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In an interesting analysis Gerry Crispin talks about the impact of employee referral on firm’s hiring over the Job boards. Not that job boards are ineffective but employee referrals are far more effective and have a greater impact than Job boards. He gives these inputs to substantiate the idea; Analyzing actual data (as opposed to guesses) from 24 specific firms who filled 188,000 positions during 2005 showed that 32% of the 188,000 were filled with internal movement and promotion. Of the remainder, the folks who were hired externally, 27.1% were filled by Employee Referrals. (source: CXR Annual Source of Hire Survey) In a second study of employee referrals,More than 50 firms reported that the ratio of the number of hires to the total number of referrals during 2005 produced a yield ranging from 1 hire for every 10 employee referrals to 1 hire for every 2 employee referrals (with 1 hire for every 4 or .25 being the average). (source: CXR Colloquium Benchmark on Referral Practices) If a...

Business needs are not just driven by your external customers and need but also subject to your internal customers. Employees are the key to internal customer’s satisfaction level and different aspects of engagement are put in place in organizations to achieve high internal customer satisfaction. Leaders play the most pivotal role in communicating and giving the message of being an internal customers to Employees. Ram Charan outlines five steps to engage employees and talks about how attitudes, feelings and emotions that makes work enjoyable and ignites people's energy to do more than they thought they could. Great leaders understand the numbers, but they also touch people's hearts. 1. Spend time and listen.There's no substitute for personal interaction. Even the most competent, motivated professionals can lose focus, energy, and commitment when their interaction with the boss dwindles. Some people will assume others have your ear and feel less important. Others will simply...

Time magazine has come out with a special issue on Asian heroes. Heroes from five diverse fields which include Arts, sports and Business have been identified. It’s interesting to read the success story of heroes of our times. Some interesting leaders like Meena from Afghanistan are really inspiring. In 1977, at the age of 20, she launched the country's first movement for women's rights, calling her group the Revolutionary Association for the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Its goals: the restoration of democracy, equality for men and women, social justice, and the separation of religion from the affairs of the state. Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus from Gramin bank on how he started his journey. In 1974, famine gripped Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands died and millions became destitute. For Yunus, who had just returned to Bangladesh as an economics professor after completing his Ph.D. in the U.S., it was wrenching to discover how meaningless his academic achievements were in the ...

Renowned economist and social scientist Milton Friedman died this week on Friday .A supporter of free market economics and the father of monetarism who popularized the term "there's no such thing as a free lunch", he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics in 1976 and his thinking greatly influenced former US president Ronald Reagan and ex-British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The Independent reports “Over half a century, Mr Friedman, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, established himself as arguably the most influential economic thinker of his time. Over that post-war period, "Friedmanism" - the belief that changes in money supply dictate fluctuations in the economy - supplanted Keynesianism as the dominant economic philosophy of the industrial world. Friedman believed in the power of free markets, to the point where it sometimes seemed his only use for government was to regulate the flow of money. The consequence of Friedman's policies was to d...

Dave Ulrich on -What differentiates “ effective HR” from “ineffective HR”? HR departments, practices and professionals must add value. This means, simply, that someone receives from these HR investments something that is important to them. Often, we measure HR by what we do — staffing, training, paying, communicating — but we should be focusing on what HR delivers. To deliver this value, HR departments often are being split in half. Some of the traditional transaction work of HR, which deals with things like payroll, hiring processes and registration for training, are done more efficiently through technology and occasionally outsourcing. More strategic HR practices, such as building collaboration, learning and leadership into an organization, require that HR professionals fully participate with the business leaders at creating more capable organizations. So the question you need to ask yourself ,how is your work adding value to the organization and its employee in attaining the desir...

