Upgrading talent

Downturns place companies’ talent strategies at risk. As deteriorating performance forces increasingly aggressive head count reductions, it’s easy to lose valuable contributors inadvertently, damage morale or the company’s external reputation among potential employees, or drop the ball on important training and staff-development programs. But there is a better way. By emphasizing talent in cost-cutting efforts, employers can intelligently strengthen the value proposition they offer current and potential employees and position themselves strongly for growth when economic

Positioning the Possibilities

People who have advanced degrees are everywhere. Anyone who has spent time recruiting knows that a master’s degree or PhD does not bestow any level of common sense or intelligence. Despite what schools would like us to believe, the degree, by itself, will not get you a job if you haven’t found another way to convince the company of your potential. Instead, you have to dig into your experience and come up with the stories that will get a hiring manager to think

Revamp management education

It is nobody’s case that management institutes should stop listening to the needs and wants of industry. But they cannot afford to be perceived as placement agencies rather than educational institutes, says Vasant V Bang.

EVEN before the current financial meltdown, scholars from within the management education fraternity had questioned the ways of management schools. Henry Mintzberg wrote a book titled Managers, not MBAs. Last year Harvard professors Rakesh Khurana and Jim Heskette wrote about deprofessionalisation of management education. Joan Magretta a former editor of Harvard Business Review wrote: “Leading business schools certainly played a role in legitimising the culture of easy money in 1990s. The pitch business schools made to the students in the late nineties was: you shall need connections. We have got them.”

The Brand Called Me

Is branding oneself a positive approach that employees should have? Personal branding is not all about selfpromotion and marketing tactics; it is more fundamental than that. It is a clear, deep, and profound understanding of who you are and what you stand for. “Every organisation should believe in playing with the strengths of the individual. The employees who can brand and market themselves well carry an image that gets associated with not only their brand name but also the organisation’s. Self-branding always helps.

The Business Partner Model: past & future perspectives

The informal business partner model has existed for well over 100 years when effective staff support functions, including HR, contributed to business results. Formalizing how HR professionals create more value as “business partners” has been of increased interest in the last 10-15 years. Given the emerging importance of HR as a contributor to business success, we suggest that it might be useful to pause and reflect on what we have learned in the past decade about the relevance of the business partner model and on the challenges that lie ahead.

More from Dave Ulrich

Awakening entrepreneurial spirit

An 18 day train journey to meet with business and social entrepreneurs who are changing India

Tata Jagriti Yatra '08 (December 24th 2008 - January 11th, 2009) is an annual train journey that will take 350 of India's highly motivated youth (with some participation of international students) between the ages of 18-25 on a eighteen day national odyssey, introducing them to unsung heroes of India. The aim is to awaken the spirit of entrepreneurship - both social and economic - within India's youth by exposing them to individuals and institutions that are developing unique solutions to India's challenges. Through this national event we will inspire them to lead and develop institutions nationally and within their communities. This event is conducted in 13 locations across India.

A to Z for Global Meldown

Dear Friends,
I got this wonderful link for the given subject. As we know we are about to launch our professional career. In the process we will challenge many tools for screaning in an interview as like Group Discussion.
If we would be able to give something more than the selection board's expectations, it can be a strong reason for our selection. It is difficult to accept but we know that the general mindset of industry people--HR students have a less exposure in Finance World.
So to break this myth for us, we should be very handy for finacial and economical trends. Do visit to this link which will be very beneficial to all of us.

http://www.rediff.com/money/lehman.html

Global meltdown to affect MBA placements

With the global financial crisis hitting several sectors, top management institutes are worried it will adversely affect the job prospects of their students, who are expecting a drop in the number of offers and the level of pay packages. Several top notch companies have already conveyed their intention to freeze campus placements, while some have decided to hire a limited number of candidates in the final placements.

Management institutes like the IITs fear the hike in average pay packages could reduce by 20 per cent, whereas students are apprehensive of a more severe downturn.

"The market meltdown will definitely affect the final campus placements with indications that companies would squeeze their requirements to a bare minimum. Companies, which had recruited five-six students during the last campus placements, may now restrict the number to one or two," Prof Sourav Mukherjee, placement chairman, IIM-Bangalore, said.


Pay packages for fresh students may not be as attractive this time. For the last five years, the increase in annual package offered to fresh graduates used to be in the range of 20-30 per cent, but now it could be in the range of 10 per cent, with average salary being Rs 14,00,000," said Prof Sushil Kumar, placements chairman, IIM-Lucknow

Read More.......

