It Still Comes Down To Who You Know

Person-to-person networking continues to be job seekers’ most successful tool. We recently analyzed job data on the nearly 60,000 individuals throughout North America to whom we provided career transition services over the past three years.

Traditional networking was the source of new career opportunities for 41% of job candidates last year, while Internet job boards accounted for 25% of new positions landed.

Source of New Job
(59,133 job seekers)

The job search is changing and some approaches are losing ground to others, but classic, systematic networking continues to be most effective way to find suitable employment. Certainly technology plays a growing role. But online social networking may not always be separate from traditional networking since one so often leads to the other. A job seeker uses the Internet to track down former associates or acquaintances and then reaches out to them in person. And, just like a cold call, the Internet is a way to make an initial contact with a prospective employer.

As revealing as the data may be, a job search is usually a more complicated and multi-layered process. Job candidates are encouraged to use as many tools as possible, every kind of research, any former contacts, and every opportunity to reach out to people who may be able to help. So in practical terms successful job candidates rely on a mix of approaches to find the new position most suitable for them.

Nevertheless, from year to year the data say that traditional networking is nearly twice as successful as any other job search method. Time and time over, the data proves that people tend to trust people they meet.

Bosses Get Busy With Emails on Weekends

One in three employees often gets emails from their boss over the weekend and they are expected to reply, according to a new survey we conducted at Right Management. An additional one-third of the 569 survey respondents also reported getting emails from their boss on the weekend, not often, but just from time to time.

The survey findings are another indication of an increasingly 24/7 workplace. Everybody once thought technology would reduce the drudgery and make the workplace more efficient. Sure, technology has delivered great benefits to employees, but also crosses the boundary between the workplace and the worker’s own private space. It seems one can no longer get away at all from work or responsibility.

We specifically asked if workers were expected to respond to the emails from their boss, so we were not talking about broadcast emails or purely informational communications, but those intended for a particular person and looking for a response. It’s now taken for granted that everyone has to check their work email during the weekend.

Continuous, borderless communications are now a workplace fact of life. I suppose it’s possible weekend emails serve to smooth out the pressures of a Monday morning, but likewise they may become an intrusive nuisance. We know workers are feeling exceptional pressures, and so many weekend emails may be counterproductive.

Managers set clear expectations about what really needs to be addressed over the weekend. And if emails might just as easily wait until Monday, say so. If you don’t have to send an email on the weekend, don’t send it. Create it in draft form and hit ‘send’ on Monday morning. Workers need down time. Weekends should be a time to re-energize. When bosses expect employees to be constantly at attention, you get productivity loss.

Navigating Workforce Strategy

Workforce demands and compositions are shifting in response to economic, social and demographic trends. Talent assets need to be managed as aggressively as the fine-tuning applied to other organizational assets. Everything else fails if the right talent isn’t in the right place. This requires an alignment of workforce strategy with business goals.

In the changing world of work, the one constant is the need for an exceptional workforce. The effectiveness of your workforce strategy makes the difference between thriving and diving. Today, talent is the only source of sustainable success and differentiation. Building an exceptional workforce will drive higher levels of performance and positively impact your organization’s ability to deliver on business strategy.

I will be presenting on this topic at the SHRM 2011 Conference and Exposition on June 28 in Las Vegas. Please join me and learn language, a process, business drivers and key metrics to architect an effective workforce strategy is aligned with business objectives.
Architecting a high-performing workforce strategy starts with the foundation of a five step process:

• Identify current state and future goals;


• Establish understanding and commitment;


• Gather the data and assess priorities;


• Analyze results and conduct gap analysis; and,


• Action planning and implementation.

Why make the investment? Building an exceptional workforce will drive higher levels of performance and will positively impact your organization’s ability to deliver on its business growth strategy. Investing in this process upfront will iidentify constraints and accelerators to organizational performance – top strengths to leverage and top priorities to fund and why. It will also increase executive alignment across functions and geographies, while also aligning talent initiatives to business goals – whether they are related to globalization, growth, productivity or even the brand.

I hope to see you at SHRM.

Engaging an Aging Workforce

By 2050, the world population will be over nine billion. Despite this growth and the flooded employment market, employers worldwide report difficulty in filling positions. Many are facing an HR paradox: How to find the right people at the right time, with the right skills in the right place, and fill the gap in the midst of plenty?

On a global scale, birth rates are declining and populations are aging. This means that there is a smaller pool of working-age talent from which to draw. The world average life expectancy was around 52.5 years in 1960. But today it is 68.9 years of age –31% higher in just 40 years. The percentage of individuals over age 65 who are in the labor force jumped about 40% from 1998 to 2008 … and this trend is set to continue.

Combined with these demographic challenges is a broader, more strategic challenge of the global talent mismatch. According to Manpower’s Annual Talent Shortage Survey, 34% of employers worldwide experience difficulty filling needed positions. So it’s not just about having the workers available amidst a shrinking pool of talent. It’s also about having the right people with the right skills needed to drive businesses forward.

Experienced workers will make up a larger percentage of the workforce and employers will need to find ways to keep them engaged. They will need to train managers to manage a multigenerational workforce that includes the young and the old. The skills mismatch is set to accelerate, creating an imbalance between supply and demand.

On June 28, I will be presenting on this topic at the SHRM 2011 Annual Conference and Exposition. I hope to see you at SHRM.

Speaking to the Top of the House

The ability to influence an executive audience is an essential requirement for today’s leaders of all levels. Unfortunately, many are unable to effectively influence senior audiences to take action on their ideas. At the SHRM 2011 Conference and Exposition on June 28 in Las Vegas I will be speaking on this topic and I invite you to join me. In this highly-interactive session, you will learn how to:

• Immediately capture and sustain the C-suite’s attention;
• Present yourself credibly, authentically and engagingly;
• Deliver ideas that provide inspiration;
• Develop confidence to excel at results-oriented communications.

Recent research found that high-performing organizations have the head of HR reporting directly to the CEO. Only 67% of low-performing organizations had their reporting lines set up this way. As a result of this infrastructure, the high-performing organizations reported a stronger and more productive connection between business strategies and HR strategies when the head of HR reports directly to the CEO.

CEOs sometimes forget that people are the only real sustainable competitive differentiator. It’s up to HR to ensure the CEO realizes the value of these assets and commits to investing in a talent strategy aligned with business objectives. Lack of a talent strategy is the number-one impediment to executing on business plans. It is HR’s role to step up and convince the C-suite how to do this. Why? Because there are countless examples of how the business strategy falls down and goals are missed if talent is not aligned.

If you are an HR leader and want to earn a seat at the executive table, you must market the HR function so senior management realizes the value-add and the full impact of what you do and how you contribute to the business. You need to understand each C-level executive and relate your function’s activities to his/her strategic imperatives. One of the unique opportunities about being in HR is that your responsibilities infiltrate every aspect of the business. Why? Because it takes talent to get the job done. The collective talent of our workforces is the only sustainable differentiator that will provide competitive advantage over time.

I look forward to seeing you at SHRM.