So what makes a company a great employer ?Every employer would like to study and adopt the best practices from the best employers .The sixth annual Business Today Best Companies to Work for in India recorded a phenomenal 75% increase in participation from last year and a total of 131 organizations registered for the survey. The winners of the survey are companies who have made substantial investment in their people, infrastructure, facilities, technology and evolved HR systems. Stock options, flexi-timings, telecommuting, redressal and grievance committees, customized training and development opportunities, career management control and empowerment seem to be standard fare at these organizations. Most companies in the top ten have leveraged technology and have built truly integrated HR systems and processes. This is turn, has benefited and empowered employees who get access to information related to HR policies, performance management review, training needs and career planning tools, o...

Lance from YourHRguy talks about why HR and recruitment need to work in harmony for the success of an organization. When unplanned turnover happens, it is often (but not always) avoidable. And when turnover happens, it is a burden on a recruiter (who may already be sitting on several recs). Wouldn't you rather have your recruiter working on new and high worth positions rather than scrambling to replace a guy that you could have retained? Whenever someone is recruited that ends up having avoidable job fit issues, wouldn't you rather that the recruiter be closely aware of the issues and to work with traditional HR to either solve the issue or to move forward with someone else? The biggest reason is that separating HR and recruiting will lead to mistakes in most organizations. Mistakes that are both burdening on the employee as well as on the company. Not only lost revenue but lost opportunity. And with the success of both HR and recruiting depending so much upon each othe...

Azim Premji recently spoke on innovation at the Stanford Business School . Failure is an essential part of the innovative process , “ It is impossible to generate a few good ideas without a lot of bad ideas. Failure should be forgiven and forgotten quickly ,” he said during his Oct. 27 visit. Premji’s talk was part of the School’s View from the Top speaker series. To that end, companies must deliberately design a culture of innovation to actively seek feedback from customers, celebrate all kinds of diversity in their workforces, and also foster an environment in which workers feel safe taking risks, even when they fail. “In every market, at every juncture, there are significant scale advantages that make the largest companies appear invincible. Yet time and time again, upstart technologies create disruptions and they change the rules of the game,” said Premji. He used the example of Skype, which became the first company to offer voice-over-Internet phone services on a broad scale years...

Is leadership all about charisma and inspiring people with great speeches and effective people’s skill? Can you think of someone who can effectively play the role of a leader despite being quiet and low profile? HBS professor Joseph L. Badaracco ,In his book Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing , describes what quiet leaders do and how they make their workplace, and their world, a better place. So who is a quiet leader? They're not making high-stakes decisions. They're often not at the top of organizations. They don't have the spotlight and publicity on them. They think of themselves modestly; they often don't even think of themselves as leaders. But they are acting quietly, effectively, with political astuteness, to basically make things somewhat better, sometimes much better than they would otherwise be. One really needs to think hard as we often confuse charisma with leader’s effectiveness. Robert Greenleaf’s concept of Servant leadership a...

Ever wonder why Indian managers are in great demand everywhere? ET article suggets "Several qualities of Indian management talent have been compelling to multinationals. Regardless of the profession they are in, Indian managers tend to have very strong, foundation skills, honed by our rigorous academic systems. They are quick learners, something that’s again driven by our educational system, the variety of work environments and diversity of issues that they face in India. Indian managers tend to be very adaptable. Apart from the academic rigours and knowledge of business one trait which really makes the Indian manager indispensable in the ability to handle diversity. This may be something which comes naturally to Indian managers but its one skill which allows them to take a leap. As a manager managing teams with cross cultural background and different aspiration level is one of the biggest challenges. Our rich cultural background and the ability to interact and manage diverse po...

Ever wonder why innovations fail despite the buzz being created about the criticality of new ways to come up with better solutions. Jefferey Phillips thinks it’s the unrealistic goals and high expectation that many people are looking at innovation and shying away from participation. There's simply too much talk about innovation and not enough experimentation and trials. As the talk increases, the level of discourse is not improving, and is only creating barriers as the expectations increase. What most firms need now is to provide tools, processes and training to their innovative folks and get out of the way. We need more experiments, more trials, more intentional accidents. We need to set the expectations that everyone should be involved in innovation - at least to the extent of generating and submitting ideas. As we define an innovation "team", let's take care not to create innovation ghettos. Too many people are being left out of the process, which means too many id...

