Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

My Takeaways from the ATD Tech Skills Gap Panel

The technology skills gap is a well-known issue in American employment circles. Yet, research tends to focus on only one aspect of the problem – the shortage of hard tech skills like programming and information security management. But there is another, perhaps even more critical dimension to the technology skills gap¹: the lack of applied tech skills in the workplace.

As we’ve talked about previously, when an individual has applied tech skills,² they can integrate people, processes, data, and devices to effectively inform business strategy and plan for and react to unanticipated shifts in direction.

At the annual Association for Training and Development (ATD) conference³ in San Diego, I moderated an applied technology skills gap panel with John Aquilino, Manager, Skills Gap Training and Services, DeVryWORKS; Jessica DiCicco, VP, Learning & Development, Randstad; Jackie Linton, Deputy Chief Administrative Officer, City of Philadelphia; Kristen Switzer, Sr. People Development Manager, Taylor Morrison; and Andre Walker, VP of Training & Development, Securitas Security Services.

Applied Technology Skills: Why Now?

I began by asking the panel why applied technology skills have become so critical in business. “Everyone in our company, whether they are in construction, purchasing, accounting, or customer service, touches a technology system. They need to understand these systems to do their jobs well,” said Switzer. “We are also offering training on a variety of technology platforms that require employees to come up to speed.”

Next, I asked John to comment on how his cross-industry employer partners are equipping their workforces with applied technology skills. “Access to training and development is not the issue,” he responded. “It’s much more about how those skills are curated and aligned to arrive at actionable outcomes.”

Panelists shared that their organizations are searching for and using solutions that help their employees develop “soft skills” related to technology adoption such as critical thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving. “Applying knowledge of Big Data, digital infrastructure, and integrated processes is essential to effective decision-making,” said Aquilino. “Companies are infusing learning experiences with technology, so employees can leverage the familiarity of working with machines in their daily roles.”

For more panel insights, head over to the full piece at the DeVryWORKS website.

Considering a Global Business Strategy

Many business owners dream of taking a company overseas. You're capable of making such a potentially lucrative move—with the right global business strategy in place.

Tamara Nall, CEO of data consulting firm The Leading Niche originally incorporated in the U.S. But she decided to go global as a result of a relationship map that plotted the strength of her most influential relationships against the need for her company's services.

"Glaringly, the map pointed to international markets and West Africa specifically," says Nall.

Kelly Gibbons, co-founder of personal branding firm Main and Rose has a slightly different story. Her company, which helps socially-driven entrepreneurs and brands with communication services, received several inquiries from international clients every week.

"When the time came to expand, we decided to base our new office in a location that many consider the center of the world: the UAE," Gibbons says.

Consider Your Proposed Strategy From Top to Bottom

A global business strategy should include:

• an overview of expansion plans, 
• a description of the market, including size and competition, 
• a description of planned overseas operations (including how products will be produced, distributed and marketed) and 
• a description of how the international business will be led, managed, staffed and positioned for growth.

It sounds deceptively easy. But, according to Nall, developing an effective global business strategy requires careful consideration of a variety of factors.

For the rest of the piece, head over to the AMEX OPENForum.

Tapping Into Global Business Innovation

Before the internet, most innovation took place in small communities, with isolated breakthroughs eventually spreading throughout the world. Today, however, global business innovation is the norm.

Business owners pursuing growth may want to make a habit of looking around them—and not just at local competitors. How other companies around the world do business can affect your organization.

I spoke to two business owners to understand how they tap into global business innovation to power their companies.

Stepping Out of Your Communal Bubble

Fabrizio Moreira is the owner of The Moreira Organization, a nonprofit that develops world leaders. He has learned that everything a business owner touches involves a global team of talent—from manufacturing to storing data in the cloud.

“This global talent pool means you're competing with a lot of innovators who you ignore at your peril," Moreira says. “Many emerging markets are leapfrogging established markets because of need-based innovation and fewer existing infrastructure constraints," Bullen says. “Paying attention to what these markets are doing can help you identify opportunities in your own market as well as threats that may be down the line."

He seeks out intelligence on global business innovation by observing similar organizations operating in other countries, and finding ways to plug in and work with them.

Erik Bullen is CEO of MageMail and is actively involved in the start-up and innovation community, mentoring and advising for programs such as Techstars, MassChallenge and LaunchX. His ideation is regularly informed by other cultures, markets and industries.

“Many emerging markets are leapfrogging established markets because of need-based innovation and fewer existing infrastructure constraints," Bullen says. “Paying attention to what these markets are doing can help you identify opportunities in your own market as well as threats that may be down the line."

