Four Groups Blog

Jason Corsello highlights the ability of Talent Management software firms to match and link competencies across industries and clients. Demonstrating the relationship between this data and revenues and costs in the words of Jason;

…is…can I say…groundbreaking?

This could be an interesting trend to develop over the coming years?

An interesting article and comment from HR Magazine highlights the lack of consensus over appropriate selection methods (also see Personnel Today). There are some pretty startling figures in here too, along with the editorial comment;

Popular recruitment methods are useless at predicting whether a new employee will be any good in their job, according to the very people who use them most. Cranfield’s latest Recruitment Confidence Index shows that 86% of HR managers who take written references do not find them useful as predictors when it comes to finding an applicant who can go on to do the job well. The majority of HR managers surveyed also found panel interviews (78%) and CVs (67%) poor indicators of future success. The more modern psychometric tests were deemed ‘not useful’ by 44%.

HR comment: HR departments are either sticking to what they know – even if they are poor at predicting successful employees – or there is a real gap in the selection process that someone has yet to fill.

Perhaps there is a gap waiting to be filled?

Personnel Today have an interesting opinion piece in which they call for greater sophistication in demonstrating the value added by HR and HR Outsourcing in general;

HR outsourcing’s tools and techniques need to move up to a new level of sophistication. Such a level would enable vendors (and their clients) to have an exchange amounting more to ‘if we put in x we get y back’. Of course, how x might influence y is enormously complex and requires a deeper level of understanding.

Am I preaching to the converted? Why, then, does the performance of a multi-billion dollar industry continue to be evaluated in such a superficial way? I’ll bet that HR outsourcing’s failure to adequately understand its performance – and how this drives the performance of its clients – is the primary reason why the HR outsourcing industry isn’t twice its current size.

This made me think of some of our own ideas on linking relationships and behaviour to the bottom line…

Max Goldman makes a very telling remark about the means and methods of adding value from a HR standpoint. Commenting on a 2006 Talent Management Survey Max writes;

The most interesting piece, I thought, was this quote from Averbrook: “Many organizations roll out a performance management system or workforce analytics system and simply just put it out there. They don’t do a good job of making sure that people know why these systems are implemented, show people the value of the systems, etc. So if organizations don’t market these systems to their employees, the employees will just think of them as another online tool and won’t actually use them to their full advantage.”

Surely this is another symptom of an old problem?

I read an interesting post from Jerry Pounds at Management Issues. In short, the issue of intentional emotional distress can now carry a hefty penalty, at least in the US.

A hospital maintenance worker was recently awarded an $11.65 million jury verdict in Federal District court in Chicago against his employer for intentional infliction of emotional distress.

In an article in HR Magazine, Jathan Janove reports an increase in employee suits related to “discharge, demotion, pay cuts and other adverse employment actions.”

According to Janove, employees sue not because of the specific action but because of the emotions created by the “perceived insult.”

According to a 1999 study in Ohio, “employees who were not treated with dignity and respect were 35 times more likely to file claims (emotional injury) than those who were.” Employee anger becomes employer litigation; a threat to employer liability and a risk management nightmare.

No doubt organisations will find this a challenge to react to and successfully meet. As Jerry writes;

For decades, the American worker has suppressed their anger about indignities and disrespect experienced because of an anachronistic class system perpetuated by inadequate leadership models. They harbored a burning anger that is finally finding expression and recourse in a sympathetic generation of judges and jurors.