Trying to summarise a 45 minute multi-person conversation (for that read bun fight) into a blog post is something I find very difficult but here goes…

Yesterday I attended #TRULondon5 and having taken Bill Boorman up on his invite to run a track about 20 people were assembled to have a conversation about measuring quality of hire.

I started by setting the scene (which I’d also done in a post you can read here) and giving some clarity on keeping the conversation on track and no veering off to what was seemingly everyone’s favourite topic social recruiting. I think I may have enforced that a little strongly at times so if I did trample on anyone I’m sorry!

Rather than try and summarise the narrative here are some of the points that arose:

• Are we trying to define quality or value? Some believe the difference to be semantic and what we are really trying to define is contribution.
• Some thought value was the intangible and quality the hard measures. Others (mostly me) thought value is the tangible and quality was akin to value plus cultural fit.
• Understanding the expectation of the role is key. Very different for entry level to senior management and an organisation doesn’t want/need everyone to be high flying innovators etc
• There was a conversation about understanding ‘what good looks like’ with particular reference to a basketball player called Jeremy Lin (who I had never heard of). There’s a great post about him here from Hung Lee. It lead to discussions about the circumstances under which people succeed and what it takes to make talent flourish.
• Length of service or tenure was asserted as ‘the one true measure’ which met with some agreement and some disagreement. Given the rising cost of employment it was a means to deliver a return on investment for the costs of recruiting/inducting/training etc
• Given the rising role of contingent workers (not just temps but contractors, interims & consultants) some discussion arose about how that would impact any measure of tenure and also the disconnect between clarity of expectation on a contingent worker versus a permanent worker
• Tying quality to performance was discussed at length. With objections raised about the subjectivity of performance measures, how performance expectation isn’t understood at recruitment stage and how difficult it is for recruiters to influence hire once the individual is in role.
• Measuring assessment scores of new hires versus those of current employees was discussed as was of course the need for objective assessment and clear data. This of course would challenge some organisations on their current hiring practices and also requires a significant wealth of data to already exist.
• An interesting point was raised around measuring an individual’s value as a social recruiting asset – so how many referrals they give the organisation which resonated with the concept of net promoter scores. We didn’t discuss this at length but it was certainly different.
• The concept of following up with hiring managers and asking them structured questions was raised after the track but quickly shot down as requiring too much time and would be yet another thing that would end up being chased for

And then, as all the air seemed to have left the balloon, the fabulous Laurie Ruettimann interjected with a point which took the discussion to a whole different place and it went something like this…

“We need to get people jobs to stop them rioting”

which seemed as good a place as any to end….

Running the track was an interesting experience, they are difficult beasts to tame and I definitely don’t think I heard the silver bullet idea; I did get to understand opinions from different people and hopefully move the conversation on a step. This of course only represents my perceptions of the conversation and hopefully some other participants will comment.

For me, if I were implementing a quality of hire measure it would be a data driven exercise comparing the performance scores of hires against their group (whether that be function, division or whole organisation) to understand where they were in comparison to the whole. I think this would be sustainable and rational but would require the recruitment system and the HR system to interact which could of course lead to the end of the world. And yes performance measures are subjective but they are the subjectivity that gets believed (and actioned in many bonus schemes) so let’s get over that! I may be wrong  (often happens) but let’s at least do SOMETHING…

The importance of this can of course be questioned (‘why do we have to measure everything’) but if I was the CEO/HR Director I want to understand that quality is being brought into my organisation. If I’m the hiring manager likewise. If I was the recruiter I would want something to challenge the hiring managers with (a push back to contingent hiring decisions) but also a measure that empowers me to challenge the cost/time challenges that are ever present…

Having reflected on the experience the one thing that has surprised me is how recruiters perceive themselves in the organisation and how they see their role….but we’ll save that for another day.

In the meantime a few of us took part in a livestream chat after the track which you can see here if you can face more!

It was a very interesting and informative meeting with someone who ‘knows their onions’ had some interesting views on the market and how it feels at the moment and some very useful advice.

During our conversation we discussed several individuals with whom I’ve worked and what became clear to me was considerable intelligence was gathered and retained on people considered ‘high potential’ that may form future targets for searches. What was more interesting was the time scale over which this information was gathered and the focus on verifying information that would form the support to any shortlisting decision – we’re talking 5-10 years.

