This 128-page presentation called “Reference Guide on our Freedom & Responsibility Culture” was circulated at Netflix a few weeks ago. It details the prevalent culture at Netflix. What was meant to be an internal document for employees to read, has now become a killer recruitment pitch.

Manpower’s 2009 Talent Shortage Survey reveals that the global talent crunch remains a pressing and pervasive issue for employers worldwide. 30% of the employers around the world and 20% of employers in India struggle to fill positions available despite the global economic downturn.

The top 10 jobs that employers are having difficulty filling across the
33 countries and territories surveyed are (ranked in order):

1. Skilled Trades
2. Sales Representatives
3. Technicians (Production/Operations, Engineering or Maintenance)
4. Engineers
5. Management/Executives
6. Accounting & Finance Staff
7. Labourers
8. Production Operators
9. Secretaries, PAs, Administration Assistants & Office Support
10. Drivers

The complete results of Manpower’s global talent crunch study can be viewed below:

The Global Talent Crunch – Why Employer Branding Matters Now

Kaustubh Mishra, an IIM Lucknow alumnus, has started The White Collar Company – an organization that imparts management training through biking journeys. This unique outdoor training program has been successfully conducted for 20+ organizations in different parts of the country. So all you Roadies fans, ask your HR Managers to get in touch with Kaustubh on +91-9909015463 and he’ll customize a program for your team/organization.

This is a guest post by Ms. Paromita De. Paromita is an HR Professional with substantial experience in different aspects of HR – from recruitment and selection to training and development to compensation & benefits.
-
Effective organizations in today’s world are facing enormous challenges. Downsizing, diversity, global competition and total quality are a few harsh realities staring the organization in its face. However complex the challenges may sound, it is ultimately the human resources that make the organisation either go or not go. An organisation as an entity has multiple dimensions to it – conceptual and human, technical and functional, cognitive and behaviouristic. In the organizational behaviour context, a cognitive approach has traditionally dominated through units of analysis such as perception, personality and attitudes, motivation and goal setting. The behavioural decision-making area is concerned with the cognitions involved in judgment and choice. Hence, it could be stated that the cognitive framework is a crucial factor for an organisation to reach closure on hiring employees.

Every organisation follows a recruitment philosophy while hiring people. Ideally, the selection process should draw on the organisational needs. These needs again, differ from organisation to organisation. From the perspective of an organisation, it is necessary to internalize goal specifics such as maximising production, maximising worker satisfaction, minimising interpersonal conflict and so on. In a similar manner, an individual’s needs simultaneously have to be matched with that of the organisation. It is only then that an effective organisation emerges.

The above concepts could be better explained through relevant examples cutting across different businesses and functions. Advertising agencies such as Ogilvy & Mather, Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi have all been built on the foundations of a top-notch creative team consisting of art directors and copywriters from different walks of life and with no specific technical knowhow. Such diversity is prompted by the need for varied perspectives that can trigger out-of-the-box thinking and lead to a truly unique and memorable advertising campaign for their clients. Technology-driven organizations such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Intel lay great emphasis on the intellectual prowess of candidates. They employ the top PhD students from the leading engineering and science schools across the world – including Stanford, MIT and IITs. This is imperative because the business demands continuous innovation and the need to stay abreast with advancements in technology. Given the scarcity of such talent, they willingly mete out large amounts of money to retain these employees. On the contrary, successful automobile manufacturers like Honda and Toyota have all realized the importance of a strong engineering team coupled with low-cost labour at their production facilities. The skill set required here is limited and the workers need not necessarily be “smart” in the traditional sense. Also, there have been several organizations, composed of people with the best academic track record and backed by leading investors, which have faded to anonymity. The smartest people with the most innovative ideas have failed then because of the non-alignment of their business model and their people strategy.

To match people to jobs, besides information about the job, data about the qualifications required to perform the job must be understood by the analyst of the organisation. Working conditions may explain the need for particular skills, training, knowledge, or even a particular job design. Unique working conditions influence hiring to a great extent. For instance, an airplane manufacturer has problems installing fuel tanks inside wings of the bombers it builds and say the crawl space is extremely narrow and cramped. These tight conditions can cause considerable production delays. The best selection procedure to be followed here by the Personnel department would be to recruit welders who are less than five feet tall and weigh about a hundred pounds. In this case, physical attributes of a personality matter more than his/her intellectual personality. Then, age is an important consideration in roles such as field sales given the hectic nature of the job.

