There’s no more compelling sales pitch for your workplace than one from the mouth of a worker. Anyone considering a position at your company would be wise to seek out the thoughts of one of your current and former employees, who come armed with firsthand experience, and are able to offer an unbiased view. It’s […]

Introduction

Jori Hamilton explores some areas an effective talent development process directly impacts, and methods you can use to capitalize on them.

Fortunately, the empirical literature showing how and why diversity-related training fails also points towards ways that the training could be reimagined in order to better serve its stated purposes.

Covid hasn't just flipped the table on recruiting and employer branding these last few months. It is really making talent management functions re-think things from a clean sheet of paper (which is very much a good thing). As TM starts thinking about what the nature of what a job is, how skills can be installed and developed in near-real-time, how most staff is probably only using 50-80% of their abilities at work, there's an opportunity for you to step up and partner, connecting the "why" of work with the shifting "what" and "how."

I have mixed feeling about this article on why every company should make professional development a core element of their brand promise. One, yes, many many many candidates and employees want development, but even when they want it, they don't want/value it the same way. Some want classrooms and certifications. Some want mentoring and coaching. Some want the freedom to experiment and fail. And yes, there are some great talents who don't look to their employer as a source for development. Over at the day job, we have lots of data that lots of people want development, but it is by no means universal. Development is popular among some talent, but to say that every brand should define their brand around it is a little myopic. That said, it's an area where many companies ignore to their detriment.

Metrics, anyone? EB Rock star Shaunda Zilich writes up a nice piece on EB metrics. I was going to quibble with it until I realized that the best part of the article is unstated: Metrics are gibberish until you decide what your strategy is first. You can measure oodles of things and easily get batted around like a leaf on the wind unless you have clearly defined what you are trying to do and deciding the metrics on that. Once I saw that, I realized how great the article was.

As a guy who seems to always be launching this new project or that new idea, I really do try and carve out a little time every few days to just… think. Sometimes its to write a sit-down book (not some musician biography or noir pulp book I use to escape, but a book I need to be seated in a chair to absorb). Sometimes it’s to dump a bunch of thinking on my white board. And while this year has made it hard to get a safe change of scenery (I used to love airports and plains for just this sort of thing, but my favorite was camping out in a hotel lobby for two hours), it is still imperative that we all break away from our calendar and email and make space to just think, to let the mind be… idle? Well, maybe if you’ve achieved total enlightenment, that’s something you can do, but every without the saffron robes, maybe you can just make sure you give your brain some space.

Are you putting data at the heart of your EVP? Here’s a nice long article (from three people I rather respect and like) that tries to connect some dots between EVP and data. With the exception of thinking about your EVP as a catalog of your company’s traits and features instead of as an idea that aligns to and supports someone’s worldview, it suggests that we all still have a long way to go to really open our doors wider to all the different kinds of talent out there.