HumanMarkets

Roy Oswalt is one of  the best pitchers in all of Major League Baseball.  He almost certainly on every credible list of the top five pitchers in the game.  He pitches for the Philadelphia Phillies.

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Last night Oswalt played left field.  First time in 39 years that a Phillies pitcher played another position.  (It was required because the game went 16 innings and the Phillies literally ran out of other players when Ryan Howard was ejected from the game. 

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Oswalt caught a fly ball for an out.

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I liked Oswalt before – he is now among my favorites.  I like people who “pitch in” to do what is needed – especially when it is outside of their normal role.

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Great profile for hiring .  Hire Oswalt.

1 Comment | In: Multiple Markets, Recruiting, Talent Management | | #

Source: The US/Mexico border

You go into a staff meeting today and someone, maybe casually in the pre-meeting chit chat, starts talking about immigration reform and the Arizona state law.  Your colleagues then look at you and ask – “Hey HR, what should we be thinking about Immigration Reform? From your perspective, are we for it?

Do you have an answer?

Human Markets is not a political blog and immigration / immigration reform is in the most part a political topic.  However, it is also a labor market issue for some employers.  Here are a few thoughts that we might consider about forming an HR point of view in advance of being asked and looking ill-prepared.

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On the surface, the connection is that Federal policy has used employers as a significant enforcement mechanism for immigration.  I-9s; e-Verify, Work Visas, are all examples of employers having to take responsibility for denying employment to illegal/undocumented workers.  Some in HR focus on this as the totality of the HR issue within the immigration debate. 

The verification issues at point of hire are expensive and open employers up to risk that is uncompensated by the market.  That is, when we take risks in business, we should get paid for managing those risks well.  Here, managing regulatory prosecutorial risk is simply the price of admission.  (In other words, if a customer as two widgets, yours and your competitor’s.  All else being equal, will they pay you more for having a cracker jack I-9 process versus the other guy having a few illegal workers on board?  I am guessing they will not.

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Maybe the more important perspective for HR to have is how immigration reform will impact hiring.  It would be great to have a more holistic view that includes the impact of immigrants as customers or clients for our organizations, but that is likely the purview of the marketing group.

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A few questions that might be helpful in forming a point of view about the impact of immigration on your workforce :

• Does your workforce include a material number of people who are working in the United States illegally already?  (If this is true, you as HR should know this and know the risks your are accepting on behalf of your company.  They may or may not be acceptable risks depending upon your firm’s situation.  However, like Bristol herself – you can’t be a little bit pregnant on this.)

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• Do you compete for labor in a market that pays close to the minimum wage?  In other words, are you competing for labor in a market that is influenced by ultra low wages?  (If immigrant labor dried up, would your cost of labor be directly impacted, even if you do not yourself employ a large population of immigrants?)

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• Do you provide benefits in a community with a significant level of immigrants? Do you understand the relationship between your “unit costs” for health care and whether or not it is influenced by immigration?  (So across the range of recent immigrants there is a range of experience in how they are able to finance their health care – both those working legally or illegally.  Ask your broker or consultant to explain to you if local health care providers have higher costs because of the cost of unpaid services.

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• Do you operate with a labor model that is dependant or high volume or high skill within your workforce?   

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• If you operate on a wider geographic scale, do you see differences in your employment issues in areas closer to large illegal immigration? 

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I would stay away from politics and from the broader economics of immigration.  Unless you are really expert at it, for example, I am not, making political assessment on the job is not so smart.  However, as the Barons of Talent within our organizations, we should understand the labor markets in which we compete.  If immigration policy impacts your labor market, you should have a point of view about it.

No Comments | In: HR Strategy, How to do HR, Multiple Markets, Recruiting, Talent Management | tags: Immigration, Labor Markets. | #

Recently I got a call from a recruiter looking for some networking help on a job. So far, so good. The requirements came over indicating that the candidate needed to have a credential that I don’t have. Their successful candidate needed to have come up through an “HR academy organization – GE, Pepsico, IBM”

That seems really short sighted to me (maybe because I didn’t punch that ticket). They maybe great HR companies but they are not the only ones. These companies can generate their own share of substandard people. Having done HR there is no guarantee of success.