What appeared completely absent was any form of ‘social’ awareness – whether the individual was active on any form of social network, whether they contributed to any networking or forum, any blogging (micro or macro) and measurement of influence was based on delivery and reputation not on an algorithm (Klout, Kred etc)

Given their approach there are two ways to look at this (well broadly two):

1. Their approach is dated and needs to evolve

2. Their approach is valid for what they do

I’m not sure on the answer and I suppose only time will really tell but it did cause me to reflect and left me with one lingering question: the reputations and impact made online are they only made online? In other words does the impact we have “on here” really only impact those who play and in the ‘real world’ is the measure of reputation far more impactful than anyone with a high klout score would choose to acknowledge?

For my part I am going to play both sides of the fence, because in all honesty, why not?

Now whether St. Valentine was the patron saint of lovers or actually it was just dreamt up by Geoffrey Chaucer I don’t really mind. The reality is the modern Valentine’s Day is a commercially impactful expectation fest which has very little to do with love and lots to do with supply chains!

I was involved in an organised chat on Twitter recently which asked a question along the lines of “which is better for networking, online or face to face?” and my answer went something like “One enhances the other. Maintain & grow through online. Enrich and in-depth in real life. Also hard to get drunk online ” and I stick by that. I have a number of friends and a relatively small family but thanks for the wonders of Facebook and Twitter I pretty much know that they are all OK and getting on with their lives. Likewise for business contacts Twitter and Linkedin provide a similar source of information.

It does sometimes feel in this time of the rise of social media that it’s only those I’m connected to online that I stay truly up to date with and at times I find myself wondering about those not connected and should I be doing more (or shouldn’t they just get over it and get in the game). It was interesting catching up with a friend i’ve not seen for 4 months last week and in the course of the conversation she confessed she both lurks on twitter and reads most of my tweets – the catch up was much easier I can tell you!!

An organisation I worked in for some time had painted on one of the walls of it’s staircases this:

“The unit of value is the customer relationship”

Having walked passed it thousands of times I got to a point of immunity to it but in reflecting on the nonsense that Valentine’s Day has become I think that whilst the word customer was appropriate in that context should I take a moment and think about the value in my relationships.

So there it is, my thought for the day – think about the people that matter to you, both business and personal and maybe take some extra time today in understanding and appreciating them and the value they bring to you and if you do have a significant other make sure they get a big snog too!

Afterword:

Having discussed this post with one of my closest friends last night he made the comment ‘bosses never send you a valentines card do they?’ so maybe that’s another thought…not sure how anonymity will work there though

If you think about cars their innovations follow a progression which I would describe as:

• Luxury optional extra
• Luxury defacto
• Standard optional extra
• Standard defacto
• Commoditised

The irony of some car brands is that actually this progression gets messed around and the luxury still make an extra what the standard brands make defacto (my Ford Fiesta had a rear windscreen wiper as standard!) but largely I think the progression holds. What starts out as a wow i.e. electric windows or iPod connectivity, becomes an expectation and reaches the point where it just isn’t noticed.

I was having a conversation with a friend over the weekend who is consulting at a well known plc. She has gone in there with a specific brief and is really enjoying getting stuck into what must be a very challenging organisation. In catching up we chatted about loads of things but it was the following comment that she made that stuck in my head,

“The previous HRD left to plaudits about the redesigned, reengineered and reenergised HR function but if that’s what they call redesigned….” (I may be paraphrasing, we’d both had quite a few wines but you get the point)

I shared the analogy of the electric windows and she went on to describe an HR function that was amazing at ‘the electric windows’, ‘the iPod connector’ and the ‘dual side climate control’ but actually the engine was rubbish and the car wouldn’t move.

If you read anything (this blog included), attend a conference or get into a conversation externally it is likely you will hear about and describe whatever people think the electric windows are but does our relentless focus on the new and exciting blind us to the role we are supposed to play in the organisation?

Whilst a lot of what HR had to deliver to a business isn’t exciting or conference worthy (who wants to talk about offer letters) to return to the car analogy – without a petrol cap you won’t get fuel to the engine at all… More to the point is the ‘stuff’ that gets the car going what the business value from HR where the new and shiny is what we choose to get focussed on with each other?

