I am usually skeptical of books that promote a specific company or corporate mission. So when I began reading Finding Keepers: The Monster Guide to Hiring and Holding the World’s Best Employees, I was a bit distrustful. And as someone who covers HR, I very much doubted that this book would tell me anything that I hadn’t already heard before.
But I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. The 214-page book is packed with good information and tips for HR executives and recruiters on how to identify and keep the best talent.
Nothing in the book is particularly groundbreaking. But the authors—Steve Pogorzelski, executive vice president of global sales and customer development at Monster; Jesse Harriott, vice president of Global Monster Insights; and Doug Hardy, who runs Monster’s publishing program—do make a strong case for why companies need to approach recruiting as they do marketing.
True to the title, the authors do promote Monster, but not in a way that is offensive to readers. There is a range of perspectives from executives at various companies, including Deloitte, Nationwide Financial and Valero Energy.
In thinking about recruiting the best employees, the authors note that 80 percent of potential candidates are employed, but are “much less attached to their current employer than workers historically have been.”
Not all of these employees are out there looking for new jobs, but they are still willing to go if the right opportunity presents itself. HR executives need to be aware of these employees not just for recruiting purposes, but because many of these “poised employees” are their own workers, the authors note.
The problem with recruiting today is that too often companies approach recruiting as a weeklong transaction. Finding Keepers argues that employers instead should view the employee engagement cycle in three phases: attract, acquire and advance.
The authors say that companies usually peter out after the acquisition phase, and thus good talent doesn’t stay around for very long. The conversation about finding the best talent, therefore, can’t just be a discussion about how to improve hiring practices. Companies need to figure out how to keep these people after they have been hired.
But the first step is to attract the right candidates, and Finding Keepers provides solid ways that recruiters can go about doing this. The book provides very practical advice about how to word a job advertisement and how to make sure the interview experience is positive for candidates. Again, not rocket science, but these are things that—at least in my experience—many employers brush aside.
“The dynamics between employer and candidate during the acquire phase set the tone for the relationship that follows,” the authors say.
This means that companies might want to consider keeping in touch with their second-best candidates in case they need them in the future. For example, the authors suggest reaching out to these “silver medal candidates” and finding out what they thought of the interview process and what they would change. This is just an easy way to keep these candidates engaged and increase your chances of being able to hire them down the line.
Another practical, yet innovative, suggestion from the authors is for employers to understand why employees leave. Too often in exit interviews, the HR executive asks, “Why are you leaving for this other company?” The authors say the question should be “Why were you looking for a new job?” Again this isn’t rocket science, but I bet it would greatly help companies understand why their employees leave.
As I was reading this book, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the bad interview experiences I have had in my career. It felt like dating—waiting for them to call and often never hearing back. Once, it took a year for someone who interviewed me to call back. A year! Our initial interview went well, but he never called to tell me that the company gave the position to an internal candidate. A year later, however, this person called me out of the blue for a different job—he still had all of my news clips and résumé. Clearly, I had made an impression on him, but his failure to reach out to me resulted in my feeling less than excited about going to work for him.
Are companies really sincere about rethinking the way they find and acquire talent? Or do they just assume that once the market goes sour, good talent will come banging on the door? Let me know what you think will happen.
In his new book, Talent on Demand, Peter Cappelli attempts to address an issue that I would hope all companies are thinking about today: how to manage the unpredictable demand for talent.
Unlike other books on talent management, this book uses terms and examples that CEOs and CFOs can understand. Instead of just talking about turnover, productivity and other HR metrics, Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, talks in terms of making money: “And making money requires that you understand the costs as well as the benefits associated with your talent management choices,” he says.
The gist of Cappelli’s book is that most companies are relying on outdated and ineffective strategies to develop their internal talent, while being way too dependent on outside hiring.
For example, many companies still use a development model for employees that assumes they will be with them for their entire careers. Under what Cappelli calls the “Organization Man” model, companies train employees to learn the skills that are specific to their business needs, with the understanding that those employees will grow with the company.
