Employers need to boldly go where no man has gone before when it comes to developing future talent, according to global hiring chiefs.
Businesses like Cisco, Royal Dutch Shell and Tata Sons have been taking a highly proactive approach to sourcing the talent they anticipate needing tomorrow. The more specialist the business, the more inventive it has to be at building relationships with would-be employees before they have even joined the organisation.
Cisco and Facebook
Speaking at The Economist’s Talent Management Summit on 9 June, Phil Smith, CEO of Cisco UK and Ireland told delegates the technology giant has had to ‘use other mechanisms to attract people’, with word of mouth still being very important. He said “we build relationships with people well before they join the company, building communities in universities using social networking tools like Facebook; creaming off the best talent before it even gets to the milkrounds.” In his view, a ban on social networking in the office cuts out an important talent sourcing tool and that, like the telephone, its use can be managed sensibly.
As an organisation that is a voracious acquirer, Cisco targets specialist companies that are “expensive but small where the real capability is the people.” So Smith makes sure that, unlike many acquirers, they don’t lose them out the door through culture shocks. He shared how he took his leadership team into a focus group about what employees really thought about working for Cisco. One issue that emerged was the difficulty employees have of working for managers not only in the same building, but not in the same country. One distressed employee complained how her US line manager called her for a catch-up at 7pm in the evening just when she was putting her kids to bed. She didn’t know how to articulate the problem, the manager had no idea and once it was out in the open a solutions was found.
Cisco is a relatively young target (1984) with 75,000 employees worldwide, 4,000 of which are in the UK. It has grown rapidly with revenues of $40bn worldwide and $2bn in the UK.
Royal Dutch Shell and project management
The energy industry is in a relatively unique position where demand can only go up. Chief human resources officer Hugh Mitchell at Royal Dutch Shell estimates it will continue growing for the next 30 to 50 years bringing huge environmental pressures. He asked: “We will need to develop every form of energy demand you can think of and the world will need to invest $33 trillion over the next five years. What will that mean in terms of skills and talent?”
He went on to explain that the headcount/revenue ratio was not high with $350bn being delivered by 93,000 employees but a drop of, say, 2,000 specialist engineers loses critical business. Shell is unable to poach geologists, petrochemical experts and specialist project managers from rival energy companies as they are often in partnership with them, so they have to look how to grow talent over 10 to 15 - year timeframe. And it ignores economic cycles as the oil price fluctuates all the time. One solution was setting up a Shell project academy in 2005 and setting project management as a key milestone and making this a required competence throughout the organisation.
The capability to deploy large numbers of specialist workers quickly is also crucial to Shell, which still carries 5000 expatriate workers. “If you win the work you need the people in place to respond to it. This means having a globalised, solid, central HR function”, said Mitchell. “We also need to be clever about how we transition people from one project to the next. It would be a disaster to waste skills if there wasn’t a job to go to after one had finished.”
Tata Sons and intra-group talent expert
This $67bn Indian conglomerate has enjoyed a period of rapid growth and has become something of an emblem of emerging market transformation. With 90 operating companies spread across 80 countries in six continents Satish Pradhan, its group human resources chief’ has his work cut out. He shared how it gets its leaders to “export” talent within the group and that education needed to include the ability to “think about organisations, leadership and managing outcomes” with “more introspection”. Tata is famous for its rotation of talent with leaders being moved around from steel, to tea, to automotives – although one delegate from Jaguar Landrover said they had not as yet seen much of an influx of Tata senior managers as yet. However, his colleagues at Tata Global Beverages (which now includes Tetley Tea) had seen their period of ‘being left along’ come to an end with a Mumbai presence being much more obvious. Pradhan is passionate about leaders leading by example. “When leaders speak, what to do people do? They watch their feet and their experience is in what has actually been done.” He believes that it is the ‘energy’ of the organisation that has to flow through these people and he shared how Tata puts in place “piping for the energy to flow.”
Lost in space
The themes of managing and deploying global talent took an interesting dimension when NASA’s director of workforce strategy, Jane Datta, explained the challenges of how the US government agency with some 80,000 employees was undergoing a profound shift. This was as a result of the high-profile space shuttle programme ending after 30 years with just one more flight programme going out over the summer. NASA has had to shift the talent focus away from space exploration to a technology and research one and, as Datta pointed out, “with any new programme you don’t’ know what sort of talent you are really going to need in advance.” She faces the task of having to reskill the workforce by letting attrition happen and reskilling. She said “We’re not yet losing people to Richard Branson, but we might! We see losing people to commercial entities as partnering with them to do our missions and the things we are not doing anymore, although it is important for us to have the right talent in house to do only the things we can do. Attrition is our friend.”
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