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About TalentCare Group 

*Editors Note: What follows is a compilation of opinion and observation based on the author’s experiences in and knowledge about workforce  trends and the human capital marketplace in North America today and it’s evolution over the last two decades.  This section is provided to make available to new and existing clients an orientation to some of the issues, factors and assumptions that have influenced us in the development of our approach and in the design and delivery of our service offerings.  We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of many other authors and educators in the assembly of this document and hope its contents will benefit our clients and others who may have occasion to review it*

Why We Do What We Do

We are in the business of Enabling Talent Alignment® because we believe that the most significant contribution we can make to help improve the stability and performance of high quality small and medium-sized organizations, and to promote the efforts of talented individuals in making their contribution, is to apply our skills, experiences and methodologies to bringing great organizations and great talent together.

We believe there are two fundamental changes driving the evolution of business and organizational development in the marketplace today:

• The Battle for Healthcare Market Leadership is a War for Talent
• The War for Healthcare Talent will be won through Talent Alignment

In many industries and markets the advantages that a company or organization may have now, or have had in the past, based on a unique product or service feature can now be so short lived that basing success on any of these types of temporary assets is short sighted at best, disastrous if it defines the entire strategic direction.

What is becoming more valued now than any other asset is the intellectual property, the human capital that creates it, and the ability an organization has and demonstrates over time to attract, engage and sustain relationships with the top talent in their industry and/or markets.

Common practice in evaluating a company’s assets for acquisition has historically included the value of their customer and account portfolios.  Now a strong component of the evaluation is becoming a determination as to whether the new owners will be able to hold on to the workforce, particularly strong middle and senior managers, sales personnel and other key contributors.

Employee As Customer? - A Paradigm Shift                                Top

Those employers who may have felt the only arrow in they needed in their arsenal for attraction and retention was up-ticking the compensation component may find that the bar has been raised for motivating top talent and workers in general.  Competition is heating up for good employees at every level of an organization’s hierarchy at a feverish pace.  One hiring manager remarked, “It’s frightening; you’d think they were customers! I have to develop presentations for candidates just like I do for new accounts and key customers.”

When you think about it, in many ways attracting and keeping good employees is just as important to the success of an organization as securing new customers, especially after calculating their life-time value to the enterprise.  Recent studies by leading human capital analysts Watson Wyatt have shown a direct correlation between organizations that properly manage their labor component and significant improvements in bottom-line profitability and increased share-holder value for both public and privately held entities.  They call this the Human Capital Index.

That same type of ROI analysis is being used by organizations beginning to assess the actual value of their current workforce and examine how they can retain, retool and get more value from the talent that they already have, rather than suffer the cost and lost momentum caused by the departure of key employees.  The cost to an organization for replacing an employee is now estimated at 150% to 200% or more of their annual compensation, depending upon their role and their level.  In certain key positions, like leadership or sales, it can be several times that amount. And that is assuming they don’t take the customer with them.

If you would like to see information on the cost of turnover in real dollar terms and get access to some financial modeling tools to help you calculate those costs in your organization, follow this link.

The Watson Wyatt study is just one among many indicators that finding and keeping great people is the key to long-term success in the marketplace.  Other trends are found in the continuing growth in Employee and Talent Relationship Management systems and tools, as well as the extension and refinement of customer loyalty type programs into the rewards and recognition programs that have sprung up and are becoming popular for motivating and retaining an existing workforce.

Sounds like things are on track.  Oops! We’re running out of workers?

Talent Shortages                                                                        Top

If current trend data on projected worker shortages is even marginally accurate, becoming world class in managing the people side of the business equation is moving rapidly to the forefront of strategic initiatives in organizations that intend to stay out in front of the pack.

If you have been busy running your organization and haven’t looked out the window lately, in spite of all the dismal job data and publicity about layoffs over the last few years, there is now a shortage of qualified workers in many occupations and industries.  In some sectors it has reached crisis proportions.  And it appears it will be getting worse.  Baby-boomers are beginning to retire and there is an estimated gap of over 8 million workers projected by the end of this decade.  Some of the projected gaps in qualified, experienced workers, especially for those capable of leadership roles, are simply staggering.