For more where this came from, check out the AMEX OPENForum.

How to Retain Millennials Today

It’s not unusual to hear HR professionals at large, publicly-traded companies lament: “No one wants to work here. I wish this was a nonprofit.”

On the surface, this makes sense. After all, nonprofit organizations are often an easier sell for millennials, who say they want the opportunity to do meaningful work on issues that benefit society. But as they get older, millennials who want to pay down debt and start saving are increasingly looking to employers who pay handsomely. And if they do accept a lower salary for a job, they expect that nonprofit environment to provide the most rewarding experience they can imagine. As we all know, however, even the noblest nonprofits are still organizations, and no organization is perfect.

AccessLex Institute is a nonprofit that advocates for policies that make legal education work better for students and society alike and conducts research on the most critical issues facing legal education today. The mission is intriguing, especially given how many young professionals consider and eventually enroll in law school. And sure enough, AccessLex never had much of a problem attracting millennial candidates for its open positions. The organization’s challenge has involved getting them to stay once new hires realize that nonprofit employment can be stressful and frustrating at times -- just like any job.

Assimilate Talent Strategically And Early

Based on nearly 15 years of working with millennials, I can confidently say that the most important thing organizations must do to retain millennials is to assimilate them strategically and early. First impressions matter a great deal and new millennial hires aren't likely to give a company a second chance if they don't like what they experience initially.

To that end, AccessLex set out to increase its retention of new millennial employees by creating a high-tech, high-touch virtual onboarding system. The tool was built based on what they learned was new hires’ biggest hurdle -- feeling disconnected from the culture. The organization’s internal research revealed that young employees would accept a job, come in for a few weeks and keep interviewing. If a better opportunity presented itself, nothing stopped the new hire from taking it. “We knew if we could make them feel part of the organization right away and get them to hang out with us for a year, we could actually keep them for much longer,” said Tanya Papahristos, Director of Human Resources for AccessLex.

For the rest of the piece, check out Forbes.com.

 

How to Implement a Forward-Thinking HR Initiative

Traditionally, the HR function has not been known for it. In fact, it’s typical for HR to be several years behind other industries – or areas of the same organization – when it comes to implementing new and more efficient ways of conducting business.

However, today’s HR leaders are working to change that.  Thanks to an infusion of younger and in many cases more agile workers into the profession, HR departments are leading the way in cutting-edge implementations that facilitate stronger employee experiences, better productivity, and longer retention.

Seek Relevance

If this sounds palatable to you, and you want to be the person who makes a difference in your organization, there are a few ways to go about it. The first is to understand that even the most forward-thinking initiative shouldn’t be developed in isolation. This means that you should first speak with your boss about the larger business and departmental goals you need to achieve, and where you should be focusing your attention to that effect. As you brainstorm, zero in on concepts that fall within this scope.

It’s also worthwhile to pay attention to the world around you. HR conferences like the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), HR Technology, Disrupt HR, and Work Human offer sessions to learn industry best practices as well as innovative new techniques for solving HR-related business problems. Every time I attend an event like this, I return energized and full of promising ideas.

Similarly, if you are part of a local HR community, reach out and learn what other organizations are doing. Visit other companies with similar challenges, attend networking events, and bring in expert speakers to get your team thinking about issues in a new way.

You can foster the birth of forward-thinking HR initiatives from within your own ranks too. Instead of relying on the same people all the time, seek out new blood. Invite skilled individuals from other departments to spend time in HR, and crowdsource ideas from your larger employee population through hackathons and MVP (minimum viable product) competitions to design HR-related products and services.

Leverage Technology

Many forward-thinking HR initiatives naturally involve technology, and the effective integration and use of people, processes, data, and devices in order to work strategically and effectively is an up-and-coming HR competency. At DeVryWORKS, we say that employees who can do this have applied technology skills, and recent research I conducted with DeVry University’s Career Advisory Board found that nearly half of HR and hiring managers believe there is an applied technology skills deficit in their current employee base.

One critical applied technology skill with particular relevance to HR is citizen development. According to Gartner’s IT Glossary, a citizen developer is a worker who creates new business applications using development environments sanctioned by IT. Over the last few years, most organizations have moved their HR systems into cloud platforms. These platforms are the perfect hosts for mobile apps and other tools that make it easier for employees to do their jobs and have a continuous, positive experience.  And now, you or members of your team can build applications without the programming expertise or coding experience that was mandatory previously.