Jargons can be a highly disadvantageous if one is trying to reach out to people. None other than Freakonomics co author Stephen J. Dubner says - Most of the literature isn’t very interesting or meaningful to me (this is simply a matter of preference); and some of it might be interesting or meaningful but I am unable to tell. Why? Because the language of economists is often – not always, certainly, but often – deeply obtuse. Now, again, this is my problem, having to do with my preferences and my skills. Research economists, like most academics, are writing for their peers, not the laity. And as much I might like their research to be written in plainer English . Very true, more often than not great piece of work continues to languish because in fails to connect to people it intends to reach. It’s not just true in case of academics, but even in organizations ,people fail to establish connect with others simply because of the fact that they use too many jargons and make simple facts look ...

Michael E. Porter, director of Harvard's Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness recently spoke on -- " Why Do Good Managers Set Bad Strategies?" -- offered as part of Wharton's SEI Center Distinguished Lecture Series. Portar feels that Bad strategy often stems from the way managers think about competition, he noted. Many companies set out to be the best in their industry, and then the best in every aspect of business, from marketing to supply chain to product development. The problem with that way of thinking is there is no best company in any industry. "What is the best car?" he asked. "It depends on who is using it. It depends on what it's being used for. It depends on the budget." Managers who think there is one best company and one best set of processes set themselves up for destructive competition. "The worst error is to compete with your competition on the same things," Porter said. "That only leads to escalation, which...

In case if you have cursing your recruiter for not attending your calls and sitting over your resume for long. Take a look at this post of microsoft recruiter Jeena and you know the reason why? Today I received 189 emails: most with resumes, questions and employee referrals. I also received 4 unsolicited phone calls about employment and another 123 people applied to jobs I have posted. This makes grand total of 316 people looking to talk to me today. Keep in mind I also run a team of 8 direct reports spread over 2 different businesses and I spent a large portion of my day running two separate meetings with the business VP and my direct team. I’m not asking for sympathy- this is after all my job and I love nearly every minute of it- but the reality is that the bulk of people who wanted to talk to me today won’t hear back. And for the people I did talk to, I treated them with encouragement and hope and have good intentions of following up thoroughly, but there is another equally l...

We have always believed in “hiring for potential” and continue to be guided by this spirit but does it continue to be the mantra for recruitment. Gretchen’s post talks about the gradual shift in hiring approach in software industry over the year. I was trained to interview against qualities such as a candidate’s ability to learn new technologies or deal with ambiguous situations. As a hiring gatekeeper, it was my job to ensure that the interviewers during final rounds focused their evaluations on similar traits which would indicate a candidate’s ability to live up to their full potential. While software engineering is still a hot career, the talent a lot of employers seek is not always what’s available in the market. (Supply does not equal demand; expectations are too narrow; many companies competing for the same small pool of talent.) And the jobs a lot of engineers seek aren’t necessarily in their ability to land. (Again, supply does not equal demand; expectations may be too high; m...

Offshoring is a business reality which has resulted in jobs migrating to other countries. The common perception that jobs shift due to cost advantage may not hold any more .It’s not just about the low skill work like call centre operation, high end white collar jobs including HR jobs are being outsourced. The report, " The Globalization of White-Collar Work ," says "No longer is offshoring all about moving jobs elsewhere," said the study, which examined 530 companies in the U.S. and Europe. " "Increasingly, it's about sourcing talent everywhere." Companies in the advanced economies of the U.S. and Europe cannot find domestically the high-skilled talent they need to sustain their innovation and growth strategies," said Duke University Professor Arie Y. Lewin, co-author of the report."They turn to China, India and other countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America in search of highly skilled talent. The report indicates that "In term...