Talent as a Scarce Resource
July 2009
Did you know: The 25 percent of India's
population with the highest IQs exceeds the total U.S. population? China
will soon become the number one English speaking country in the world?
Today's 21-year-old will have a dozen jobs—by age 38?1
by Corbette
Doyle
The face of talent is changing rapidly and dramatically. For decades, the
United States was the global leader in both creating new talent and in
innovation. Not coincidentally, that lead in both categories is slipping.
The United States has dropped from the #1 country in the world for the
proportion of college graduates to #17. It should be no surprise, then, that
our lead in innovation has narrowed dramatically, even in areas like
biotech, where we once held a dramatic edge.2
Until
recently, the impending talent crisis was broadly acknowledged as one of the
top-10 challenges by CEOs. Critical reasons for the concern were falling
birth rates, aging populations, and diminishing improvements in
productivity. Now, post-financial meltdown, companies are more concerned
with how to reduce headcount than how to find or preserve talent. Very few
are looking at, let alone addressing, the dramatic talent bottleneck that
promises to loom large in the next 5 years or so.
The Insurance Industry
Quandary
The insurance industry, with an older-than-average and
whiter-than-average workforce, promises to suffer more than most. Think back
to what attracted you to this industry in the first place. For many of us, a
parent or a family friend encouraged us to consider the industry. One of the
problems with a referral-only (or primarily) approach to recruiting is the
resulting homogeneity of the workforce. Is it any surprise, then, that 96
percent of CPCUs are Caucasian and that only one woman is CEO of a major
insurance company?
But racial and gender diversity are not the only issues
leaders must address. Until the mid-1980s we only had two generations in the
workforce: Baby Boomers and Traditionalists. Now we have four, and the
newest generation of Millenials (or Gen Y) has a very different attitude
toward work, as evidenced by the statistic above. How do we keep our
financials accurate, leverage our technical knowledge, or meet our client's
needs if we have no continuity of talent?
What's a Leader To Do?
Focus—now—on building a more diverse workforce at every
stage of the talent pipeline. Analyze the demographics of your applicant
pool, hires, performance review metrics (i.e., who is getting the top
reviews?), promotions, and voluntary terminations. Do this at each level of
your organization or division. Compare your results to industry benchmarks,
such as Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) data, and look for
the discrepancies to determine where your bottlenecks are. If you're doing a
great job of promoting diverse talent, but your applicant pool is strikingly
homogenous, then focus on recruiting—and on your reputation among women and
minority populations. The African American community, for example, has a
very strong grapevine when it comes to which employers are truly inclusive
and which only talk the talk. Bottom line: acquiring diverse talent won't
solve the talent bottleneck; you have to figure out how to keep that talent.
Creating a more inclusive workplace is one of the most effective ways to do
that.
While you travel that road to inclusivity, make sure you are using a
broad filter in terms of your definition of diversity. It isn't only about
race and gender. The fastest growing minority in the United States and the
world are people with disabilities. Our rapidly aging population will
exacerbate that trend as eyes fail, backs become weaker, and years of
Blackberry use add to the ranks of workers with carpal tunnel syndrome. In
an inclusive workplace, those disabled feel comfortable asking for
accommodations needed to maximize their productivity, gay and lesbian
employees put photos of their significant others on their desks, and
transgender employees ask about complex benefit issues.
Garnering Trust
How do you build a more inclusive workplace? It starts with trust. As
Stephen M.R. Covey describes in The Speed of Trust, when trust
rises, the rate at which business is transacted increases—and,
correspondingly, costs come down, including the costs associated with
employee turnover.
A sure sign of a trust issue is a retention problem. If
you have great success in recruiting diversity, but your leadership ranks
become progressively homogenous at each step of the ladder, do a deep dive
on your performance review metrics and the objectivity of your feedback and
evaluation strategies. While the vast majority of us believe we cannot only
recognize and nurture talent, we also tend to believe we are highly
objective in our evaluation of talent. Unfortunately, most of us are also
the products of our media-laden environment. I encourage you to take the
Harvard implicit
association test to get another reading on your impartiality.
If
the test results don't convince you, read about the interview illusion in
Fast Company. Research shows that most
organizations would do a better job of selecting talent if they skipped the
interview entirely. A more viable approach might be to rethink the approach
to talent management. Establish objective criteria for the hiring process
that uses behavioral interviewing techniques, use 360 performance reviews to
ensure you receive input from multiple perspectives, establish objective
goals against which you measure performance, require diverse slates of
candidates for promotions and development opportunities, and use a diverse
slate of interviewers and decision-makers for all critical positions.
Conclusion
As a final note, be aware that, as the employment practices
liability insurers for companies like Wal-Mart and Walgreens have found,
absent highly robust and objective talent management strategies, juries find
implicit bias compelling evidence of discrimination in the workplace.
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