Another issue that must be looked into are those which are binding upon the organization from a socio-cultural standpoint. A case in point is equal opportunity employment on the basis of gender and caste, which is now becoming mandatory in most nations. Organizations like Infosys and Wipro are perfect examples of good corporate citizens and they are now reaping the benefits for the same. Employees look upon these organizations as the most preferred employers in the industry. This highlights the need for organizations to look beyond intellectual and academic merit of candidates.

From careful deliberation on the above points, we see that the success of organizations lies in being able to identify the right kind of people at the right time and by being sensitive to cultural issues surrounding the operating environment. Be it personal development or organisation progression, a career-ladder strategy follows a principle that the most appropriate selection criterion will not necessarily be performance on the immediate task for which a person is hired. Organisations instead focus on selections procedures on how trainable the new members are and how readily they will adapt to organisational norms and later duties. It can be concluded that organizations that have been successful have had the “smartest people strategy” rather than the smartest people.

This is a guest post by Avnish Anand. Avnish is a philosopher of sports (a more apt description than a sports expert, sports journo, or sports enthusiast). He watches almost every sport and has an opinion on every issue in each of these sports. The opinions are compiled on his Sports Site, A Common Fan.
-
The world of sports is extremely performance driven. It’s the hardest “industry” to continually stay at the top. No other industry is as competitive. Winning in sports is everything. There is no place for non-performers – winners thrive and losers perish. Business organizations also aspire to create a similar kind of culture – one which is completely performance driven and breeds excellence. However, few HR teams know how to go about doing so. What they need to do is take a break from what they have been doing all along and start doing what people are doing in the world of sports. So what are the key things that people in the world of sports do?

Great players don’t always make great managers and vice versa – In most organizations, the best individual contributors are often promoted to become managers. The world of sports runs differently – those guys have long known that the skill set required to become a great manager is drastically different than the skills necessary to be a great player. A lot of great managers have been very ordinary players but in corporate organizations managers have more often than not been great workers also. HR in organizations needs to learn this – to promote based on people and management skills and not just on their ability to contribute individually.

To win it is important to focus on the key positions that play the most significant role in securing victory – Sports teams know that it is not possible to have top performers in every position and also that attempting to do so is a futile exercise. HR teams are not so focussed and end up spreading their resources thin. Successful teams have always concentrated on filling the key positions with top performers and HR needs to do the same – start prioritizing jobs by their potential impact on the success of the business.

Your performance statistics will never improve if you keep hiding them – The best sportsmen always love to compete and compare themselves against others – by keeping score. The world of sports is obsessed with tracking performance figures and that ensures that non performers have nowhere to hide. Compare that to the corporate world, where the HR keeps all the performance statistics under wraps. No information about target achievements and appraisals are ever made public. This also forces the HR to keep salary increments a secret. Non performers keep getting away. Thus to build a performance based organization you need track, measure and distribute output and performance reports.

Rewards and recognition programs should not have a fixation for parity – In sports the best players often get paid many times more than the mediocre performers. In business, the difference is far less. HR uses tools like normalization curves and target percentiles to justify their action of keeping salary differentials low. It is difficult to get the top talent (as required for point 2) if they are not paid significantly more and treated differently than the average performer. It also corroborates the fact that in sports, performance is rewarded and paid for accordingly. HR often has no justification for its payment practises and hence is forced to keep them secret (another example of point 3)

Firing poor performers is a good thing and not a bad one – In sports, teams are always striving to improve – even if it’s by the teeniest bit – it’s a pre-requisite for teams that want to continue the winning habit. They are always looking to weed out the bottom performers and replace them with better talent. HR managers on the other hand believe that sackings are bad for morale and keep delaying it – giving poor performers’ chance after chance. How’s that for the motivation of the star performers – seeing their efforts get negated by that of shoddy performers, who are not even made to pay for it.

In sports, Winning isn’t everything… it’s the only thing – Sports teams are never satisfied with second place. It is this kind of “performance culture” that brings the best out of players. Unfortunately HR departments are quite happy with an above average performance. Average goals often result in below average results. There is no motivation to exceed expectations.

Don’t reward complacency with training sessions – Great sportspersons have the personal will and drive to get better. They don’t have to be tutored like school children to work on improving themselves. HR teams are preoccupied with training sessions. They believe that grown up and career conscious men don’t have enough self motivation to improve on their own and have to be sent to training programs to achieve that. Well I have news for them. If you have a company full of such men, you are in big trouble.

Disclaimer – We are talking of teams and organizations that want to win, not ones who are happy being mediocre.