Personally, being someone who enjoys novelty and change I think previous bosses would at times be  pulling their hair out trying to get me to focus on the basic and maybe much as it for me would we all be served to take a moment thinking about what makes the car actually run rather than just the things it has that we can boast about?

It could be argued (by me if no one else wants to) that inertia and risk aversion will keep the patient alive but with only with a ventilator and the only way to get this back to anywhere near fighting fitness will be some bold moves, courage and displays of confident decisiveness.

The consumer confidence index produced by GfK was flat year on year between January 2011 and January 2012 (although had improved by 4 points from December into January) at the same time the Reed Job Index is 9% higher than it was in January 2011 with only a 2% improvement from December into January.

The Reed index was created in December 2009 (and set at 100) and now sits at 123 but are we in better or worse shape than we were just over 2 years ago? You can probably argue it either way depending on what perspective you take and what data you use but I personally would like to think the worst is over and we now fully understand the problem (fingers crossed) so just step forward those bold confident decision makers….

As part of Reed’s PR effort I had a conversation with Marketing Director of Reed.co.uk, Mark Rhodes and our conversation covered a breadth of information around the job market. Whilst Mark acknowledged the index was based on data from reed.co.uk and I politely alluded to where that would position the data in the market considering reed’s brand we discussed at length the fundamental weakness in an index of this nature as it measures jobs being created not jobs being filled.

If you’ve worked in HR you’ve likely at some point completed the ONS questionnaire on headcount and recruitment which usually in my case involved a chasing call from someone in finance with the threat of punishment for not completing it.According to the ONS there were 29.09million people in employment (between 16-64) in Jan 2011 vs 29.12million people in the same age group one year later. It would take a far greater statistician than I (that’s a long list) to compare the reed job index with the ONS data but the ONS number os 0.03 higher for the January 2012 data.

So Reed produce some good news and what do I do with it? Well not exactly treat it with cynicism but maybe some scrutiny and I wanted to use this to ask some questions:

• Does increased confidence in employment feel valid to you in February 2012?
• Do you think more jobs are net being created than are disappearing?
• Do you think jobs are being created and remaining unfilled? If so, why?

I’ll leave you with those and bid you a good weekend!

What I confess I forgot to ask is how many endocrinologist and lollipop people vacancies they’ve ever had on Reed….next time!

I can’t remember how it first got stuck in there but if I was doing a ‘Peter Ustinov as Poirot’ style trail of breadcrumbs it would involve:

• A comment made in my performance review 4 years ago
• A blog post from Katie McNab (which I can’t find)
• A conversation with Lisa Scales
• A tweet from Bill Boorman

The upshot of this grain of sand and what has followed is that I am a track leader at #TRULondon being held in a few weeks in ….yes….you guessed it….London.

For a good description of TRU I will turn to Peter Gold who said this on his blog recently:

“What is TRU?

In case you are not sure, TRU events are UNconferences which means there are no formal presentations instead being replaced by tracks. A track is an open conversation between a small number of track leaders (typically 1-3) who start a discussion around a topic and the audience debate as they choose. The tracks are very informal, unstructured, sometimes heated and often fun. People can come and go as they choose rather than made to stay put until the end.”

You can book tickets and find out more information by clicking the image above but the reason for this blog is not to explain the unconference process or how it all works. The point of this blog is to gather some views on the track I am running to feed into the debate on the day.

The track is entitled “Quality of Hire” and refers to the metrics so beloved by organisations. I imagine if you put the average resourcing manager under the spotlight and asked them about their metrics they would all quote at minimum time to hire and cost per hire. These are really easy to track and calculate and are so called ‘hard measures’ that help people achieve bonuses. They may throw in something about average age of vacancy and some may even include some kind of turnover measure either during probation or during first year of employment. I’m sure there are some classics I’m missing but you get the idea…

The conversation I want to have is how do you effectively measure quality of hire. I have a few ideas myself but don’t want to share them just yet…. so Dear Blog Readers, the floor is yours, let the debate commence…..NOW!

P.S. I’ve chatted this idea over with a few people over the past few weeks who have had a little input. One of them, Roger Philby of The Chemistry Group apparently has an argument that will “blow you out of the water” so if you feel so inclined please tweet Roger (He’s @RogerPhilby) and continue to goad him into turning up and making his argument live!