Retrenchment shadow falls on HR personnel

With most companies either retrenching or freezing recruitment plans, human resources personnel across sectors are a worried lot.
Recruitment-related HR executives are being moved to other HR functions like training and development and other day-to-day HR functions, or being taken on contract. If things worsen, there could also be layoffs.

Read More.......

TO START OR NOT TO START?

A downturn is both a good and a bad time for entrepreneurs. It throws up numerous opportunities but also seperates the wheat from the chaff.

STARTING a business may not be the most important thing on the minds of salaried professionals worried by future layoffs by cost-conscious employers in a downturn. But for those wanting to turn entrepreneurs for some time, this could actually be the right opportunity to jump right in—with the right kind of business models. While starting a new business in these difficult times, one needs to understand that people are spending less, and more carefully too. “A smart entrepreneur will look at opportunities that didn’t exist till now. Whenever there is a mess, there is an opportunity to think out-of-the-box,” says Saurabh Srivastava, founding member of the Indian Angel Network.

Innovation In designing the Office of Today

What if you step into your office building, one fine day and find out that the entire appearance of the office has undergone a major makeover? You find that all the glass cubicles have been dismantled to create more open space and you now share your workstation with your CEO! Your canteen has a LAN connection and you are encouraged to work using your laptop, sipping cappuccino, while being seated cozily on a beanbag. Your boss encourages you to have your weekly brainstorming sessions at the office recreational centre, while working out on the treadmill. Your new office is swanky, contemporary and stylish!

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Downturn in economy can mean new opportunities for entrepreneurs

However, believe it or not, some experts say that this is just the time for launching a start up. Just speak to Hitesh Oberoi, part of the team that launched highly successful ventures like naukri.com, jeevansathi.com, and 99acres.com. He believes that “it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur again…. [Companies are] going to try and cut costs, be more efficient; manpower is easily available so it’s a good time to start a company.”

What You Need To Know About Surviving Layoffs

Every morning, it seems, you read an article in the paper about layoffs at another company. Those layoffs are hard on the people who get laid off, but they are also just as hard on the people left behind. There is more work to be done and fewer people to do it. There is the lingering fear that more layoffs might happen or that the company might close altogether. Here’s what you need to know to survive in this business climate, both as a manager and as an employee.

Best big companies to work for

Valero Energy
Fortune 1000 rank:

16 Best Companies rank: 67 No. of U.S. employees: 17,488

Most common salaried job: Store Manager - RetailAvg. pay in that job: $97,73 What makes it so great? Largest oil refiner in North America makes its corporate jet available for employees with medical emergencies and covers 100% of health insurance premiums.

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Top 10 Tips to Attract,Retain & Motivate Employees

Grimme's Top 10 Tips: To Attract, Retain & Motivate Employees
1-Pay employees fairly and well - then get them to forget about money.
2-Treat each and every employee with respect. Show them that you care about them as persons, not just as workers.
3-Praise accomplishments and attempts…

What kind of employee are you ?

Aries Employee Profile (march 21 - april 19)
Aries employees make excellent troubleshooters.They'll usually want to be out in the field at a variety of different work sites fixing things. They certainly won't be happy for very long behind a desk in a 9 to 5 schedule. The bored Aries employee ..........

Taurus Employee Profile (april 20 - may 20)
Taureans make some of the best employees. They are loyal, hardworking, and no-nonsense. They work methodically and follow projects through until they are complete. Some may appear to work a little too slowly-usually because ......

Talent Management through Psychological Contract

According to a survey by Merit Trac, there is 93% gap in the employability even after professional qualification. This raises serious questions regarding our education system. Skill and competency is a result of nurturing right learning attitude.

People and knowledge have always been the foundation of any organisation, however, the importance in last decade has grown many fold due to globalisation and Information Technology Revolution. Products and processes no longer are competitive edge and can be replaced by better ones. Psychological contract between people and organisations are becoming more important than the written contracts

6 degrees of separation

We all network in multitude of ways, sometime even without realising it. It’s true. No one is, or can be, exempt from these social linkages or networks, be it an individual or a corporation. And from an organisational point of view, dabbling in social networks has always been important, to learn and absorb more from the environment. But it has also gained importance from the point of view of recruiting - simply because networking is one of the easiest and fastest ways to find people with the right competencies and experience. In a world that is rapidly latching on to the use of technology to do everything in a better way, organisations have found that some old-fashioned social interaction can work wonders for them

A dearth of HR talent

A survey of HR directors at 20 global corporations based in the United Kingdom also found that core HR services such as employee data management and recruiting are often poorly executed. The troubling gulf between the needs of the business and the ability of HR to respond will force many companies to rethink their approach to the recruitment, training, and development of HR employees.