More fundamentally, it struck me that the credential was being used in lieu of real evaluation and decision. To go farther into the rhelm of “I have no idea what I am talking about… ” I wonder if their insistence on that credential betrays an internal HR focus at the expense of a broader range of business skills.

I know some really outstanding “graduates” of the academy. None of them apply what they learned there thoughtlessly. The processes and strategies are all part of the context of their thinking, not the inherent object of their action. The worst of the graduates do their jobs just like they did back at “ACME” or wherever. They do it the same way because it is the “ACME way”.

What do you think? Is it a legitimate strategy to look for a Head of HR for a division based on the credential of being an HR Academy grad?

5 Comments | In: Multiple Markets, Recruiting, Talent Management | tags: HR Academy. | #

Source WSJ 15 May 2010

Peggy Noonan offers a great column in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the pending hearings to confirm the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court.  Among a few others – some political, she makes the excellent practical point that the Senators need to allow / require the woman to speak.  It seemed like good advice for interviewers as well.  I have made the Senatorial mistake many times.  I vow to do better.

No Comments | In: Recruiting | tags: Interviewing. | #

Here is a great question to use in understanding an organizational role. It is a illuminating for market pricing a job; for OD diagnosis; or for talent management questions.

Who does the person in this role affiliate with within the organization?

Let’s take for example you are focused on the “Chief Engineer” of a technology company.  When you ask where the Chief affiliates you are asking, is this person the member of the top executive group who has responsibility for engineering (top down management – flowing management into Engineering); or is the Chief the senior most engineer who then liaisons with the executive function (leads the group from within; an “engineer’s engineer”, a technical leader).

Affiliation tells you a lot about the person in the role; how to pay them’ what support that team may need to balance the affilitation choice; and how others at the level of the Chief may percieve them and their department.

Market Pricing:          Assume from above that the person affiliates with the Engineering group.  Market pricing might then be best seen as classic “Chief Engineer” with an internal reference to a gap between the person and the tier below.  However, if the affiliation is as an executive, the balance of market pricing might be on what executives as a whole are being paid.

Organizational Effectiveness:   Is the engineering group linked directly to competitive customer activity, or is the group more of an infrastructure support.  I don’t know that the answer does or does not make one or the other affiliation ideal.  However, it does seem to me that affiliation with the engineering group would be more typical in an infrastructure group.  In the even that engineering is directly creating customer value, there would need to be another strong executive outside of engineering able to play the watershed role to pull together all of the customers’ interests.

Recruiting:     When thinking about making a placement on a team, exploring the history of affiliation for the person, and thinking about what affiliation the current situation calls for, can make for the difference between a good and a great selection.  A candidate whose passionate affiliation runs downstream is less likely to want to be promoted out of the group.  Is that what you need in your internal labor market?

Executive Direction:   Executives love to use the “my team” phrase.  What is the difference in focus for managers below an executive if she explicitly tells them that they should be affiliating with the group they manage, as oppose to the affiliation being “I am on Sally Smith’s team.”  I think that it comes down to the “who says I’m sorry.” 

Every team has bad days and makes mistakes.  Because we live in an imperfect world, “bad things happen to good departments”.  We all have to say “sorry, we did not get that done”, from time to time.  When an executive allows a subordinate manager to primarily affiliate with being on that executive team, I think it makes it easier for the subordinate manager to “take the I’m sorry” from the folks doing the work below.  When the subordinate manager affiliates with the team, it is the subordinate givingthe I’m sorry to the manager.  This is important not because it is about accountability.  That can be pressed in either scenario.  It is important because it sets the subordinate manager, and the executive up for a different view of risk.  When I think that I an accountable for all risk – planned and unplanned; reasonable and unreasonable – I act differently than if I think that I have pushed that done a level and I am only accountable for risk that is reasonably known.

So, this is not a silver bullet question – it does not answer all of a companies questions or instantly make you the smartest HR wonk in the room.  However, I think that it is a useful lens to look through to understand roles a bit better.  Understanding how the risk is being allocated in your organization, on a de facto real life basis, makes you a better market player.

Make sense or is this a bad case of too much time on my hands?

No Comments | In: HR Strategy, Professional Development, Recruiting, Talent Management | | #

Is the Middle Class dying?  This recession may be increasing the possibility of that being true.