For many small and medium sized business owners, particularly those who have been struggling just to keep from having to lay off their best workers, the following statistic may come as a surprise.  Although overall unemployment during this most recent downturn has hovered between 5 and 6%, knowledge workers, those who are becoming the new business currency for this increasingly complex world, have been almost fully employed at 99.5%.  For the very best workers, that number is even higher.

Great Talent is Always in Demand, What’s Different Now?

What is new, and represent significant changes affecting both hiring managers and their organizations, is 1) the severity of the shortage, 2) the level of workers being recruited, that is those positions for which organizations are either using internal recruiters or are willing to pay finders fees to third party recruiters to locate and 3) the mobility, connectedness and sophistication of the workforce in general, 4) the web.

Severity of the Shortage – Depending upon your industry and market, the shortage of qualified labor can mean devastating loses of revenue, profits and even market position.  With all of the new financial tools now available for analyzing organizational performance, many owners and managers are for the first time able to realistically assess the impact and cost of vacancies at every level of their operation.  Hard data is now visible on executive dashboards that show not only what the labor shortfall is, but what that vacancy is costing their organization every week that the position goes unfilled.  This is true for both backfill situations and for newly created positions driven by growth and expansion.

Level of Workers Being “Recruited” – Given the information now available to managers surrounding the impact of workforce shortages, organizations are easily justifying the expense of having either their internal recruiting resources or external third-party recruiters locate, qualify and extend offers to levels of workers that previously would never have been considered.  Although some of this change is driven by the improved availability and accuracy of the data, some is based upon an understanding of the urgency of locating and on-boarding good workers before these shortages become any worse and before their competition gets to these scarce resources.

Mobility, Connectedness and Sophistication - Current and projected labor shortages in this cycle are being accentuated by a technology and communications revolution that had only just begun when the dot.com fever created a similar shortage and hiring mania in the early nineties.

This demand cycle finds a totally connected workforce that is on-line and “hooked-up” via picture cell phones, PDA’s and pagers, using 24/7 voice and instant text messaging and spending many hours a week on the internet doing industry and company research, looking for and applying for jobs with the click of a button, downloading salary and benefits surveys and information, participating in on-line special interest group discussions, attending webinars, continuing their education, pursuing hobbies and shopping for every imaginable product and service.

Not only is this workforce connected, apparently many of them are seriously disenchanted with their current employers.  Several recent surveys of currently employed workers shows somewhere between 33% and 70% of those responding were ready to walk away from their current employer, citing conditions that were less than acceptable stemming from reduced resources, a deteriorating work environment and increased workloads over the last few years.  One of the primary complaints identified has been a lack of feedback from immediate supervisors and a lack of respect for their supervisor and/or the organization in general.

Another noteworthy statistic in one survey was that of those who were intending to get onto the internet for the first time in 2003, 46% were doing so primarily to look for employment.

The Web - Much of what was mentioned above in the mobility and connectivity section is directed at what has changed to make workers more knowledgeable about the economy, their industry, their company’s competitors, their individual value in their market (see www.salary.com) and numerous other factors affecting how workers relate to their current employers and how they feel about their own employment experience in general.

What the Internet has done for (or to) employers and organizations is create an avalanche of resumes and applications that has buried their internal resources under thousands of pages of information within which is hidden a few top-notch workers.  If your organization is required to report on hiring data, only recently did the EEOC publish the clarification about how an employer can and must differentiate between a qualified applicant and an unqualified “job-seeker”.

That decision was useful and helpful.  But it still doesn’t resolve for employers and hiring authorities the issue of how to dig out the best qualified talent from thousands of unqualified and qualified but mediocre “applicants”.

Bottom Line - Highly qualified and talented workers are becoming more important to the success of organizations in almost every industry and harder to find in many markets.  When you do locate them, they are more knowledgeable more sophisticated about their market value, their industry and business in general.  They are also more mobile; more connected and in many cases have clearer expectations about what their career objectives are when making their next move and what it will take to “get them on board”.  In addition, they are likely to be more cautious about employer-employee relationships than many of their predecessors.