But the reality today is that companies can’t predict what their talent needs are going to be 10 years from now, and even if they could, it’s not likely that their employees will stay with them for that long.
Most employers have realized that and thus have become overly dependent on outside hiring, which has its own set of challenges.
Cappelli argues that employers should instead adopt “on-demand talent management,” which means developing employees according to competencies that could be valuable no matter where the business is in 10 years.
He advocates on-the-job training, but cautions companies against rotational assignments, because too often good talent ends up waiting on the sidelines for their rotation to come up, and nothing is more frustrating to an employee than waiting. Other ways that companies can get the most bang from their buck in on-demand training are:
Peer training, where employees can volunteer to mentor others.
Outside training, where organizations lend employees to outside charities or even to clients (as consulting company Mercer does) to learn from those experiences.
Cost-shared training, where employees are asked to foot some of the bill for their outside training. One way to do this is through training wages, where employers pay employees less while they are in a training program. Another way is through tuition assistance programs, or having them go through training before they take on a job.
All of Cappelli’s points are pretty interesting, and companies should take many of them seriously.
But the real problem today with companies is that they too often give lip service to employee development, but fail to follow through. I can’t count how many times a week I hear companies say how much they value their people, that they’re the No. 1 asset, etc. But when the going gets tough, those same people are the first to get the boot.
Since we seem to be heading into a recession, I wonder whether companies will embrace Cappelli’s ideas on developing talent, or will just resort to the old ways of mass layoffs, with the hope that they will be able to find the talent again when the market picks up. What do you think?
Whether you like her or not (and plenty of people don’t), Hillary Clinton’s showing on Super Tuesday says something about how far women have come in being taken seriously as leaders. Clinton has noted that when her 88-year-old mother was born, women couldn’t even vote.
But it would be going too far to say that Clinton is proof that women are now judged solely on the strength of their leadership and that gender doesn’t matter. The pummeling that Carly Fiorina took during her tenure at HP is proof of that. Further evidence can be found in book published this fall, Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders.
Some business books toss off anecdotes and pretend that’s research. Not so here. The authors, Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, both college professors, pack the book with studies and data to support their answers to the provocative questions serve as chapter titles:
Is there still a glass ceiling? No. Instead, women have to negotiate a labyrinth of conflicting demands, expectations and barriers to advance.
Are men natural leaders? Men score higher in some traits associated with leadership. And women do better in others.
Do family responsibilities hold women back? Is discrimination still a problem? Yes and yes.
I think it’s interesting that the authors settled on the labyrinth as their metaphor. Without going too much into the mythic realm, as a recent post did, I’ll just mention that in Greek mythology, it was a woman, Ariadne, who knew her way around the labyrinth that her father had ordered built to hold a monster, the Minotaur. And it was Ariadne who gave her lover, Theseus, the thread he used to find his way out of the maze after killing the creature. So what did Ariadne get for her trouble? Theseus abandoned her on the island of Naxos. I told you that office romances never work out.
Through the Labyrinth is fascinating and depressing in almost equal measures, depending on the page and the finding. For example:
Unlike women who have bumped into the glass ceiling because they’re not perceived as leadership material in a male-dominated world, men working in female-dominated careers often ride the “glass escalator,” ascending faster than women. Their token status works for them.
The double bind is alive and well: Acting like a man—assertive and aggressive—is often seen as the wrong way to proceed. Acting like a woman—being soft-spoken, or just plain soft—is just as likely to block professional progress. The authors quote Kim Campbell, who served as Canadian prime minister briefly in 1993: “I don’t have a traditionally female way of speaking. I don’t end my sentences with a question mark. I’m quite assertive. If I didn’t speak the way I do, I wouldn’t have been seen as a leader. But my way of speaking may have grated on people who were not used to hearing it from a woman. It was the right way for a leader to speak, but it wasn’t the right way for a woman to speak. It goes against type.”
