The Trouble with HR

Overview

What to do when HR's old tricks for finding talent don't work anymore.
A 2006 study by IOMA found that companies with effective talent management practices retain employees for longer time periods and outperform industry averages by 22 percent. But most HR departments are still using the same old cookie-cutter approach to finding new hires. This book offers a revolutionary new approach to attracting and hanging onto the best and brightest talent, providing real-world strategies for:

• identifying and evaluating prospective employees

• deciding who will develop and progress into the management ranks

• fitting the person's skills to the job

• developing a strategy to groom one's staff and keep them happy

• and finding ways to reward them properly and keep them engaged

The book explores the latest thinking in employee relations, compensation and benefits, training, on-boarding, and development practices. This is a unique, powerful book no one concerned with finding and retaining the best people should be without.

About the Author

Johnny C. Taylor Jr. (Charlotte, NC) was chairman of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), is a keynote speaker on HR issues, and serves as CEO of Rushmore Drive, a new IAC/InterActive Corp. website.

Gary M. Stern (New York, NY) co-authored Minority Rules and has written for Investor's Business Daily and The Wall Street Journal.

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Review Quotes

"Taylor and Stern provide the reader with practical, viable tools that can serve to create and sustain a flexible, integrated, and creative business organization…invaluable for any company, large or small, profit or not-for-profit.? -- Graziadio Business Report

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Cover Copy

Why is HR so underused when it comes to hiring and retaining employees? The trouble with HR, according to this insightful book, is that CEOs and managers often view their HR departments as impediments to getting results. They fail to understand how HR can radically improve the bottom line by using best practices for hiring and retaining top talent.

The Trouble with HR supplies the knowledge and strategies to change that attitude.

Filled with insider tips from an experienced HR professional and many real-life examples, the book explains how to develop a strategically focused, long-term approach to hiring and retention that includes:

• Establishing a consistent talent acquisition process that reflects your organization's identity

• Interviewing based on a detailed job description

• Fitting the job with the candidate

• Rewarding people both financially and via recognition

• Making employees feel respected and valued

• Developing your best employees to become the organization's future leaders

Sadly, too many managers and executives rely on quick interviews and their gut instincts to quickly fill positions—or hire good people and then completely ignore them. The results are many disastrous choices and a steady exodus of disenchanted employees. Tailored to HR professionals, business executives, managers, and entrepreneurs, The Trouble with HR supplies powerful, proven strategies for getting the best people on board—and keeping them there.

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Jacket Copy

Nothing—not your product design, your marketing campaign, your technological innovations—is as important to your organization's success as your ability to hire and retain the best people. It's a widely accepted but neglected fact. In reality, hiring scenarios usually involve harried managers scrambling to fill suddenly vacated positions, with no planning and no strategy, with little more than gut instincts to guide them.Where is HR in this process? Very often stuck in a box, relegated to the sidelines. But HR can be a crucial ally in finding and keeping stellar employees—not just another layer of bureaucracy to wade through. The Trouble with HR helps human resources professionals become that ally.

This book offers step-by-step instructions for putting the right people in the right jobs in any organization, whether you're a Fortune 500 company, a small startup, a nonprofit, or a government entity. Packed with real-life examples from companies such as Yahoo!, Facebook, and Southwest Airlines, as well as interviews with well-known HR professionals and the latest and best practices in the field, this indispensable resource gives you a winning edge in the recruiting wars, even in the most competitive industries. You'll learn how to:

• Turn your talent scout into a top-level executive, and put into action a five-step talent acquisition strategy that works

• Create an environment where people really want to stay by paying them fairly, treating them well, training them thoroughly, and getting them to fall in love with your company

• Use a 360-degree approach to write detailed job descriptions that will keep the hiring process moving in the right direction

• Make hiring decisions based on objective criteria, and avoid the costly mistake of relying on subjective feelings that someone is right for the job

• Select potential leaders from inside the organization and implement a leadership development plan for grooming them

• Beef up your department's knowledge base with information such as retention statistics, employment trends, and how to locate talent pools

• Transform HR from a sideline activity into a true leadership position that works with the business managers and executives on people issues—the lifeblood of organizations and the undisputed area of expertise for knowledgeable, dynamic HR departments