This particular session was hosted by Wickland Westcott with their client the Co-operative Group. For those of you that aren’t aware of WW (which may be many as they are one of the best kept secrets in HR consulting) they are a small/boutique firm with offices in Macclesfield & London. I must confess now that I’ve done a fair amount of work with WW and rate them highly so may not be at my most objective in what follows.

The session was co-presented by the consultant who’d led the work, Keith McCambridge and the HRD for Talent from The Co-operative, Jackie Lanham. That was the first difference – it wasn’t a consultancy saying ‘this is how we saved our client’ and it wasn’t a practitioner saying ‘this is what we did….oh and they helped’. It was Keith who said the golden bullet line (I think he meant silver bullet) and what followed was not a review of process and procedure but rather a narrative of the shared experience of delivering a succession plan to the Co-operative.

Some of the key points shared in the session were:

Fear is a great motivator

Rather than using an argument based on the logic of “we really really should have a succession plan you know”, the motivator behind getting the work done was – look at M&S and Vodafone, they didn’t have robust succession and look at how much trouble it caused them. Not sexy, not sweet but effective!

Focus on the people who want it

The succession process at the Co-operative wasn’t an obligatory/everyone must fit in a box process but rather focussed on the people who demonstrated desire to want to advance. This sparked an interesting debate about the fact that driven people are not always competent to move forward and the competent people sometimes don’t want to move forward.

Don’t hide from the Well Poisoners

A well poisoner is a term I first heard attributed to Walt Disney and describes those people who are not only negative towards your change/initiative but actively work against your change. In this case these people were involved early on and some were included in the steering group for the project.

Process is a turn off – hide it!

As with a lot of projects of this nature, there is a lot of process involved in making it actually land. However, for the participants and the leadership this is not the element that will engage or excite them – hide as much as you can.

Context is key

The Co-operative is a high growth acquisitive organisation that means new and challenging roles will be created and drive the need for succession. This context means the appetite you create by engaging in succession planning can be satisfied by the organisation but being aware of the context in your organisation is important before embarking.

I really enjoyed the session (and the breakfast) and it was good to hear of an organisation focussing on and more importantly embracing succession planning not just as a paper exercise but as something that becomes part of the strategic development of the organisation. Jackie did share the fact that 2 executive appointments had been made internally that previously would have required external search – more than paying for the process – clear ROI, nice!

I await my next briefing….but in the meantime, Keith – cash no cheques and Jackie if I could direct you here

I was fortunate enough to be joined by several people who it transpired were up for having a good open conversation. Credit where it’s due, they were:

• David Clutterbuck, Professor at Oxford Brookes & Sheffield Hallam
• Steve Moss HRD at Leaseplan
• Michael Keating HRD at Eaton Electrical
• David (who’s surname I didn’t write down), HR Insights

and here we are ‘unconferencing’

Photo courtesy of Jon Ingham

The topic I proposed was “Leadership Development: Making silk purses out of sow’s ears” and whilst I had a clear idea in my mind about what I meant it did appear in my haste to come up with a topic I created some confusion. The reference was not intended to refer to the participants but rather the process, how, in times like these where resources are constrained could an organisation still deliver great leadership development activity.

I made copious notes during the session and if I could find those notes now I would feel far more comfortable in writing this post but I opened the conversation with the question and about 3o minutes later we paused for breath!

Of the key points that came out of the conversation some were what you would expect but there were a couple that sparked new thought. The points were:

• Call it something different – calling it Leadership Development ups the ante
• There is a perception that external delivery/facilitation is better than internal
• Involve the wider business in delivering the programme
• Peer to peer power is often underutilised
• External consultants have far more freedom to challenge
• Use different businesses that are non competitive but that have characteristics you want to improve (e.g. one company in the service sector had spent time with a major supermarket understanding speed & urgency)
• Form a cooperative with complimentary but non-competitive businesses and share internal resource i.e. your internal becomes their external

It was the last two points of discussion that got me quite excitable.

The idea of modelling characteristics from other businesses I thought was great – I have worked with other businesses on practice or processes before and used their best practice examples in developing my own work but this idea of trying to understand their characteristics really appealed to me.

When it came to the idea of the cooperative I got very excitable. The last 2 years have been a real eye opener for me on the power of developing better networks and this idea appealed on so many levels. It could be about sharing best practice, about delivering great work more cost effectively, exposing colleagues to new companies/people, developing colleagues facilitation/delivery skills and building meaningful relationships with new people/organisations. It just has so many possibilities.