Women endure some astounding suggestions from their bosses and colleagues on how they should behave to get ahead in the workplace. The authors quote Patricia Woertz, CEO of Archer Daniels Midland, who recalled that one of her first bosses “assured her that children would ruin her career: ‘Get yourself fixed,’ he said, ‘and put it on your expense report.’ ” Woertz didn’t take the advice. She had three children, and an “extraordinarily successful business career,” the authors say.
If you can hang in until Chapter 10, you’ll find some sort-of-good news—a discussion of the techniques that women use to successfully thread their way through the labyrinth. As you might guess, it’s all about juggling, balancing and, sometimes, overachieving. “It isn’t fair, but women often need to be exceptionally good to be credited with the abilities of less-competent men,” Eagly and Carli write.
And as if they could hear the screams of their readers, they add a few pages later: “Some readers may object to some of our advice, because it implies that women must accommodate themselves to existing cultural and organizational norms rather than the other way around. Our point is that women should not wait to seek leadership until organizational and cultural changes have created a level playing field. Women who initially break into male-dominated roles face special challenges, but when they are successful, they can foster progressive organizational change that creates greater fairness for the women who follow in their footsteps.”
It takes guts, that’s for sure. Here’s a thank you to Clinton, Fiorina, Woertz and all the other women who are leading the way through the labyrinth. Keep an eye out for the Minotaur.
A young man is unhappy and in turmoil over his life. He encounters a wise but mysterious old man who seems to command knowledge that could make all his dreams come true, but for the youth to achieve his goals, the old man demands that he pass the tests and challenges he will put before him.
And it’s also The Go-Giver, a new book that modestly (and accurately) describes itself as “A little story about a powerful business idea.”
It’s pretty high in Amazon’s rankings for business and motivational books, and I would guess that its positive message and its mytho-heroic story are the reasons why.
So, just as Joseph Campbell set forth in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book that George Lucas used as a thematic blueprint for Star Wars, The Go-Giver begins with a youth who stumbles into a secret world. In this case, it’s it’s Joe, a 25-year-old company go-getter who is struggling to succeed in his sales business. He’s lost the big contract he was after, and so goes in search of the mysterious “Chairman,” who, he thinks, he can use as leverage to win back the big account.
The Chairman lives regally in a “beautiful stone mansion.” (Campbell notes that the first stage of the mythological journey is the “call to adventure,” signifying the destiny that has summoned the hero “and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of the society to a zone unknown.” Campbell says the zone can be represented as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, but it’s always a “place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings.” So too in The Go-Giver.)
The Chairman leads Joe through his journey of initiation, introducing him to transformative characters—the chef, the real estate genius, the teacher-turned-CEO, the coffee goddess, and the ultra-mysterious “Connector.” He imparts to Joe the “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success,” and while that doesn’t have the same ring as the Sword in the Stone, the Force or the Nine Rings of Power, I guess stratospheric success will have to do in here in the world of the business quest. By the end of the book, Joe has learned and lived the laws, become the benevolent and successful “go-giver,” and secured the love and freedom of the fair maiden. At then the Ewoks dance with joy. Sorry—I got my quests mixed up. No Ewoks here.
As I said, a lot of people are buying this 132-page book, at $20 a pop, even though its message can be stated, verbatim, in less than 100 words. The writing is pedestrian, and all in all, I’d rather watch Star Wars. But clearly, thousands of Amazon readers are getting something that I’m missing. What is it? Let me know.
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In his new book, 
Whether you like her or not (and plenty of people don’t), Hillary Clinton’s showing on Super Tuesday says something about how far women have come in being taken seriously as leaders. Clinton has noted that when her 88-year-old mother was born, women couldn’t even vote.
A young man is unhappy and in turmoil over his life. He encounters a wise but mysterious old man who seems to command knowledge that could make all his dreams come true, but for the youth to achieve his goals, the old man demands that he pass the tests and challenges he will put before him.
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