What Are They Looking For?                                                        Top

One positive trend in what could otherwise be considered a bleak forecast is that highly desirable workers and the workforce in general are a little more realistic about compensation.  They are not now as prone to trying to drive suitor companies into a bidding war as they may have been during the gold rush years of the dot.com era.  Sure, you may have to kick in with a reasonable compensation plan.  And you will more than likely be talking about a wider range of choices and flexibility in such things as flex work schedules, telecommuting, continued education and training, cash-out options for PTO, self-directed health care accounts, even sabbaticals, etc.

But the most significant shift in the “requirements” of the new workforce is a growing need for a redefined relationship.  The parent-child type relationships that typified many employer-employee environments of the past have been swept away with the effects of “right-sizing”, globalization and off-shoring, the information explosion including live communication of current events and several years of almost daily exposures and examples of corporate excesses and poor governance.  The new workforce does not take everything they read and see at face value, but the increased quantity and ease of access to information, both accurate and distorted, is rapidly maturing the workforce.

The fundamental shift occurring is one that redefines the relationship from “employee as worker” to “employee as partner”.  The value proposition that employers now need to offer should include a “great company” and a “great job,” an appealing culture and inspiring values, and bosses and an organization that workers can respect and feel positively about.  There are too many jokes floating around about kids who are ashamed to tell friends and schoolmates where their parents work.

So Where Do You Find Them?

Okay, you knew that.  So where do you find these workers without which nothing can happen?  As in the past, the most desirable workers are currently employed.  No big surprise there.  Conventional wisdom has always been that if you have a choice between a worker who is employed and one who is unemployed, the safe bet is to engage with the “still-employed” worker.  The “unemployed” candidate always poses the risk that there was something in their behavior that created or contributed to their unemployed status.

What the above data tells us is that, for the foreseeable future, you may not have a choice.  If you want to add top talent to your workforce or replace some of your underperforming workers, you will be forced to pull them from your competitors, your suppliers and maybe even from your customers.

These types of “poaching” activities, especially when targeting a direct competitor, have always presented organizations with challenges that were best handled by third-party recruiters, either contingency or retained.  This situation is not new for many firms who have for years been using retained search firms to locate top executives and sales professionals.  In fact, over 85% of businesses will use third-party recruiters at some point to supplement their internal recruiting resources.

And there are plenty of recruiters around, all types, in every industry.  Some are old school and have been extremely successful doing the same thing for many years, frequently without the benefit or aid of current technology or modern tools.  Others are newer and less tested, possibly with access to a few more of the toys and methods that have become popular over the last couple of years.  But keep in mind that the turnover rate in the recruiting profession is somewhat akin to the drop-out rate in a varsity team tryout session.  Typical fall-off in this industry has hovered somewhere around 70% per year for “newbies” and the recent downturn has not helped those numbers to improve.

What the marketplace needs now, to help small to medium-sized organizations with these challenges, is a new type of recruiting solution.  What is needed is a quantum leap, if you will, in what the recruiting profession has historically provided for this sector of the market.  You don’t need a head-hunter. You need a coach, a counselor and recruiting facilitator who is able to quickly and accurately assess your needs, the needs of your organization, and the needs of the candidate and coordinate the decision to move ahead and close the deal.

What Can You Do To Prepare?                                                Top

Okay, you knew that one too.  So what can an organization do to successfully compete for and retain the best talent in the coming years?  For many organizations this demand and increased competition for top talent at every level requires that they completely rethink their approach to how they attract and appeal to the most desirable candidates.

Where do you start?

First order of business - making your organization a place where people want to work, one with strong values and a great culture.  Create incredible jobs where talented workers will have opportunity for rapid advancement, receive superior professional development, and where compensation differentiates the good from the great. Review your recognition and reward systems — if you don’t provide relentless feedback on what’s going right and what’s going wrong, fill the tank with recognition for a job well done, and pay what it takes to retain top performers - your competitors will. It’s that simple.

Second order of business - getting your recruiting function operating at warp speed and “up to speed” on how to make better, more efficient use of their time and to become more effective in understanding not just what it takes to perform each function in your organization at a high level, but how to identify the candidates who are, by their aptitude and behavioral characteristics, predisposed to do a great job at whatever it is they do.