Johnny C. Taylor Jr. was chairman of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), is a keynote speaker on HR issues, and serves as CEO of Rushmore Drive, a new IAC/InterActive Corp Internet business. He has held senior legal and HR executive roles with many companies, including Blockbuster, Paramount Pictures, and Alamo Rent-A-Car. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Gary M. Stern co-authored Minority Rules: Turn Your Ethnicity into a Competitive Edge and has written for Investor's Business Daily and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in New York City.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE GUIDE TO CHOOSING THE RIGHT PEOPLE: THE TEN MAJOR HIRING MISTAKES AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM Anticipating your client's changing needs. Adapting to a global environment. Thinking outside the box. You could make a case these skills are necessary to keep your company one step ahead of competitors. But there is one major skill that most experts overlook that may be the ultimate decider of how your business or organization does in the coming years: hiring the right people. Arguably, if you don't hire the right people—and retain them— you won't be able to devise new products, meet customer needs, and sustain the business. Most CEOs and business leaders spend ample time on their marketing plans and financial projections. Most often they leave hiring up to the business managers who devote the same energy and research to recruiting the right staff as they do ordering paper clips. Recruiting new staff is often considered an afterthought, something to attend to after the "primary? tasks get done. Many hiring executives view human resources and the HR function as an impediment, a department responsible for filing paperwork away in steel cabinets, forcing performance appraisals on them, and adding little value. Rather than serving as a support staff and adding value for recruiting and hiring, HR is often ignored. The Trouble with HR: An Insider's Guide to Finding and Keeping the Best Talent makes the case that organizations must take a new approach to managing their human resources because, in an increasingly competitive and global economy, the key to future success and growth is simple: Hire the right people and retain them. Too many organizations hire for the minute and never think about long-term retention. For some reason, for-profit and notfor- profit entities, as well as government agencies, continue to believe that it makes sense to be reactive as opposed to proactive when it comes to managing what they all claim to be "our most important asset.? Business, nonprofit, and government leaders alike must understand why hiring the right people, and being able to retain them, is so critical to the bottom-line performance of their organizations. Consider the following: 1. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2012, a mere three years away, there will be 165 million jobs but only 162 million people to fill them. Holding on to your talented staff will become increasingly significant as baby boomers retire and the difficulty replacing them intensifies. 2. The article "Making Talent a Strategy Priority,? in the January 2008 issue of The McKinsey Quarterly, written by Matthew Guthfride, Asmus B. Komm, and Emily Lawson, attests to the role that hiring the right people and retaining them plays in a company's future. "Vying for 2 THE TROUBLE WITH HR top talent in an intensively competitive global marketplace? will become a major strategic initiative for most companies, according to the authors. Organizations will have to begin to see and use human capital "in a focused, deliberate, and proactive way to optimize the workforce.? The article makes clear that most companies are currently ill equipped to take advantage of their human capital and that companies that do better at retaining employees will have an easier time competing for global talent than the organizations that ignore turnover: "Measure turnover, understand its causes, and design programs to control it to reduce vacancy costs— both financial and productivity—to avoid its devastating affect on business.? 3. In an October 2005 Harvard Business Review article, "Growing Talent as If Your Business Depended on It,? the authors, Jeffrey M. Cohn, Rakesh Khurana, and Laura Reeves, cite a survey of twenty CEOs who said that having the right talent in the right roles was paramount to their companies' success and that a talent management program was important for developing effective leaders. Sadly, however, nearly half of those very CEOs admitted that they had no succession plans or retention strategies for vice presidents and above—the most critical group of employees on their bench. The Retention Imperative Retention is not something organizations can choose to do if they want to be viable, successful entities in the future. The organizations that can hold onto their staff, develop them into leaders, move them up the organization, create a steady flow of talent, and not spend the bulk of their time on replacing talent will WIN. And since winning is the name of the game, there must be a retention imperative. And we need leaders to create an environment where staff is recognized, development becomes a natural part of business, and staff wants to stay. At the companies where turnover predominates and making people a priority is given only lip service, productivity falters. Not only that, but line managers spend more of their time on recruitment and hiring and less time devoted to their business and revenue growth. Developing a Whole New Outlook on Hiring and Retaining Though two of us, Johnny C. Taylor, Jr and Gary M. Stern, collaborated on this book, we're going to draw on the experiences of Taylor, who has been a general counsel, an HR director, and CEO of RushmoreDrive.com, a new Internet site and community. Hence we're going to write it in first person from Taylor's viewpoint, though the two of us wrote the book. So I'm often asked what's more important—hiring or retention? And like any good lawyer, I say both. The fact of the matter is that they are equally important. It is classic tomfoolery to focus on retaining employees who should have never made it into your organization in the first place. If you hire the wrong people and then hold onto them, your organization will fail. And if you hire the right people and can't hold onto them, your organization will suffer just as much. Hence, a strong hiring strategy is a prerequisite to a successful employee retention strategy. Hiring the best people requires a whole new hiring approach. Until recently, the common practice, whether in Fortune 500 multinationals, small and midsize businesses, not-for-profits, or government agencies, was for most hiring to be done on a stopgap, emergency, "filling the vacancy? basis. Someone left for a better job, and the company ratcheted up efforts to hire a replacement. In a knowledge economy, when millions of baby boomers are retiring each year, the quick-fix hiring effort no longer works. Instead, as this book suggests, there is a better way, an entirely different and very deliberate approach to recruiting and retaining people over the life cycle of an employee's stay at the organization. The approach keeps everyone involved. That way, when you need someone to step in to fill a vacancy, you already know the strengths of your internal employees and who can advance into managerial or leadership positions. In a sense, organizations have to operate more like sports teams. Every football team knows that it has a forty-man squad, a "taxi? squad with five additional players, and is constantly searching for qualified talent to fill positions in case of injuries. Football teams recognize that the best talent wins games and those players are constantly in and out of games due to injuries, trades, or deteriorating skills. Too many businesses, on the other hand, have adopted the "ostrich? approach—keeping their head in the sand and ignoring hiring decisions until the emergency happens. When most people think of hiring and retaining staff, they think first of Fortune 500 and other major corporations. But nearly everything that we focus on in this book—creating a long-term hiring strategy, identifying talent, interviewing based on a detailed job description, fitting the job with the candidate, hiring for the future—is as true for the military, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses as for large public corporations. Because most nonprofits and small businesses cannot offer stock options and have some restrictions on bonuses compared to public companies, these organizations must focus on making the job appealing, providing more autonomy, giving staff more challenges, and compensating for the lack of financial incentives.

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Table of Contents

CONTENTS

Foreword by Wayne Brockbank . . . v

Chapter 1 Guide to Choosing the Right People: The Ten Major Hiring Mistakes and What to

Do About Them . . . 1

Chapter 2 Developing a Talent Acquisition Strategy That Works . . . 33

Chapter 3 Retaining People by Making Them Fall in Love with the Company . . . 63

Chapter 4 Objectifying the Job Search . . . 99

Chapter 5 Training and Development:Using T&D to Retain Staff and Execute Your Business Strategy . . .133

Chapter 6 What You Should Expect from Your HR Executive . . .163

Chapter 7 Being Courageous: The Ultimate Test of HR . . . 199

Index . . . 231

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