That’s not to say that you’ll be instant experts. The key to developing a forward-thinking HR application that actually works is to engage with IT to understand the basic principles behind app design, and to use technology that has already been vetted and well-integrated with your company’s existing IT infrastructure.

For any technology-based initiative, you should establish a strong, ongoing partnership with IT. Meeting with that group regularly will allow your team to receive essential governance, guidelines, and best practices. Your initial effort will likely be most successful if the implementation is a pilot, meaning its scope is limited and it is launched with one business process or one team. Pilots are useful because they facilitate experimentation and continuous improvement with minimal disruption to the business.

Regardless of whether your planned project is a new application or a new employer brand, effective communication will make or break it. Make sure that at every step of the way, your employees are informed about proposed changes, that they understand how the initiative impacts their roles and responsibilities, and that they are encouraged to test and provide feedback. A team approach to innovation is the best approach to innovation!

 

7 Ways AI is Simplifying Recruiting

This week, from my friends at DeVryWORKS: The world of talent acquisition has never been so challenging. In most of the developed world, the pace and volume of hiring has picked up significantly, yet most recruiting teams have not adequately staffed up to cope with the demand. At the same time, manual processes are still king, with resume screening and interview selection and scheduling among the most labor intensive.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform recruitment operations, but it must be used strategically, since most agree that talent acquisition should be a highly personalized, human to human engagement. The sweet spot of AI here is the lower level, repetitive tasks that eat up the time of the recruiter, who should instead be using his or her interpersonal power to draw talented individuals into the organization. Here are a few promising AI-related technologies that both simplify and streamline recruitment operations.

ClearFit

 The “Smooth Hiring” sourcing program automatically broadcasts a job description to the top job boards and identifies applicants that match your needs through a ranking process based on previously identified attributes. Candidates with a Strong Fit score meet or exceed at least 18/20 traits (including 5 Critical Traits), and all minimum skill and experience requirements. Recruiters receive an email every time there is a new Strong Fit, and once every 24 hours notifying them of all new candidates from that day. 

GapJumpers

One of the most challenging hurdles recruiters face is unconscious bias, which is triggered by our brain making quick judgments and assessments of people and situations based on our background, cultural environment and personal experiences. GapJumpers combats this by offering a blind-audition process in which candidates are given a job-related assignment and hiring managers assess the completed task without seeing any personal identifiers, including name, gender, work experience or education.

Harver

This all-purpose assessment engine allows TA professionals to measure everything from personality across six different dimensions and cognitive and problem-solving capabilities to language proficiency and situational judgment specific to the role in question. It can even measure a candidate’s work environment preferences and compare them to your organization’s to better ensure a match for cultural fit.

Ideal

This software automates resume screening by applying machine learning on an existing resume database. According to Ideal, the program determines which candidates went on to become successful and unsuccessful based on their performance, tenure, and turnover rates. It learns about existing employees’ experience, skills, and other attributes, and applies this knowledge to new applicants in order to rank, grade, and shortlist the strongest candidates. For the applicants themselves, the software uses publicly available data to offer recruiters a more complete profile of previous employment and social media engagement.

JobPal

Custom-build recruitment chatbots like JobPal allow TA professionals to respond to candidates in real-time and guide them, step-by-step, through the application process. Many candidates fatigue before they can finish an often lengthy form, but chatbots can prompt them for the same information in a more user-friendly format. And, if candidates don’t provide everything required, chatbots can check in to remind them.  Bots can also maintain an active relationship with a candidate, providing status updates on an application, scheduling interviews, and letting them know that a job has been filled and they are no longer being considered.

Textio

Many recruiters have trouble attracting diverse candidates based purely on the language in their job descriptions. This AI program examines 40 million job listings and considers the outcomes: how many people applied, how long the job stayed open, and the demographic groups the description did or didn't attract. Based on the data, a predictive engine provides feedback on how likely a job description is to draw diverse candidates along with suggestions for how to phrase descriptions using more neutral language.

X.ai

Featuring scheduling assistants “Amy” and “Andrew,” this software allows recruiters to connect their calendars, update their preferences, and schedule phone screens or in-person interviews with candidates. Allegedly, Amy and Andrew were created based on a comprehensive analysis of human meeting habits and terminology, and their communication appears so natural people often believe they are working with humans.

 

Strategic Onboarding is Essential for Vulnerable Financial Institutions

In the financial world, failing to effectively onboard new employees can be catastrophic. There are the usual costs associated with new hire turnover (nearly a million dollars a year for the average organization), but in addition, unprepared new employees may unknowingly commit expensive and illegal accounting and compliance errors and may feel so frustrated with their jobs that they depart for better opportunities.