Here is may concern – we are in what others have called a “jobless recovery”.  Estimates of unemployment are commonly pegged, even two years out at 8% or more.  While we may be soon technically out of a recession because macroeconomic indicators are showing signs of growth, there is not enough confidence in the near term future to see employment levels increase enough to substantially knock down unemployment. 

My fear is that through the recession, many people have been living off of non-wage resources.  Extended unemployment benefits and the stimulus have produced some floor of economic activity.  I have to think that 401(k) balances and other savings are being depleted.  

Coming out of the recession truly, when employment does pick up again, what might we see?  I wonder if it will be more families living paycheck to paycheck, with no savings and with material debt.  At the same time, the people at the top of the corporate heap are already seeing signs of relief.  With a macro level recovery, they can expect to seen gains in bonus compensation and gains in equity awards.

We will also be down the line a bit more with the aging workforce and population.  More people in a more fragile economic situation relative to there earning potential and health.

In a nutshell, I am thinking a lot about whether the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.  What does that mean for HR in your organization?  What does that mean for talent?  What does that say about your customer base for your organization’s goods or services.  I think that forward leaning HR people need to consider that labor and customer markets could look very different in a few years. 

What do you think?

1 Comment | In: Compensation, HR Strategy, Labor, Multiple Markets, Recruiting | tags: Middle Class, Rich Get Richer. | #

I am going to hell because I am beginning to think bad thoughts about some of the people who are approaching me for help in finding work.  I am humbled to know that I have a secure position and that I am in a position to help those looking for jobs to network.  It is an opportunity for me to sometimes suggest great talent for my organization or for the organizations of friends.  I can honestly say I never begrudge that type of call or introduction.

However, when the person looking to network, or directly solicit me for a job has done nothing in the last ten years to stay current, there is not much I can do.  My evil interior is moving closer to the exterior.

I have met people who just “don’t use the Internet much…”  These have been people looking for roles in communications oriented positions, or in operational positions, especially in HR.   How the hell (my eternal home) can you expect to work in a large organization with that kind of attitude, or even to hired when you are so completely out of touch with what is a pedestrian, office utility.  It is no exaggeration to say that telling me you, “don’t use the internet much…” is about the same as telling me in say 1975 that you don’t use that telephone thing.  It’s crazy.

If you want my help finding a job, you can have it.  But for the love of Al Gore, do the basics.  Figure out social networking, read some blogs, maybe even post an entry or two.  Read some books and articles on what thought leaders in your profession are saying.  If you are relying on a body of knowledge built over a good portion of a career, but which has not been refreshed in the last five – either through updated content or tools – you my friend are wasting both of our time.

When the economy turns, those that get ahead are the ones that anticipate the technology and structures of the future, not the past.  Those that fail to learn the lessons of the past, as the saying goes, are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.

5 Comments | In: Professional Development, Recruiting, Talent Management | tags: Eternal Damnation, Job Search, Staying Current. | #

  I am thinking a lot about unemployment.  How will it impact our business?  How will it impact wages and benefit expense.

It is easy for me, and I have from time to time, fall into the trap of thinking exclusively about national unemployment numbers.  My organization has locations around the country.  The “national labor market” is a mistaken focus for me.  I need to reorient my head to multiple local markets. 

This graphical display on NYTimes.com is a great start to thinking the right way about the issue and making sure that I am a sharp competitor where my hourly workforce labor market matters – locally.

2 Comments | In: Compensation, How to do HR, Multiple Markets, Recruiting | tags: Labor, markets, NY Times, relocation; how to do HR. | #

    You know the story by now.  My HR take on this is purely shame.  After 25 years in the business, I have come to rely on my gut, and instincts and obsevations.  I have done it in hiring, firing, promotion and compensation.  How many times have I been wrong?  I how many times did I not wait for someone to sing and really listen.  I don’t know but I am sure it was more than it should have been.

I can’t watch this with out tearing up; not out of shame but out of joy.  My joy for her and my joy that I have learned a great lesson from this marvelous talent.

6 Comments | In: How to do HR, Professional Development, Recruiting, Talent Management | tags: Britan's Got Talent, How to do HR, Human Rights; Perspective, Integrity, Talent Management, Transparency. | #