices in recruiting for 2009? Will video resumes be the killer app? Will niche job boards take over from the big boards? Will social media be the killer app?

Nope, none of these alone will get you the best candidates. Sorry.

If the economies do completely collapse there are a couple of outcomes; unemployment will rise as companies go under and people in secure jobs will be less likely to want to move. At the same time companies will need to do more with less and work hard to keep good talent.

So where should you focus?

  1. Quality of hire. Some people looking for jobs will be B grade, from layoffs, while some will be A grade. Given companies will be operating on thin margins you cannot afford to recruit the wrong person, ever! 
  2. Time to hire. While there will be more candidates to choose from, as with quality the time to hire will still be critical. 
  3. ROI, ROI, ROI. Every single recruiting activity must provide a positive return on investment. You can no long afford to just engage agencies to find candidates, it must be justified and most likely a last resort.
  4. Use your talent pool. Following on from the previous point companies that leverage the data in their talent management systems will reduce the time to hire and cost to hire. 
  5. Look for innovative and cost effective advertising. Post 10 job ads on the biggest job board for $1,000 might seem easy but is it the best use of the $1,000? Maybe providing micro-sponsorship to an industry event will get you in front of better candidates.
  6. Branding. Everyone is talking about it, but it is true. If people want to come ane work for your organisation you are half way there to hiring them. The best people want to work for the best organisations, no matter what the economy is doing.
  7. Referrals. Time and time again referrals provide the highest quality hire at the lowest cost.
  8. Social media. While it will not save you, social media will help. Look at social media to help improve your brand, and engage with top talent.
  9. Social networking. As with social media it will not save you but it will help you find candidates and improve your brand. Not to mention the ROI is very high.
  10. Learn to use search engines to find candidates.

You might look at the list and think, so what’s new? Well not a lot. It is just how you apply the processes which differs.

 


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