Today’s Onboarding Is So Much More Than a One-Day Orientation

We refer to onboarding as the period of time that organizations enculturate, engage, and train their new hires.  According to the Brandon Hall Group’s new report, The Evolution of Onboarding: Trends and Opportunities, the best onboarding initiatives confirm and exceed expectations set during recruitment, introduce new hires to how their contributions impact their organizations, help new hires assimilate and navigate the culture of the organization, train new hires on basic logistics for job performance and career path, optimize engagement with the organization, and introduce new hires to key people who can facilitate performance and growth.

Unfortunately, not all financial organizations possess this level of onboarding sophistication. Not surprisingly, Brandon Hall found that organizations with lower onboarding maturity have higher first-year attrition rates. And quick quits, or resignations that occur within the first six months of employment, account for a large percentage of all turnover.

Technology Can Solve Issues Stemming from Underprepared and Underutilized Hires

Why are financial professionals so sensitive to the effects of poor onboarding? The natural complexity of these roles and the need for new employees to get up to speed and work with others quickly are two reasons. Also, organizations fearing the errors we discussed earlier may underutilize new hires, and as a result, they may feel undervalued enough to leave. It doesn’t help that the job market for financial professionals is strong right now, especially for those with accounting and legal skills.

Organizations can do a great deal to stop the immediate brain drain of new financial hires. First and foremost, they should develop a comprehensive, technology-driven, and learning-focused onboarding experience. Brandon Hall found that organizations with higher onboarding maturity are using a combination of strategies including electronic forms, document management, dashboards, portals, and learning content support.

These features hit exactly what financial organizations need to keep their new hires: effective allocation of resources, seamless knowledge transfer, and risk management. In fact, Brandon Hall’s survey respondents said that these technologies drive improvements such as process management (73 percent of respondents), automation of manual tasks (70 percent), better new hire experience (60 percent), support for a dispersed workforce (52 percent), and decreased time-to-proficiency (49 percent). And 73 percent who use onboarding technology to train new employees do so to address critical legal requirements and compliance practices, while 63 percent do so to address differentiating product and service knowledge.

For more where this came from, check out the SilkRoad blog.

The Strategic Elevation of HR

I’ve recently had the opportunity to work more closely with DeVryWORKS, which offers organizations solutions to acquire and retain the best talent, plan for succession, and close skills gaps. One thing has become very clear in recent years: the strategies organizations used yesterday to recruit, manage, and retain top people won’t work today. Increasingly, employees are looking not just for a job they like, but an experience that’s meaningful. Thanks to analytics tools, we are in a better position than ever to measure whether our initiatives are working as intended, and it’s especially critical that we are agile in the face of a continuously evolving business climate.

Moving forward, I will publish one article a week here on topics of utmost concern to leaders and talent management professionals like you. Sometimes I’ll aim to help you build a business case for strategies you already know are imperative, and other times, I will introduce a new idea you might not have considered before. 

Let's start with a piece on how HR is changing. If you have been in the human resources profession for a while, you might have heard the legend of how HR originally became a thing. Allegedly, around the turn of the 20^th century, The National Cash Register Company had a strike to which it responded by launching a “Personnel Department.” The new division was responsible for regulating wages, ensuring a safe work environment, keeping employee records, and responding to grievances.

The HR function did not change for the better part of 100 years. While other functional areas grew and expanded, HR largely remained static and administrative in nature. If a new employee was starting or one was leaving, you contacted HR staff. Otherwise, you rarely (if ever) interfaced with them.

As the economy has improved and skills shortages have increased, however, the competition for top talent has intensified. Now, effective talent management across the employee lifecycle – from recruiting and onboarding to learning and performance, has become a c-suite imperative. By necessity, leaders are calling on HR to advise on critical matters related to the longstanding competitiveness and overall success of the organization.

In other words, the HR function has been elevated strategically so that every operation supports the larger business goals. But while many HR professionals grumbled about “not having a seat at the table” for decades, now that the seat has been granted, some aren’t sure how to contribute in the most effective way. If this is your situation, here are some recommendations to get started:

Know Your Business

Many HR professionals only know HR – and at a basic level at that. HR leaders who have the ear of the CEO, on the other hand, have a solid understanding of their companies’ position in the industry, how they are run, their unique histories, their products and services, and the roles that various functions play in achieving the organizations’ goals. If they don’t have experience with a function (finance, for instance), they are proactive in learning more about it. This deeper body of knowledge allows them to provide more meaningful talent management guidance to other leaders.