Centered leadership: How talented women thrive

Women start careers in business and other professions with the same level of intelligence, education, and commitment as men. Yet comparatively few reach the top echelons.
This gap matters not only because the familiar glass ceiling is unfair, but also because the world has an increasingly urgent need for more leaders. All men and women with the brains, the desire, and the perseverance to lead should be encouraged to fulfill their potential and leave their mark.

The challenge of hiring and retaining women

In an era of ever-intensifying competition for talent, companies that can appeal to and retain different kinds of workers are more likely to succeed. Understanding diversity in the workforce has been a professional interest of Axelrod’s since 1989, when she was asked, as a young McKinsey consultant, to help figure out why the firm was losing so many women and what could be done to keep them. In the late 1990s, Axelrod was a leader of McKinsey’s War for Talent project, which quantified the challenges that leading US companies faced in finding talented executives. She later moved on to executive roles at the global marketing communications group WPP and then to eBay.

Can an organisation evolve itself to become an employer of its choice

In todays business, people are the key differentiator and getting the right type of talent, in time and retaining them has become the primary focus of almost all organisations. Becoming a beacon to attract talent has become the secret ambition which has spurted organisations to take note of how they are perceived by employees, both current and prospective.

Organisations have started adopting various novel ways of becoming attractive. And like a peacock displaying its plumes during mating seasons, organisations too have started publicizing their uniqueness.

Economic and hiring outlook, third quarter 2008: A McKinsey Global Survey

Although executives indicate that their companies have greater pricing power, it isn’t translating into stability for workers. Hiring plans have dwindled over the past year. Almost 30 percent of the executives now expect their companies to shrink the size of the workforce in the next six months (Exhibit 4), up from 18 percent a year ago. Executives in manufacturing and financial services, where workforce cutbacks have been more common than in other industries, are even more likely than executives in general to say the workforce will decrease than increase. By contrast, 43 percent of the executives in energy expect hiring levels to rise—by far the most in any industry. It seems likely that energy companies are drawing on their enormous profits to continue exploring.

Online Video Resumes

Do you ever have one of those moments when you wince at the past and wonder, “What was I thinking?” Big hair and parachute pants come to mind for me because I was a child of the eighties. Trends come and go. Some stay and become part of our lifestyle and culture while others, gratefully, die a natural death never to be resurrected. Yet at their height of popularity, it’s difficult to tell which have staying power and which do not. This is why we need to pay very careful attention to the newest job search trend – the online video resume.

WorkPlace Diversity- A melting pot of talent

A global economy brings with it a diverse workforce. Workplace diversity encompasses race, gender, ethnic group, age, personality type, educational background and work experience.

Managers need to be careful and ensure that decisions and actions are not influenced by stereotypical views. “Ethnic minorities lack qualification, women with young children are less committed to work, disabled employees are more likely to be sick than others and older workers lack ambition and enthusiasm”. These could be some of the stereotypical presumptions that exist. These should be avoided.

Why multinationals struggle to manage talent

A McKinsey survey of managers at some of the world’s best-known multinationals covered a range of sectors and all the main geographies. Our findings suggest that the movement of employees between countries is still surprisingly limited and that many people tempted to relocate fear that doing so will damage their career prospects. Yet companies that can satisfy their global talent needs and overcome cultural and other silo-based barriers tend to outperform those that don’t.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

With the rapid increase in the ‘service’ oriented companies/sectors in the Indian economy, this trend is only set to increase manifold. Several service industries predominantly IT & ITES and Aviation have been built on this trend and the current retail boom is all set to leverage this resource pool. Reflecting on this fast growing trend, Ravi Saxena, MD, Citymax India comments, “Definitely the trend is on the rise since there is a severe crunch of trained manpower at various levels across industries.”