The session (and it’s follow-up) demonstrated to me, yet again, the power of meeting new people, getting involved in open conversation and the ideas have been added to ‘the book’ and will be brought to bear in the next role I land in.

To say they were well attended would be a slight exaggeration. I think it was only Jon cajoling people into coming that ensured a decent turn out and in looking around at the fellow table/topic hosts I must confess it did feel a bit like ‘The Usual Suspects’. That said what followed in the unconference session was an interesting conversation which will feature in a post of its own tomorrow. The first of the ‘what was interesting’ points was watching people’s reactions to being invited to participate in the sessions – dismissive, fearful, lack in comprehension or quick to talk about the other sessions they planned to attend. Whilst getting people discussing and sharing may seem attractive to some there are clearly others that are still enjoying being talked at.

I attended the second of two unconference sessions and the output from both then formed the starting point for a discussion session at the end of the day. Charitably it started slowly and I did actually feel sorry for Jon who was doing the facilitation equivalent of endlessly tap dancing… But slowly and surely the pace started to pick up aided in part by the appearance of a screen showing the tweets being shared (why the hashtag was not promoted anywhere in the conference remains a mystery and why this was the first appearance of the ‘back channel’ also I don’t get).

Jon’s fellow facilitators did seem a little reluctant to jump into the unstructured nature of the session but as someone sat there watching it happen and participating you could feel the energy and enthusiasm growing in the room and the second of the ‘what was interesting points’ is that it seemed to grow more when people had something to disagree with. My feeling is we got to the point where as it finished there did seem to be some disappointment that it was time to finish.

Having reflected on the unconference session and the plenary follow-up it does feel like an evolutionary step. I don’t think we’ll get everyone over the chasm quite yet, maybe need to have some time slots that are ‘unconference only’? I’m not sure but if you could capture the enthusiasm and discussion that was happening both in the unconference and plenary and bottle it I’m sure many conference organisers would be in the queue to buy.

I must doff my cap to Jon for putting himself out there in running these sessions and I’m sure like me many people have shared their thoughts with Jon which should hopefully help him and those in similar positions to continue the evolutionary process.

Afterword:

Jon has blogged on the same topic and you can find his post here

One of the sessions I attended was presented by Rachel Denmeade who I believe is Director of Resourcing, Talent & Development (or maybe in a different order) at Everything Everywhere (the name comes from the mission – see picture), the organisation formed by the joint venture between Orange and T-Mobile in the UK.

Now we’ve all been to these sessions where senior people from well known organisations talk you through an episode from their company narrative and they fall broadly into two camps namely:

1. We did this, we were amazing and the whole world is now amazing thanks to us
2. We did this, some of it worked, some of it didn’t, if we were doing it again here’s what we’d do differently

Thankfully for all present Ms Denmeade chose the latter approach and a very interesting session followed. It’s an absolutely massive (such proper business language) JV and formed from two organisations that were and remain competitive – Orange is owned by France Telecom and T-Mobile by Deutsche Telecom.

There was loads of good stuff contained therein but the point that really stuck with me was the way the Senior HR team chose to resource the change programme from an HR perspective. For any of you who have lived through a significant change programme such as this (I have) the usual approach seems to be to take either external interims/consultants or the usual suspects from the HR team and give them the “new & shiny” work to do. Meanwhile, back in ‘business as usual’ a resentment is growing in the remaining team who are busy cranking out the day job looking over at the new toys and feeling isolated and left behind. In trying to create a new unified culture even the HR approach puts barriers in the way.

What Everything Everywhere decided to do was spread the work across the existing team and get people to take on additional responsibility and accountability for the JV work whilst doing BAU. In the process of this they structured how these people would increase the delegation of work to their teams and support those people being delegated to. I loved this!

Not only do people doing the day job get to play with the shiny but also the people working for them get the development opportunity of covering work at the next level and the sense of increased accountability.

In the list of things that they would do differently if they had their time again I was very pleased not to see this HR structure on the list as something that hadn’t worked and it’s an idea I will pinch pay homage to at some point in the future.

More HR Directors Business Forum stuff to come but now a message from our sponsors….