Know Your Customers

The most strategic HR professionals have a handle on both their internal and external customers. Speaking with representatives in other departments, they’ve become well-versed in the profiles of those who purchase their company’s products and services, those who apply to work at the organization, and those who are currently employed there.

Think Beyond Tactics

Far too often, HR is guilty of launching initiatives without a broader context, which are developed in a vacuum. Continuous improvement is good, but make sure there is a method to your madness. For example, an HR leader shouldn’t implement a shiny new applicant tracking system without first doing research on how individuals are currently hired into the organization.

Focus on the Employee Experience

Employee experience design involves thoughtfully considering what employees should feel and do at each stage of the employment lifecycle to maximize engagement, productivity, and retention. The old HR way involved a series of unrelated and isolated actions (i.e. an employee’s orientation agenda did not address the goals that would later be addressed in his or her performance review), but the new way is continuous and connected.

Involve Managers Everywhere

It is well known that the most critical factor in retention is the manager/employee relationship. Strategic HR leaders facilitate these relationships from the get go, ensuring that managers are mentally present for new hires and are taking specific actions to ensure that employees effectively assimilate into the organization and receive appropriate guidance throughout their tenures.

Pilot and Measure Innovative Projects

Strategic HR professionals understand that current processes and procedures – especially manual ones – have a limited shelf life, and that today’s HR organizations must be agile in their response to constituent needs. They constantly aim to do things in a new way, often taking a promising idea and implementing it on a small scale (for example, an onboarding portal rolled out initially to the marketing department) to see how it will play. And most importantly, they know that building a business case for a new initiative requires knowing how to use Big Data and analytics tools to measure a pilot’s success.

HR is most strategic when everything it touches has business implications. If you find yourself constantly being asked to collaborate, that’s a good thing. It means you are headed in the right direction.

 

Introducing Tours of Duty for the Business World

According to Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and author of the book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, a tour of duty is an employee situation that involves working full-time in consecutive roles within an organization, working full-time in consecutive organizations for the purpose of upskilling, or taking breaks or dialing down from a full-time role in an organization.

Within a single organization, a tour of duty typically lasts for a finite period of two to five years. Both manager and employee openly acknowledge that at the end of the tour, the employee may well leave the organization. “The new compact acknowledges the probable impermanence of the relationship yet seeks to build trust and investment anyway. Instead of entering into strict bonds of loyalty, both sides seek the mutual benefits of alliance,” commented Hoffman in Harvard Business Review. “As allies, employer and employee try to add value to each other. The employer says, ‘If you make us more valuable, we’ll make you more valuable.’ The employee says, ‘If you help me grow and flourish, I’ll help the company grow and flourish.’”

The best tours of duty involve the mastery of new skills, or entrepreneurial opportunities like building and launching a new product, reengineering an existing business process, or introducing an organizational innovation. Regardless, the notion of a compact is critical. The tour of duty agreement must be made between individual manager and employee and therefore cannot be legislated by HR.

For more on tours of duty, check out the full post at the SilkRoad blog.

Performance is a Cultural Variable

co-founder and CEO Mollie Lombardi described a culture of performance as a set of behaviors that are rewarded or discouraged by the people, processes, and systems within an organization. To create and foster a performance culture, Lombardi suggested focusing on the following conditions for success.

Alignment

According to new Aptitude research, alignment on culture is a major challenge: only 38 percent of organizations said that leaders and employees would describe their culture in the same way. On a related point, 53 percent of senior leaders said performance expectations are clearly communicated, but only 34 percent of employees said the same.  Leaders are in denial, and it doesn’t help that while 60 percent of companies have executive level oversight of client experience, only 37 percent have an executive level role focused on workplace culture and employee engagement.

Employee Experience

Eighty-one percent of top performing companies said they measure the experience of candidates, employees, managers, and leaders. When an experience doesn’t resonate, it’s often because we are using a one-size-fits-all model. Lombardi advised that we must do a much better job tailoring messages, recognizing that employees have a singular experience throughout their day. And the only experience that matters is theirs.

In addition to catering to the needs of the individual rather than the collective group, we can create a better experience by bridging the gap between employer and employee through more frequent and bidirectional communications, and creating an easier process for individuals to do their work, engage with others, and drive performance. The best employee communications are consistent in message but vary in format (depending on information consumption habits) and are supported by a strategic technology implementation.

For more of Lombardi's insights, check out the full post on the SilkRoad blog.