Technology revolution in HR

The relationship between human resource management and information technology is inverse. Human resources use machines to manage people, and information technology uses people to manage machines. It is important to remember that information technology brings new tools and a strong interest in knowledge management to this business relationship. While human resource brings a strong orientation for improving job performance and a focus on knowledge use.

Using branding to attract talent

Competition for talent is heating up in many industries and will probably intensify, since demographic trends make it increasingly difficult for companies to replace valued employees when they retire.1 In response, many companies are trying to sharpen the way they market themselves to recruits, by applying branding techniques to recruitment.

Is the family business right for you?

If you already run a family business, you already know how complex the relationships can become. The key to success is organizing the business just as you would any other, with charters, governance procedures, and the like. Spell it all out. Over the years Davis has contributed a number of articles for HBS Working Knowledge that provides useful advice on how this can be accomplished.

Few, proud and social

For the US Marine Corps, social networking is nothing new. The few and the proud have a long history of coming back from travels and conquests to tell stories to friends and family. So it is only natural that the Marine Corps now uses social networking as a big part of its Internet marketing efforts to attract new recruits.
From a MySpace page to its own branded social networking site at Our.Marines.com, the Marine Corps uses the power of social networking and viral communication to excite and engage its target 18- to 25-year-old audience.

Follow The Leader

Recently, in a KPO, two senior officials quit to set up a direct competitor of their existing employer. The first thing they did was to contact their teams at their previous employer. There was complete havoc created while the teams were quitting, and eventually, the organisation had to suffer heavily though it had invested so much of time and effort to build those teams.

Biggest global challenge - Managing Talent

According to the latest global study by The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and the World Federation of Personnel Management Associations (WFPMA), managing talent is the most critical manpower challenge worldwide. It is believed that this issue would remain at or near the top of executive agendas in every region and industry for the foreseeable future. 

Hidden Talent

Corporation can gain a competetive advantage if they can identify the employees who hold key knowledge and retain them - or at least transfer their knowledge to others if they do decide to leave. Those employee exist at all levels of an organisation , but they are frequently hidden from view. Identifying, nurturig and retaining key knowledge holders and other emplyees with valuable but often overlooked skills will allow corporations to remain agile even during times of high turnover.

The people principle

Dr Wayne Brockbank*, clinical professor of business at the University of Michigan Business School, explains the ‘why, what and how’ of human resource strategy, and where companies can make the greatest gains.


About Dr Brockbank: The faculty director of the ‘strategic HR planning program’ and the ‘advanced HR executive program’ at the University of Michigan's Executive Education Centre, Dr Brockbank is also the co-director of the University’s ‘HR executive program’. Wall Street Journal and Business Week have consistently rated these three programmes as the best HR executive programmes in the United States and Europe.

The leadership challenge: direction and destination

In all forms of organisations, managers face issues and seek solutions. In the earlier part of one's professional career, one is dealing with known issues and known solutions. All training methods help professionals to migrate to handle higher responsibilities, the highest being when one is dealing with unknown issues having unknown solutions. Therefore, top leadership by nature is risky. It is this syndrome that causes people to read books, learn from others' experiences and try to emulate success formulae. This too is not easy.

The people problem in talent management

Increasingly, companies view the ability to manage talent effectively as a strategic priority.Yet our research finds that senior executives largely blame themselves and their business line managers for failing to give the issue enough time and attention. They also believe that insular "silo" thinking and a lack of collaboration across the organization remain considerable handicaps. Moreover, executives who think that their companies' succession-planning efforts are deficient don't, on balance, see talent-management processes and systems as the chief problem.

A talent shortage for European banks

European banks face a looming talent shortage. In the next five years, some large institutions will face difficulties filling positions crucial to the execution of their evolving strategies. While the best talent managers can tap strong internal contenders for such roles, many others will be forced to fill pivotal jobs with second-tier internal talent or with external candidates—a relatively expensive and risky approach for banks.

Talent Management

"We must create a society in which a person does not have to betray inner sensitivity, inner essence. Each of us needs opportunities to unfold the essence of being. Then the sensitivity becomes fountain of strength, of peace, of joy." Vimala Thakar

7 Ps excellences through strategic People & Performance – Purpose, People, Process..............

Purpose: Attunes people to organizational vision and mission.

“It’s your boat, so start rowing.”

As an individual how attuned am I to my purpose? Most of our problems arise due to not being attuned to our own vision

and mission in life.

Most organisational vision/mission statements or even DNA charts are only words, devoid of any spirit or life