The premise here is that you don’t have much time to try to figure out whether someone is going to be a good fit in a particular position.  The market is moving too fast and you can’t afford to make avoidable mistakes going down this road.

Bottom line – The thing that now separates market leaders from “we should have gotten out earlier” is good hiring decisions versus poor hiring decisions.  If you have your people act together, that is, if you have the right people in the right positions, and you are creating and maintaining a environment that retains those people, you probably have a fighting chance of surviving the next round of carnage in your particular industry and markets.

How Can We Help?

Most organizations we talk to will readily admit that they need to do this stuff, to get better at it, and that it will probably take more time than they have to fully develop and internalize it.  But they also acknowledge that even if they had the time, they don’t have the in-house experience and resources to turn these concepts into an actionable program and manage it successfully while trying to meet all of their other objectives, especially with the reduced staff that now exists in their HR department.

Our clients understand that given the financial constraints under which they are operating, and a mandate to improve performance or perish, the challenge can be framed as two imperatives:

1. We need to become more effective and efficient in our hiring practices, to better “align the talent” with the position and with our organizations culture
2. We also need to extend the same principles and methods that will improve our new-hire evaluation and selection process to developing our existing staff to accelerate both individual and overall corporate performance

Based on these decisions, most clients decide that there are two primary factors motivating them to engage our services – time and money.

• Time - The urgency assigned to hiring and aligning the best, and also to improving the performance of existing staff, means they don’t have time to reinvent the wheel internally
• Money - The extremely reasonable costs associated with outsourcing their recruiting and assessment services to TalentCare Group or engaging us to train their organization on how to do it for themselves

What We Do                                                                        Top

Imperative Number One – “become more effective and efficient in our hiring practices”

With fierce competition for customers, supply chain optimization, rapidly shrinking product life cycles and increasing pressure to improve performance in every corner of the enterprise, most organizations don’t have time to use trial and error on this crucial element of their business model.  They can’t afford to adopt and implement anything less than best practices and proven methodologies ….and they need it now!

TalentCare Group uses a highly effective system that directly addresses the deficiencies that exist in many recruiting functions and hiring processes.  It has been proven out in the marketplace and validated by leading organizations both in North America and internationally.

Imperative Number Two – “extend the same principles to developing our existing staff”

One of the most painful lessons frequently learned by owners and managers of small and medium-sized organizations is that simply because someone is a great individual contributor does not mean they will be great, or even good, in a supervisory role.  In fact many studies have shown that some of the personality traits that can make someone a strong individual performer may be the same traits that almost guarantee that they will not, in most cases, be successful in a leadership role.

In these situations, not being able to accurately assess these types of “soft” factors before making a promotion decision is critical to not only getting the most from each employee’s potential, but even more critical to prevent over-extending their capabilities and running the risk that they will fail, become demoralized or possibly leave the organization.

TalentCare Group uses a highly effective system that directly addresses the deficiencies that exist in many performance evaluation and succession planning processes.  It has been proven out in the marketplace and validated by leading organizations both in North America and internationally.

General Approach and Methodology

TalentCare Group has integrated two highly effective systems into a single cohesive service solution for our clients called Enabling Talent Alignment® to address the deficiencies that exist in many recruiting functions and hiring processes, as well as many performance evaluation and succession planning processes.  Given the context of today’s organizational challenges, we believe nothing is more important to the long-term viability of an organization than ensuring that the best talent is on their team, enthusiastically working for them and committed to that organization’s long term goals and objectives (and not their competition’s).

Some companies don’t get it.  We wish they did.  We know that they would benefit from getting their talent aligned and using our proven methods to get there.

Some companies get it and already have or are putting in place the resources and systems to make this competitive advantage work for them. Click here for a list of organizations that get it.

If you want to understand more about the benefits that our approach, methods and tools can bring to your organization, click on this link: Enabling Talent Alignment®.

TalentCare Group is passionate about helping our clients achieve the success that comes from having the best people on their team, in positions they were “born to do and do well”.

Follow the links below to find out more about how TalentCare Group’s unique approach can improve your organization’s performance.